Scouting Out A New Location: Redwood Park...

[Andrew O'Neill]

...to see if it's worth it to bring the big camera.

 

[Chuck1]

Nice spot
I'm a sucker for ferns

 

[mshchem]

Nice video, the future square format camera Yashica, Kiev 88 ???

 

[Roger Thoms]

Nice spot
I'm a sucker for ferns

Yeah, me too, and ferns look awesome on a carbon transfer print.

 

[grahamp]

Now you've done it, Andy! The place will be over-run with photographers!

 

[MattKing]

Some of us have already been there

It is an intriguing place.

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

Some of us have already been there
View attachment 421568

It is an intriguing place.

And we'll have a club outing there, too! By the way, that very same view is in my video for next week! I didn't photograph it, though.

 

[MTGseattle]

I need to toughen up my photographic skin as it were. I don't think I would venture out in that weather. The benefit would be thinning the herd at popular locations.

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

I need to toughen up my photographic skin as it were. I don't think I would venture out in that weather. The benefit would be thinning the herd at popular locations.

I don't like going out in that weather, but I got tired of waiting for the rain to stop. As you know, the rain can sometimes be a never ending thing!

 

[DREW WILEY]

It's been an odd year. I'm on the central Calif coast. We had a lot of rain, then suddenly, the driest, hottest March ever on record. The north coast remained wet.
Now it's raining again here, but not intensely. I love the redwoods and old growth firs in the rain. They can almost be like a big umbrella, but at other times, are basically fog collection machines, drippy as true cloud forests. I have a Goretex darkcloth for a reason.

Glad you got down here a ways, Andrew. There's quite a bit along the coast. I spent some summers as a child with my Grandmother way further north on the Tillamook coast in Oregon. There were only three days one entire summer it didn't rain. She lived at the edge of a big old growth fir rainforest. One had to carry a machete everywhere just to keep paths open. And back then, everyone dressed like tuna fishermen, in bright yellow rubber suits and high rubber boots.

There's another carbon printer on this forum who actually lives on the north coast -
Vaughn.

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

It's been an odd year. I'm on the central Calif coast. We had a lot of rain, then suddenly, the driest, hottest March ever on record. The north coast remained wet.
Now it's raining again here, but not intensely. I love the redwoods and old growth firs in the rain. They can almost be like a big umbrella, but at other times, are basically fog collection machines, drippy as true cloud forests. I have a Goretex darkcloth for a reason.

Glad you got down here a ways, Andrew. There's quite a bit along the coast. I spent some summers as a child with my Grandmother way further north on the Tillamook coast in Oregon. There were only three days one entire summer it didn't rain. She lived at the edge of a big old growth fir rainforest. One had to carry a machete everywhere just to keep paths open. And back then, everyone dressed like tuna fishermen, in bright yellow rubber suits and high rubber boots.

There's another carbon printer on this forum who actually lives on the north coast -
Vaughn.

Drew, the park with the redwoods is near me....in Surrey...Canada. Planted by two brothers, over a century ago. It is close to the US border, though...which I will not cross... I won't need to explain my reasons, as it crosses into the P word.
I loved the redwoods in the rain.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Oh, my mistake. There are all kinds of redwood parks around here, but only one official "Redwood National Park" in the US, intended to preserve some of the last 2% of old growth redwood still in existence. The tallest tree ever discovered on earth was a redwood on the ridge behind me; now there's not even a stump, just a plaque on a concrete block somewhere in the weeds. A scientist cut it down in the 1880's to count its rings - what a waste!

Nice fern shot. I love the sound of falling rain, whether on a tent or camper shell, or even my parka; I grew up in a house in the mountains with a metal roof. Even the school roofs were metal.

These hills were covered with tall redwoods until every one them was cut down. Now they're all second growth around here. But in the meantime, the entire ecosystem changed, with diminished streams, far smaller salmon runs, drier climate, and a giant loss of biodiversity, because redwoods are basically fog collection organisms dripping water down to their root systems. But even second growth redwoods can be wonderful to explore and photograph, especially if there are remnant giant stumps or still intact giant fallen old growth logs.

Redwoods grow fast. There are some sizable planted redwood forests at mid elevations on the Hawaiian Islands, and apparently New Zealand too.

 

[mshchem]

John Deere (the blacksmith) perfected/is credited with the steel plow. This allowed the draining of the prairie lands across North America. Unbridled tillage, water pollution, low oxygen in the Gulf of Mexico. Horrible!

 

[DREW WILEY]

Most of the blame should go to the Fed agencies which hard-channelized the major rivers like the Mississippi for sake of rapid shipping commerce. When I was studying fluvial Geomorphology, that was a textbook case of how to make an erosion problem exponentially worse, gutting out even the Mississippi Delta. But yeah, problems were beginning once the balanced ecosystem of tallgrass and bison was broken up.

But here it was how our forests were foolishly decimated, more like mining the trees than "harvesting" them. Entire ecosystems collapsed, and far more fire-prone scenarios replaced them, including susceptible monoculture tree replanting, which has been catastrophically burning this past decade.

It was interesting to see Fire Dept representatives working alongside Park climate study specialists out on the trail two days ago, with all their instruments and carbon fiber tripods. Pretty much a necessity these days if more catastrophic urban interface brush fires are to be avoided. I had a long conversation with them. Turns out we had a lot in common, in terms of outdoorsy backgrounds and science education.