On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
JanieM
REDWOODS
One of the excursions Steve took me on was to the Montgomery Woods State Natural Reserve, a forty-minute drive from his house on twisty mountain roads. Most of the pictures in this set were taken either at the Reserve or along the way.
My great-great-grandfather, Samuel Nelson Woodruff (called “Nelson”), traveled from Ohio to Oregon in a covered wagon in 1852, when he was twenty-three years old. Being from a family of scribblers, he kept a diary, wrote letters home, and sent articles about his travels to his hometown newspaper.
Nelson’s father, Jonathan, would gather the family and read Nelson’s letters out loud. One day he came upon a passage that said: “I’ve seen tree trunks that climb a hundred feet before they branch.”
Family lore says that Jonathan stopped reading, set the letter down, and announced, as disappointed as only a father could be, “Nelson . . . has taken to lying.”
Nelson got married and had three children in Oregon. He and his wife were eventually divorced, after which he headed back to Ohio, married again, and had six more children. His grave is in the rural village where I loved spending time with my grandma when I was a kid.
The coastal redwoods tend to be taller and less wide than the giant sequoias of the western Sierra Nevada. That said, they are still plenty wide.
I’m not sure I belong to the same species as someone who could look at this and think, “matchsticks.”
A redwood trunk hollowed out by fire, yet still very much alive.
The floor of the forest in Montgomery Woods.
A typical example of the roads we traveled: trees shading a curvy roadway in tip-top condition.
Redwoods, and structures made of redwood, are everywhere in this countryside, from the smallest shed…
…to the loveliest home nestled in the woods.
A very old cherry tree in the orchard of an old homestead.
Long ago, probably cut out of an old CoEvolution Quarterly (the magazine offshoot of the Whole Earth Catalog), I had this quotation tacked to my wall:
It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods,—trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ’s time—and long before that—God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools.
Looking online, I found the original of that passage in an Atlantic piece by John Muir that was published in August of 1897. Whoever had printed the quotation in the version I copied had left off the punch line:
—only Uncle Sam can do that.
John Muir was more optimistic about Uncle Sam than I’m feeling today. But there are redwoods still standing, and they are still beautiful.
War For Ukraine Day 161: What Comes Next?
Grover Gardner
Speaking of Oregon pioneers, about 12 years ago we visited a small private museum in Canyonville. It was filled with artifacts from pioneer times–clothing, furniture, farm implements, trunks full of personal effects–all in remarkable condition. The elderly tour guide asked if we had any questions, and I said, “Yes, where did all this stuff come from?” She replied that most of it had belonged to her father, who had come to Oregon as a young man in the 1870’s. I thought she had misspoken and said, “You mean your grandfather?” No, she replied, her father! After his first two wives passed away, he married for a third time at the age of 75 and had three more children. She was the youngest. I was struck by the fact that I was talking to the daughter of an Oregon pioneer!
raven
@Grover Gardner: Did you know about this?
Leto
In 2015, when I was stationed in the UK, I spent a week in Scotland at a woodworking school. The guy who runs the place brought out a slab of redwood and asked me where I thought it was from. I said, Cali? He responded, no they’re from Scotland. Apparently Muir sent back a lot of redwood seeds, the climate and soil there in Scotland are a close match, and now Scotland has a nice redwood forest. I made a nice keepsake box from a few redwood pieces. I would still very much like to visit the original redwoods though, and those are really pretty pictures.
eclare
Those photos are so serene…nice way to start the day.
raven
@Leto: How tall are they?
raven
@Leto: Did you know about this?
eclare
@raven: The things I learn here! How interesting.
stinger
What a gorgeous set of pictures!
Leto
@raven: I believe they were sent in the mid 1840s, so they’re still green behind the ears… :P They’re still young, but they have a really good forest management program so they’re able to harvest a percentage of them. I know they have coastal redwoods that are part of a preserve that they plan on just letting grow forever.
I didn’t know that about the Spruce Production Division. Cool!
raven
@Leto: Besides aircraft they made stocks for rifles from space because it didn’t splinter if it took a round!
Kevin
Love those trees!
The Moar You Know
@raven: while not run by the armed forces anymore, there are still spruce suppliers who specialize in “aircraft-grade” spruce for the old-school airplanes which are made with spruce frames and fabric covering. Of which there seem to be quite a few still, these days.
One of the many things I learned while building guitars (the tops of most acoustics are made of spruce).
The Moar You Know
@Leto: I’ll be damned. In Scotland? Good. The climate is certainly right, maybe a bit on the wet side.
I’ve got a rather large slab of redwood at home that I’m going to have resawn upon my retirement for some acoustic tops; it’s a 120+ year old piece of the old Moffett Field blimp hangar, which was taken down in the early 00s and salvaged. The stuff is beautiful.
JanieM
@Grover Gardner:
I have a genealogy of the Woodruffs that was compiled by a woman of my grandmother’s generation who lived in Connecticut, and whom I met when I was in grad school. She traced her father’s Woodruff line back to Mathew in CT in the 1640s, then went forward from there to roughly my mother’s generation.
There are lots and lots of entries where people had 2 or 3 spouses and many children — my own great-grandfather had 7 with my great-grandmother, who died after the youngest was born. My g-g then married a woman who already had 7 kids of her own, and they had 4 more. Not the same as having a whole new family at 75 (!!!) — but still kind of staggering to think about.
Mathew Woodruff is 10 generations back from me — that means that in theory I had about a thousand ancestors in his era. If I were serious about genealogy, I would have gone backwards and traced all the lines as well as I could, starting from my parents, instead of tracing one line backwards and then going forward from there. But though I fall down a rabbit hole now and then, I’m not that serious about genealogy….
Munira
Love that part of the country and your photos – and descriptions. Thanks
Grover Gardner
@JanieM: Interesting, thanks!
El Cruzado
By the middle of the XXth century the vast majority of the redwoods in the Santa Cruz mountains had been logged for a variety of money-making purposes. As fuel, for shingles, trusses, planks, lots of railroad ties etc. The larger, straighter specimens make up the structure of the industrial buildings in San Francisco’s SOMA and elsewhere.
At that point between conservation efforts and economics redwoods logging petered out. But redwoods are resilient SoBs, at this point you drive or hike around those hills and they are pretty much taken over by the trees again.
Albatrossity
@Leto: Yes, I found a very large old redwood along a stream in Scotland, and even though I could identify the species, my mind would not let me make that conclusion. Only later did I find out that redwoods are fairly common in Scotland. We also visited Muir’s boyhood home, in Dunbar.
J R in WV
OK, this may be one of the most informative On the Road posts ever! Thanks everyone for stacking more facts about the trees on top of previous facts. They still build cisterns of redwood on top of Manhattan skyscrapers. Barrels to hold fresh water on the 55th story roof…!
JanieM
Should have credited Steve from Mendocino for editing, as always, and for picture #2 in this set.