Redwood Forest — A Backpacker's Life

I had a lot more photos of Redwoods, so thought I would post a few more with one of my favorite excerpts from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I have a greater appreciation for it now.

Song of the Redwood Tree

Farewell my brethren,

Farewell O earth and sky, farewell ye neighboring waters,
My time has ended, my term has come.

Along the northern coast,
Just back from the rock-bound shore and the caves,

In the saline air from the sea in the Mendocino country,
With the surge for base and accompaniment low and hoarse,
With crackling blows of axes sounding musically driven by strong arms,
Riven deep by the sharp tongues of the axes, there in the redwood
forest dense,

I heard the might tree its death-chant chanting.

The choppers heard not, the camp shanties echoed not,

The quick-ear'd teamsters and chain and jack-screw men heard not,
As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years to join the refrain,

But in my soul I plainly heard.

Murmuring out of its myriad leaves,

Down from its lofty top rising two hundred feet high,
Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs, out of its foot-thick bark,
That chant of the seasons and time, chant not of the past only but the future.

A Backpacker's Life List by Ryan Grayson is licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

After leaving the Redwood Forest, I planned to head south to San Francisco on the Pacific Coast Highway, but I saw a road sign that said, "Avenue of The Giants." Those words had a certain allure, so I took a detour.

The old road lead me through Humboldt Redwood State Park. I spent most of the day photographing more giant trees, but it's difficult to photograph a Redwood. The scale of me standing next to a Redwood Tree is the equivalent of a mouse standing next to me. It is impossible to convey that feeling of smallness in a photo. The closest I could come was to put myself in the shots.

It's hard to think of such massive trees as plants. There are species of ants that live solely on one Redwood tree and nowhere else on Earth. A single Redwood is a planet for an entire species.

It is also impossible for a photo to give you the feeling of respect you have for them when you see one. A respect you might ordinarily reserve for wise elders or the representatives of a bygone era.