February Adventure 2018, Part 1 - Redwoods State and National Parks

For our February adventure, Ann and I decided to take advantage of a long holiday weekend and to make it even longer.  Once we realized that taking the highway down to the Redwoods took about as long as going to the Painted Hills, there was little doubt where we were going.  We’d had a taste of the Redwoods over Christmas and we wanted more.  So on the Thursday before the President’s Day Weekend, we took off after work and headed down I-5.

As one might expect, we didn’t pull into the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park campground until well after dark.  At this time of year one can’t make reservations so we were winging it.  We didn’t have to worry though, it was mostly (though not entirely) empty.  Tired and knowing that we weren’t staying for long, we pulled into an easy site and crashed for the night.  

The next morning we got up fairly early, made coffee, had breakfast, then packed up and hit the road.  This time, the slow road.

The itinerary for the day was to head back down Howland Hills Road, though in the opposite direction than the one we took over Christmas.  On the way there, we tried to scout out some incredible looking rock formations on the Smith River, where Ann saw some trails and a “picnic” area.  After looking around, we realized that the area was along a strip where there were some very large, private residences.  Darn!  So we back-tracked onto our original plan for the day.

It didn’t take us long on Howland Hills Road for me to see a photograph and to pull over.  As is my nature, the “subject” of course was about 15 feet up in the air, so I had to position Beast just so off the side of the road.  I grabbed my gear and carefully climbed up for my shot.  

As usual, it took me a few minutes (Ann knows that my “I’ll only be a minute” usually means 15 - bless her). But I eventually found the right focal length to use and a composition I was pleased with.

While I was doing my thing, Ann grabbed her gear and headed behind the tree I was photographing. 

As I was packing up, I saw a very interesting tree base not far off, so I climbed down for another shot.  As I rounded the base of the tree I had been photographing, eyes on the new subject, working towards what would be the best position to photograph from, I ran into Ann - right in the spot I was moving towards.  

I give her a lot of credit - she had climbed up the roots of the tree and had her back to the tree and her tripod legs extended, with her camera right in front of her.  She didn’t have much room to move (I should have pulled out my iPhone to get her!).  She also had the best possible shot of the subject.  Here it is:

Looking at her LCD screen, I realized that she, indeed was making a much better image than I was considering (in part, because she was utilizing the row of rocks to lead your eye to the interesting tree base), so I decided I had to take a very different approach.  And I did.

Ann’s is better.

After trying, unsuccessfully, for other images at that location, we decided to continue down the road.  Nothing much caught our eyes, so we pull over to hike into Stout Grove.  There, we descended into a lovely grove where, if we were pointing our cameras in the right direction, we minimized the bright light that makes photographing in the forest on a clear day a frustrating experience.  

It’s hard to give one a sense of just how big these trees are.  For example, the root-ball of the downed tree in this photograph is taller than I am. 

And no, Ann wasn’t about to pose in front of it to give it a sense of scale.  Also, using a super wide lens doesn’t really work either, because to really get a sense of the height, you still have to tilt the lens back and then you get all sorts of distortions.  There are solutions to that, somewhat, but Fuji doesn’t make a tilt/shift lens (yet - there goes my imagination, once again, running away with me).  I’m still scheming for a solution though!

We photographed at Stout Grove for awhile, but the rising sun started wrecking havoc on our image making.  Still, with a bit of creative filter work (thank you again Joe Cornish) I was able to pull something out an exposure nightmare.

As the light flooded Stout Grove, we packed up our gear and headed down the trail back to Beast.

While we enjoyed looking at the trees, we made no more stops on Howland Hills Road.  The light was just too bright and the contrast too great to make a good image.  Clear skies aren’t always a blessing - at least not for photographers.

So we headed south towards our home base for the next few days, the Elk Prairie Campground.  That didn’t mean we had to go there directly, so we made a short detour along the Coastal Drive Loop and got a great view of the cost from the High Bluff Overlook.  It was windy, and way too bright for photography, but a great place to make a pot of coffee for the afternoon!

We eventually made it down the the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park and took our time driving down the Newton B Drury Scenic Parkway until we got to our campground.  Like the other campground, it was too early in the season for reservations, and several of the loops were closed, but spots weren’t difficult to find and we got a nice one next to Prairie Creek.  With a nice riffle not 10 feet away from Beast, Ann and I would have as good a lullaby as one could hope for to put us to sleep the next few nights.

Having secured our campsite, it was time to go scouting.  We stopped by the Ranger station on the way out and got some advice on nice locations, which paid off handsomely over the next few days.  We then headed off to check out a viewpoint from Bald Hills Road which was, well, pretty ho-hum.  So we decided to head down for a change of environment and check out a lagoon-beach area we’d scouted  on the maps.

We weren’t disappointed.  Since it was still early enough in the afternoon to not think too seriously about photographs, we tromped over to the beach and, seeing some rocks in the distance, decided to check them out sans cameras.  The tide was out and footprints were everywhere so we didn’t expect we’d get anything special, so why carry the weight.  After a bit of a hike, we finally hit the rocks and they were lovely.  Ann and I pulled out our iPhones to get photographic ideas and to make sure we didn’t forget this place.

We eventually checked the tide graphs to our disappointment.  Early morning was high tide and there was no way to get to the rocks from the parking area at high tide.  We were a couple of weeks off in our timing - but log that site in for a date when the tides are right!  There was plenty of subject matter to fill a morning.

We got back to Beast as the sun was getting into a good position, so we decided to head in the opposite direction but a bit more inland to check out Dry and Stone Lagoons.  It didn’t take us long to decide that’s where we’d be for our late afternoon shoot, so we grabbed our gear and set up.

As one might expect, the area was quite marshy given it was a lagoon.  But we had failed to grab our water boots, so we navigated to locations where we had dry land to work from and pretty much restricted ourselves to the views we could get from where we were standing.  The sun was settling quickly and we knew we wouldn’t have time to move to entirely different locations.

The subject that had grabbed both of our attentions was a grouping of white trees on the far side of the lagoons.  As the sun lowered towards the horizon, it started to cast a lovely golden glow on everything.

I switched camera orientations, changed lenses and finally wound up with my telephoto zoom trying to work the landscape as much as I could from just that one spot.

I eventually moved my attention more to the east, where I had a view up a creek towards the coastal mountains.  By then, the sun was lowering even more and everything was turning a splendid gold-red.

It’s pretty hard to mess things up when the light is so lovely.  However, such light doesn’t last forever.  The sand dunes area that we were standing on finally started casting shadows across the foreground, and the sun settled behind the clouds and we lost our light.

Seeing that there were clouds down to the horizon, we knew the sun wasn’t coming back out so we packed our things up and headed home for the night.  We had a couple of  more days to go and we wanted to be ready!