California Coastal Trail Flint Ridge Section

Redwood National Park

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It is way too hot and way too smoky inland, so I think I will take refuge in some coastal hikes where the ocean keeps things cool and the weather might be overcast, foggy, or even, dare I say it, drizzly. It was certainly on the verge of drizzly when I turned to find yellow tape across the parking lot for Flint Ridge Trail. Although most things are open again, I missed the detail that this parking lot was not, but there is street parking for at least four cars on the other side of the road and I had my pick along that empty road. Also closed is the campground, but not the trail. I feel doubts that this trail is so popular that it needs these measures, but it is rated middling on Redwood Hikes, which is mildly high for that site. I accidentally came on an impromptu Fee Free Day celebrating the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act. Of course Redwood National Park is participating. It's free to enter any day of the year.

The trailhead is a launch into the green.

The trail seems to be on an old levee as it travels beside Richardson Creek and past Marshall Pond.

Marshall Pond looks like a spot where the mud is at least as deep as the water.

The trail is slightly overgrown, but not to the point of letting the blackberries become a nuisance. It comes around to a road with no sign of which way to go. I decided left because there is gravel storage to the right. I quickly found myself back at the road again. Besides seeing another place to park in a turnout to the left, that wasn't helping me follow the trail. I turned around and tried again. I should have taken another left just before the gate on the road where a dirt track follows another old road.

The Klamath River which brings in water from Trinity River and Salmon River.

Except for a fallen tree that seems to be surviving so far, the trail is a little better maintained and almost looks swept as it climbs up into the forest. The first of it includes stumps. As it winds upward, climbing the ridge, it swings between stumps at the southwest and giant trees at the northwest extreme.

A Douglas fir took advantage of the removal of this redwood.

Glorious crazy giant trees!

It looks like the tree on the left was getting fitted for some spring boards.

Back in the land of banana slugs and there will be more.

The trail stops finding its way all the way back to the logged trees and just stays to the growing giants for most of the way up toward the top of the ridge.

To photograph a whole tree in one frame is impossible.

The flowers are mostly gone, but there's still some spots of color from berries.

I stopped by one tree with particularly deep canyons in its bark and finally pondered how it got that way. The bark is fibrous and spongy, they'll tell you in whatever literature you grab, but I often see a macrostructure in it. It holds together in hard pieces with a vague resemblance to the puzzle pieces of the ponderosa and relatives, but that isn't the end of the story. Every year, a new layer is put on on the inside and a new layer of wood is put on inside that. The very smallest layer of bark is on the outside. This bark was slowly stretched out by the layers below, becoming spongy as the fibers pull apart, then finally fissuring into the canyons seen wrapping the tree upward.

It's just thick with redwoods.

Hedgenettles make some appearances still. These are about the size of a thumbnail.

The trees change shape near the top of the ridge. They are shorter, but there seem to be a lot of bigger ones. The tops are crowded with branches and other branches droop a long way down the sides. Perhaps it's just that they're normally too tall to see those details.

Shorter at the top, but still crazy majestic trees, the one on the left doing the iterations the size of normal trees thing all up its trunk.

Still not low enough to touch this big droop of a branch.

There is a post at the two mile mark. The Redwood Hikes site above claims you've done all the best bits at this point and aren't missing much to turn around. I think there's at least a few hundred feet worth of grand trees that are definitely worth just a little more effort.

A bit of history exposed. These trees might have enveloped the smaller one long ago. It seems to be a frequent story.

One drawback to being on the coast is that many of the flowers have already run their course, especially the leopard lilies that seem to be in their height in the inland wildernesses right now. I found a few redwood sorrel that hadn't opened in the overcast day and individual hedge nettles and little else along the ridge.

There's two plants with very dry old flowers and a lot of developing seed pods in this big cluster of leopard lilies.

There's a couple really big trees that have fallen across the trail and the trail has been dug out below to give room to duck through as the trail drops and wiggles and drops further down the side of the ridge. The redwoods vanish once too close to the ocean, but the flowers increased. I saw a lot more things I'm fairly sure are invasive, too.

The forest changes to alder and spruce in the vaguely salty air near the crashing ocean.

Leathery polypody (ferns) gripping all over one tree.

A sequence of spores of varying maturity on the leathery polypody ferns.

Lack of redwoods doesn't mean there's nothing to look at.

Details of the Sitka spruce that take on the salty places.

Yellow faced bumble bee.

I poked my way up to check out the closed campground. (A free permit is required to use it.) It has a bathroom and numbered sites and a couple tables for each site and bear boxes and fire rings, but not so much room for tents in the thick grass. It would probably be better stomped down if not for the closure.

Little song birds scraping about the bushes.

A little piece of the camp right now.

Then I headed the rest of the way down to the road and the second closed parking lot. Although I had been hearing the surf for the last mile, I only managed a few glimpses of waves in the distance. I was a little tempted to try the trails down through the blackberries toward Flint Rock Head. I got a little way down pulling aside the wayward bramble stems extending across the trail to get a little better view of the rock, but not far and even managed to return without getting stabbed along the way.

Rocks and surf north of the mouth of the Klamath River.

Flint Rock Head down below. There appears to be a pool behind it. I've seen that at other stacks.

Another sorrel, but like so many other plants by the road, this one is invasive.

I gave only the briefest thought to visiting the radar sites from WWII that are along the road before turning back without doing so. I've stopped by a couple sites before.

The start of the California Coastal Trail section on the west side. No dogs or motorcycles or bicycles or horses allowed. Camping limit 5 days.

The Sitka spruce trunks can get quite burly over the years. The tree on the left has invasive ivy and the purple on the right is invasive foxglove.

It takes some attention paid to find any rocks along Flint Ridge. The west part of trail is old road.

One huge Sitka spruce full of cones.

The first of the redwoods I saw were touched with yellow, presumably due to being the closest to the salt. They take over quickly as the trail climbs again. There isn't so much climb from the west side.

They're not all redwoods, but mostly.

Such grand trees.

The trail travels very close to one massive burl.

Fog passing by between some brief sunny moments.

I found one dried up ginger flower. There's clumps of ginger all along the trail.

The trees near the top of the ridge really are very grand.

I passed the 2 mile post again. Everything else is downhill from there.

Continuing on the trail.

How many reiterations can one tree handle?

There are some wild shaped trees. Burls all the way up on the left and some wild big branches in the back on the right.

A little bit of that bark getting pulled apart by the growing wood within.

A little redwood sorrel with a few flowers. The most numerous patch I found.

I passed the tree with a hole cut in its side and then the few stumps to get back to the pond.

Still looks like a shallow bit of water.

The flowers of a blackberry, probably the invasive Himalayan.

Pennyroyal, an invasive mint.

After finishing, I wandered over the the stub of bridge remaining from the old highway. It includes interpretive signs about how the bridge washed away one storm. The new one also has bears to guard it, but they're in gold.

The concrete bears still guard this side of the old Klamath River bridge.

The last mile or so of the Klamath River.

©2020 Valerie Norton
Written 13 Aug 2020