I asked a park ranger what the best home or thing to do at this particular state park and he said, "Fern Canyon is our most popular attraction." I look at the park map and see a hiking trail from where we are to Fern Canyon and think 'this'll make a nice hike on our day off, plus it ends at the ocean.' This nice hike ended up being almost a 9 mile hike round trip which we saw at the trailhead and we proceeded; of course joking our way along the heavily forested path where enormous redwoods stand pointing to their source of life. Both Evan and I couldn't stop yawning, our bodies so deprived of oxygen; then all of us commenting over and over until the joke would no longer be funny for others how we of course choose a 10 mile hike on our day off even if it is rated an 'easy'.
The redwoods were tough to wrap my head around; seeing the enormity of their bases and how bare most of the trunk is of branches, then much higher up, limbs the size of normal trees elsewhere sprawl out to embrace the sunshine. I imagined if there was a house carved out of a redwood base with stairs built in and how crazy that would be, but how unfortunate it would be for the tree. However we saw several redwoods with huge holes several stories high on their trunks and wondering how they were able to still be alive and hold up so much weight.
We hiked and chatted about many things other people were probably wondering what in the world we were even saying and following arrows pointing us this direction to the next staying on the James Irvine Trail (of course I joked saying it was the James Earl Jones trail narrated by the man himself through well placed speaker rocks on the path).
The trail towards the end pointed to two parking areas and one had the word 'beach' in it so we headed that way, but this Fern Canyon we were heading to only .2 miles away was conjuring up thoughts of anticlimax. Then we descended some earthen stairs and walked across a babbling brook and saw some logs bunched up and TURNED the corner
All the hiking, all the jokes were moot. Fern Canyon was awesome. A literal canyon 30 or so stories high covered in little ferns from top to bottom and the canyon just snakes from their to an opening to the ocean. There are many pools of the creek that you have to jump over or climb over behemoth washed up logs all inside this canyon. Just was not what we were expecting. I love that unexpectedness.
Being 4.5 miles away from our campsite we didn't want to rehike what we just did we walked a mile down a dirt road and took another path back to camp.
Once we arrived back at our camp we decided to ride to the next state park for some reason I am unsure of. So, on our day off we hiked close to 10 miles then we biked 22 to Patricks Point State Park; if we would've swam anywhere that day we would've been close to doing a mini triathlon!
The running joke is that everyone else touring gets up early to beat the heat and get to their destination at a decent time, then there is us, who if we are lucky leave at 10. We do pump out miles when we do ride but this day we rode into the campsite close to 7pm so people were looking at us in bewilderment.
Nothing like a nice day off :)
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