It’s 7:00 as we start to pull away from our yurt here at Harris Beach State Park in the far south of Oregon. We have 400 miles to drive today in order for us to reach Sacramento, California, for our flight home. Fortunately, we are booked on the 7:40 p.m. departure with an arrival in Phoenix at 10:30 p.m.

With no less than 7 hours required to reach the airport, we don’t have a lot of time today to goof off.

I don’t know if we missed this on the way up or if we were in too much of a hurry to reach our yurt, but a headless Babe here at Trees of Mystery certainly demanded a photo. What I wouldn’t give for some red and white paint along with a ladder so I could get up there and paint a bloody stump over the canvas….maybe I’m remembering Mark Pauline at SRL (Survival Research Laboratories) and channeling his shenanigans?

We’d made good time on the road, and with a few hours to spare, we needed to spend time amongst the Redwoods. The lighting was just right, so here we go.

I can no longer tell you which part of the park we were visiting as just as I shared in the previous posts, this entry is being penned 13 years after the visit. Read the day before this if you want more details of what happened.

This year of 2007 saw us traveling a lot. In January, we spent New Year’s at Bosque del Apache over in New Mexico, watching snow geese launch at dawn. A week later, we were in San Francisco for five days, and before the month was over, we made it to the Grand Canyon and Los Angeles. Of course, my mother-in-law Jutta was with us, and we definitely had to entertain her, but we didn’t stop there. February took us to Death Valley for a few days, but then we took a break until the end of March before heading over to Santa Barbara to visit family. In April, we visited the Trinity Site in New Mexico, home of the first atomic blast. In Early May, we flew into Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for a 15-day East Coast trip that had us in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusets, Rhode Island, Connecticut, back to New York and Pennsylvania, before dipping into Maryland, spending a minute in North Carolina, zipping through Virginia and then driving back to Pennsylvania to catch a Chihuly glass art installation at the Phipps Conservatory. Restless, we returned to Santa Barbara in June and then spent the 4th of July in Yellowstone for five days. Nothing happened after that until August, when New Mexico drew us back. September saw us heading into Kansas so Caroline could learn to make yarn by learning to use a spinning wheel; actually, that took quite a while. And now here we are in California checking out raindrops on ferns and I can honestly say that they are just as fascinating as any geyser, great lake, lighthouse, canyon, or ponies out on Assateague Island.

It’s long been our belief to find the magic in every place we visit and to be fully in the moment instead of comparing our present situation to something else we could be doing. The fern growing out of the trunk of this tree should be as inspiring as seeing Old Faithful erupt or even just waiting nearby as Old Faithful gurgles and belches between performances. Try to imagine yourself as an explorer who just stepped off the boat from Europe in a nearby bay some hundreds of years ago, and you are seeing a tree of size and height unimaginable from where you are from; this is where we are every time we fall into a place, whether we’ve been there before or not.

A brilliant metaphor is in this photo: our path is blocked by this ginormous fallen tree. Did we have to turn around? Did we crawl under in that tiny space? Out of view, there was a detour we were able to navigate; isn’t this a good approach to the blockages we encounter in life? Why wasn’t I taught that before I became a teen and found myself lost in puberty?

I’m always taken by the paths that are carved through these environments. Making these places more accessible so we people leave the least amount of impact is brilliant. Not only are more of us afforded the opportunity to fall in love with our natural environment, but we also gain valuable memories that spur our dreams to consider where our next steps might take us.

By the way, when preparing these photos for posting, I find the quality often to be horrible with their 8-megapixel resolution but even with the relatively poor quality, I’m happy to have these reminders. How different it is to look at someone else’s images of a place compared to looking at our own. While seeing these again is almost like seeing a stranger’s photos, in the back of my mind, I know that I saw this with my own two eyes, which somehow allows them to be fully familiar.

Did I get carried away in sharing?

But it’s all soooo beautiful and dripping with pretty.

Moss on trees? Yeah, I’m all about that.

Climbing into the universe of the mushroom? You already know I love it there.

Contrast and change? Right up my curiosity.

It’s the vertical fern leaf in the dark shadow that made this photo for me.

But we can’t stay here physically forever; we have a plane to catch.

So we’ll have to get out here and call this short 2-hour visit to the Redwoods enough. While I’m sure I’ve shared it here countless times, I know that when we landed back in Phoenix and drove away from the airport at 10:30, we were pinching ourselves that the day began waking up in a yurt next to the ocean, followed by a long walk through the Redwoods before returning to the desert. Life is magical, all of it.