Not only did I get a picture of a family of seals on some rocks in the harbor (Bull on the left, pup in the center-right and several cows), but I also found a flock of Double crested Cormorants on some nearby rocks. There is also one sea gull that seems to think he is a cormorant.
Then we went to explore the trees.
We drove through nearby Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park
and stopped to hike on trails in the "Stout Grove." That's where I
took this picture, showing numerous big trees, and one extremely big
one, with giant sword ferns growing up to almost shoulder height.
If you look carefully at the really big tree, you will see a person standing in front
of it. That's Steffi. I enlarged a portion of this picture so that you can get a better
idea of how big this tree really is. I discovered that it is very difficult to
take a picture of one of these trees. You have to get half a mile away in order to
see the whole thing.
Then we drove south on route 101, which is known as the Redwoods Highway
in this portion of the coast. There are large trees growing very close to the
road. It's quite beautiful. We drove as far as the Redwoods National Park.
Here we found another really big tree, aptly named "Big Tree."
I can be seen here in front of the bottom 3 percent of the tree.
Within the Park there is a section called "Elk Valley." This is a meadow
which is the home of a herd of Roosevelt Elk. They didn't permit us to get very
close to them, but we hiked around the restricted area and I used my telephoto lens
to get this picture of four grazing Elk in the valley.
I had waited a while for one of them to pick up its head. I enlarged the
image of that one from the same exposure.
After this hike around Elk Valley, and some more tree viewing, we returned
north along the Redwood Highway to Crescent City, and then
continued north back into Oregon, following route 101 along the coast. This is
a beautiful route which stays close to the shore for many miles.
By this time, though, we had used up most of the day, so we stopped early
and spent the night in Coos Bay. This was the halfway point in our vacation,
which means it was time to do the laundry.
As we continued north of Coos Bay, this section of Oregon's shore is
covered with big sand dunes. This area is reminiscent of the eastern
shore of Lake Michigan, which is much more familiar to us. The
similarity is limited because Lake Michigan is fresh water and has no surf.
We took this picture when we stopped near Florence and hiked along the beach
for a while.
During this hike we saw an interesting collection of shells and crabs.
Steffi collected several of them, and we took a picture of this sand dollar
which she had found.
After we past Florence, the beaches gave way to rocky cliffs.
When we were almost to Heceta Head, we found a
turnout where a lot of cars had parked, so we joined them and
found that we had a great view almost straight down, to where
a group of Sea Lions were playing on the rocks. We watched them
for quite a while. Some people who were there said that they
had seen whales a few miles north of here, so I took a picture
of the beautiful Heceta Head Lighthouse, and we got back in the
car and headed north, in the hope of seeing some whales.
We stopped somewhere near Cape Perpetua, at a likely place with a good view of the ocean from a height. We had never seen whales (except at Sea World and the Natural History Museum) so we were new at whale watching. Nevertheless, we started seeing whales almost right away. At this time of year the Gray Whales are are migrating north from their winter home near Baja Califonia, to their summer feeding area in Alaska. The sound they make when they exhale is very loud. We took pictures of several different whales, only two of which came out well. They are combined in this image. you can easily make out the barnacles by eye, although it's not so easy from the photograph.
We had a great time on the coast of Oregon. We continued north all the way to Astoria, and then headed east to spent the night in Longview, Washington. We had skipped some important mountains on the way down, and now that we had finished the Oregon coast, we were planning on making up the loss.
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