Day 12: Humbling

Today was a wickedly long ascent out of the lost coast, followed by a long cruise down a painfully maintained mountain road back into a serene road through the redwoods. Tonight I rejoined Austen in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, and we’ll bike the next day or two together.

The day started early, waking up at 7am and on the road by 8. I said goodbye to Brandy and her dogs, and started making my way to my 2600’ climb.

I saw this on my way out, thought it was pretty funny.

Looking back toward the campground.

On the way, I stopped at another campground to fill water and ran into Jason. Jason lives in San Jose, and is taking 3 weeks off from his job to decompress and travel (by car) around California. He also has two beautiful dogs, Chelsea and Cooper, and works for SSI. There he works on satellite communications! How cool is that? Their office is right next to Google, and he was explaining they were having a hard time keeping their buildings with Google buying everything up. Oops. That stinks.

I said my goodbyes to Jason and started towards Honeydew, another small town with a general store. Stopping to get a snickers bar, and chatting with locals who offered a ride to the top (that would be cheating though) I was ready to do my ride.

The hill up was not as bad as expected. It was long, and I was pouring in sweat, but it was never too steep. I think I psyched myself up for the climb, but it was over before I expected. So I treated myself to that snickers bar :).

The road down was treacherous. Most of the time I had to go pretty slow because of the potholes. At one point, I saw someone had written this on the road (sorry for language) and I couldn’t agree more. This road could use some work.

However, the route down the terrible road paid off, as I was deposited into Humboldt Redwoods State Park. It’s incredibly hard to explain the beauty of the redwoods here, but they are magnificent. The road weaves in and out of seemingly endless forest of redwoods. The road has a slight downhill grade, and the pavement is perfectly smooth, so your bike makes almost no sound coming down the road. With very little traffic, surrounded by these towering giants, even saying it was serene seems like a severe understatement. It was humbling for sure. I tried to take some pictures, but I don’t think they do it justice.

The road deposits you onto the Avenue of the Giants, and I think I timed this just perfect. If you ever come here (and you should) do the road by bicycle. It’s incredible. Probably some of the best riding of the trip for me. Just huge redwood after huge redwoood everywhere you look. And a complete on udder silence surrounds you. Really makes you think about how small you are in this huge world. And how magnificent, strong, and almost brave a tree can be.

I also stopped at a few places along the way to look at the sights. This should give you some perspective of the magnitude of these trees.

This tree is on the ground. It’s diameter is still taller then me.

Also, as I mentioned, Austen and I met back up! We talked tonight about why he’s doing this trip, and why I’m doing this trip (maybe I’ll go more into that in a later post.) We’ll bike tomorrow together, and likely the day after that. Then he goes inland to see his family, and I meet up with Mike to go back to SF.

No sunset or tent picture tonight, sorry! But I assure you I’m camped in a beautiful campground in the redwoods. We’re surrounded on most sides by other campers, all of which are visible to us because the branches of the redwoods don’t start for many feet in the air. Our beautiful fire is just coals, and pitch black under the canopy of the redwoods, even though there’s definitely a moon out. Looking forward to tomorrow, should be a great day! Goodnight all!