Our ultimate destination was the giant redwoods in Jedediah Smith state park.\u00a0 Along the way is Crater Lake.\u00a0 We had purchased the National Park Service annual pass for our drive to Colorado a few months ago.\u00a0 To further get our money’s worth from the park pass, we stopped at Crater Lake on this trip.<\/p>\n
There are many viewpoints to stop at along the crater rim road.\u00a0 There is one trail that you can hike 1.1\u00a0 miles, down 700 ft in elevation, to the lake’s edge.\u00a0 The water is a deep blue.<\/p>\n
We last visited Crater Lake in 2008, and 11 years later, it was MUCH harder to hike back up the 700 feet from the lake surface to the top of the crater rim.\u00a0 I don’t think the trail is steeper, I think we are just accumulating age.<\/p>\n
We enjoyed the first visit more than the second.\u00a0 Yeah, it was pretty, and I’m sure the exhausting hike up the hill clouded our opinion a bit, but it wasn’t as impressive the second time.\u00a0 You should go if you haven’t.\u00a0 I’m just not sure it’s worth a second visit.<\/p>\n
Pictures from the lake’s edge.<\/p>\n
A little past Crater Lake are some viewpoints of the Rogue River.\u00a0 Here we are standing next to a gorge cut by the river.\u00a0 At one point the river goes underground in an old lava tube before reemerging above ground.<\/p>\n We spent the night in Medford, OR Today we visited Stout Grove in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in California.\u00a0 This has got to be one of my favorite places on the planet.\u00a0 The first time we were here was in 2007, and it hasn’t lost any of the magic for me in 2019.\u00a0 These trees are amazing. The oldest trees are 2000 years old, but we are more likely to see trees 500-1000 years old.\u00a0 What were you doing 1000 years ago?\u00a0 Typical trees are 300 feet tall and 16-20 feet in diameter.\u00a0 This grove has a short easy trail with a good group of old large trees. There are other trails in other parts of the park, but they don’t impress as much.\u00a0 This grove is almost all redwoods, where the other parts of the park have more of a mixture of tree types.<\/p>\n When we came in 2007 to Stout Grove, we walked across a seasonal bridge from the campground along the Smith River.\u00a0 The campground, having easy access to the main highway, made this an easy visit.\u00a0 This time, we were late by a day, the seasonal bridge had been removed.\u00a0 We had to drive the long way to the grove’s entrance on a one lane, two-way, gravel road, about an additional 20 minute drive.\u00a0 The park ranger said it was the old stagecoach road.\u00a0 If you come from Crescent City the gravel part is about 8 miles.\u00a0 If you go around and come from the east, the gravel part is only about 2 miles.\u00a0 We came from the east. It’s more miles from Crescent City, but most of it is on a smooth highway doing 55-65 mph.<\/p>\n In the first picture, Denise is standing in front of the nearest tree.<\/p>\n After this, we drove south on Highway 101 to other parts of the redwoods park to see more tall trees.<\/p>\n We spent the night in Crescent City.\u00a0 Last time we were here in ’07, we had a bad experience.\u00a0 Bad hotel, bad food.\u00a0 This time the hotel was decent as was the food.<\/p>\n Here’s us at the Pacific Ocean in Crescent City.<\/p>\n Today we went back to Stout Grove, it’s that awesome.\u00a0 We arrived around 8am and had the place to ourselves for a little while.\u00a0 Very peaceful.<\/p>\n Then we drove north on Highway 101 out of California and back into Oregon.\u00a0 The drive this morning along the coast was very foggy, so there were no ocean views.\u00a0 We stopped for lunch at The Crazy Norwegian’s Fish & Chips in Port Orford Oregon.\u00a0 They did not have the Verdens Beste Kake (Norwegian for “world’s best cake” – literally and figuratively the best cake, this coming from a chocolate hound like myself) but we weren’t the first people to ask them for it.\u00a0 Their fish & chips were probably the best we’ve ever had, possibly even better than in London.<\/p>\n Foggy views of the Pacific Ocean from Port Orford, OR<\/p>\n Scratching the itch to go on a road trip, we took a 3 day drive and visited Crater Lake in southern Oregon and Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in northern California.\u00a0 We’d been to both of these places before. Day 1 – Sept 3, 2019 Last updated: 9\/6\/19 3:00pm PT Our ultimate destination was the … Continue reading “Jedediah Smith Redwoods\/Crater Lake 2019”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":499,"menu_order":41,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4308","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hovorka.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hovorka.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hovorka.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hovorka.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hovorka.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hovorka.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4308\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hovorka.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hovorka.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/hovorka.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/cl2.jpg\")
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<\/a>Pictures from the rim.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\nDay 2 - Sept 4, 2019\r\nLast updated: 9\/6\/19 3:00pm PT<\/pre>\n
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\n<\/p>\nDay 3 - Sept 5, 2019\r\nLast updated: 9\/6\/19 3:00pm PT<\/pre>\n
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