Ringstad Ramblings: Trees of Mystery

So today we headed to Klamath California to see the redwoods. The Trees of Mystery are a family owned redwood grove. It takes you basically an afternoon to go through the attraction. There is a walkway that allows you to walk up amongst the trees, a sky train that takes you up through the canopy. They also have a trail of wood carvings displaying the tall tales of Paul Bunyan and Blue. You will also see that they have two very large concrete statues of Paul and Blue at the entrance.

So one of the first statues we see on the trail is a wood carving of a squirrel, being that squirrels basically make Lukie’s life hell at the lake taunting him everyday that we decided to give him a chance to take one on. Don’t you love the new coat we found him at the farmers market. With his new haircut he has been a little chilly, this coat keeps him cosy.

So I learned that there are coastal redwoods and giant sequoia. The two trees are closely related and share many similarities. The giant sequoia is the largest tree in the world in volume and has an immense trunk with a slight taper, the coastal redwood is the world’s tallest tree with a slender trunk. The bark of the sequoia is bright reddish brown, while the redwood is a dull chocolate brown. We were lucky enough to see the giant sequoia trees in Calavaras County and I can say that it is hard to describe the giant sequoias. To compare here is a picture is of the brotherhood tree. It is 297 feet high and 19 ft in diameter. The sequoias we saw were just over 250 ft high and over 33 feet in diameter. So this is the largest redwood in this grove.

It is very humbling standing next to these monumental trees, it is also very peaceful. This next pictures is call the Cathedral trees, they actually have a pulpit and do hold weddings here, It is a phenomenon that has a number of trees growing together to form this column.

This second picture I took from one of the walkways that travel up amongst the trees. The walkways were a little damp and had to watch my steps, but the netting keeps you safe. Very cool walking that high up. Unfortunately animals are not allowed up there, so Len and Lukie stayed down on the ground.

The sky trail is a small gondola that takes you up the hillside above trees, we could see all the way back to the ocean from way up there.

The towering inferno tree came from a lightening strike where this tree in 1995 during an incredible storm where the power had been out for more than 3 days, this tree caught on fire and it acted like a chimney, it burnt down but because everything else was so wet around it, nothing else burned. We also found out that redwood bark has no pitch or resin and usually has so much moisture in it, it actually doesn’t burn that well and the wood itself is impervious to insects and disease.