Redwood National Park

The giant redwoods of the Northern California coast are revitalizing. The second I smelled the ocean air and saw the enormous trunks my travel fatigue disappeared. These forests are a place like no other.

Step off the Redwood Highway into any of the numerous big tree groves and you see, feel, and smell a prehistoric realm of nourishment where death replenishes life and trees just keep growing and growing and growing. Until they fall and give life to new trees.

The groves also create the illusion of being miniaturized. After having so recently been among pine forests with trees 30 or so feet high, to suddenly be in a place where the trees approach 300 feet created a sense that I was about a tenth the height I was at Yellowstone or Glacier.

Redwood National Park, stretching along the Northern California coast from Crescent City to McKinleyville, is actually a collection of several state parks that receive federal funding. After spending way more than I was used to on gas in Crescent City, I stopped at a beach and dipped my hand into the waters of the Pacific.

So far this year, I've touched the Atlantic Ocean (St. Augustine) and now the Pacific Ocean (Crescent City) and been within sight of Mexico (Big Bend National Park) and Canada (Glacier National Park). Not a bad year of travel. And there are still six more months to go.

Back in my car I, continued on the Redwood Highway to the Drury Scenic Parkway and spent a few hours walking among the tallest trees in the world. I stopped at Corkscrew Tree and Big Tree then took the bumpy one-lane dirt road to Gold Bluffs Beach and Fern Canyon, a short but still stunning trail through leaf-adorned canyon walls.

Crater Lake National Park

The weather on Monday dampened my journey through Oregon. A massive front of moisture sweeping in from the Pacific had pushed its way inland. My entire route from Baker City to Medford, Oregon by way of Crater Lake National Park was wet.

Oregon has some oddly compelling topography. The curvy, up-and-down two-lane roads are proof. Creased golden hills. Broken mountains. Buried fossils. There's a lot of vertical features the road needs to avoid. But I had a hard time appreciating them through the rain, which was starting to give me travel fatigue.

Crater Lake National Park was a dud. Not the park itself, just the visibility when I was there. I caught one glimpse of the mysterious blue water of the deepest lake in the U.S. before clouds closed in. The volcanic crater is over a mile above sea level. Clouds are beautiful when you're looking up at them high above in the sky, but when you're caught in them, they severely restrict the view.

I'm still glad I visited. The lake is much larger than I imagined and brilliantly, indescribably blue. Seeing the park in the fog was still better than not seeing it at all.

Hells Canyon

The deepest canyon in America is not the Grand Canyon. It is Hells Canyon, cut by the Snake River between Idaho and Oregon. This gargantuan gorge is over a mile deep in places and averages ten miles across. To get there I had to drive from Polson, Montana through the windy, piney forests of Idaho.

The Missoulian delivered to my hotel room in Polson started my Saturday off on a surreal note. It reported a wolf had chased a motorcycle on the highway in Alberta. Strange happenings afoot. Driving on the two-lane road that follows the curvy Lochsa River across Idaho I couldn't help but wonder what other strangeness was brewing in the mountain forests all around me.

My first destination was an overlook of the great canyon called Heavens Gate Vista. It required an arduous drive up a steep sixteen mile dirt road, then a two mile hike through melting snow drifts to a solitary (unoccupied) forest ranger station.

The soaring view was worth it.

Behind the overlook stand the Seven Devils, a craggy collection of snow-laced obsidian peaks with names like He Devil, She Devil, Devils Throne, Mount Baal, and The Goblin.

Standing amidst darkly named mountains, scorched trees, and bottomless drop-offs evokes an eerie but not unpleasant feeling. It inspires an appreciation for the incomprehensible forces crashing all around us, and this nanosecond flicker of time we occupy.

Saturday night, I swung through the resort town of McCall, Idaho on the shores of Payette Lake. Waterfront signs tell the tale of "Sharlie," a 40 to 50-foot long Loch Ness-like serpent glimpsed on occasion in the lake.

That night, I camped near Zims Hot Springs and soaked late into the evening watching the nearly-full moon rise.

On Sunday morning, I had breakfast at The Pancake House in McCall and soaked in the lithium-rich waters of rustic Burgdorf Hot Springs. Then it was on to explore Hells Canyon from its depth. I drove the scenic route 30 miles into the canyon to the Hells Canyon Dam before driving up to Hells Canyon Overlook some 6,000 miles about the Snake River on the Oregon side.

I spent Sunday night in Baker City, Oregon.