Hope Creek and Ten Taypo Loop

Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park

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I turned my attention to the north side of the road where the trails climb to the ridge line instead of dropping to the ocean. I smiled thinking of the views that must be up there then remembered that it should be thickly covered with trees. One day I might understand that most ridges do not get above tree line, especially those that are only about 1000 feet up. Plenty of really big trees, no views expected. The sign says about four miles for the loop and I decided on the clockwise direction.

Signed trailhead is easy to find.

It certainly plunges into the trees. There are some steep sections as it climbs in little wiggles up to the junction that starts the loop. From the junction, I could see bridges circling around big trees down below and plenty more climbing the way I was planning to go.

Hope Creek to the left, which I continued on, and Ten Taypo to the right.

How big are big trees? It's hard to understand how big these are without being here.

Below, the bridge is hard to see as it wraps around the big trees. There are railings at the left and more right of center.

I kept to my plan an went left. Up! They both achieve the same gain anyway since they meet at the top. It wasn't so bad a climb, but it did certainly go up.

Always odd to find these walk through trees along the trail. Unlike the drive through ones, these are natural.

Trees along the trail.

The trees shrank as I moved upward. They like to warn you about that. The biggest ones are down along Prairie Creek. Those are the prizes. The ones along this creek would still be prizes if they were any other sort of tree. I wasn't prepared for quite how much they shrank on this ridge.

This looks suspiciously like it got logged.

It got better again, even as the trail ran into a bit of old road. I barely noticed the rest of the road except that a sign is provided to mark which way to go on it. There is a bit of highway noise along this section, but not quite as bad as at the end of the interpretive trail.

The old road makes a wide path through the trees.

There's still places with an extraordinary amount of little spindle trees among the larger ones.

At the top, signs mark trail as it leaves the road again. The road is more obvious at this end and people have been extending their hike by walking along it. Looking at the old maps, it might wind quite a bit up high before finally dropping down to the highway. I turned and headed down Ten Taypo Trail.

They're getting tall and have some rhododendron understory.

There are almost no flowers, so this leafless wintergreen really stood out. I'm learning something because I immediately recognized the wintergreen in spite of the lack of leaves this time.

There's very few flowers. I noted some leaf mats that iNaturalist says are violets. They have interesting leaves that apparently are beneath my notice when the flowers are blooming because I sure hadn't noticed. I like the serrations along the edges. I noticed a few more leopard lilies in seed, too.

Lots of little trees.

An old boardwalk over a swampy area. By the out-of-date USGS topo maps, Ten Taypo climbs up from its own trailhead to the road while Hope Creek is only the current trailhead and the connection along the bottom of the loop.

I got to attempting a few "artistic" photographs of the trees even though they never work out. Well, almost never, but when they do, I seem to be the only one who thinks so. In spite of sharing it with others, that is ultimately who I'm trying to please.

Looking up a long, thin burn scar.

I stopped to notice the lichen on the bark producing spores.

A pair of trees sharing a burn scar as well as everything else. The right is probably a reiteration.

After being so hollowed out by fire, this tree still lives.

A different wintergreen a little further along as it turns into seeds.

The trail finished going downward, for the most part, and turned to traverse back over to Hope Creek. It seemed to scramble a bit and I could hear plenty of parkway noise on this section.

A strange reiteration on that middle one.

A thin trail and thin, tall trees.

A thicker trail and a very much thicker trees.

Then I got back to the bridges that wrap around the big trees in Hope Creek. It turns out, they were all one long bridge. It does wrap around the giant trees that grow in Hope Creek, though.

A long and winding bridge.

And so I arrived back at the junction and turned to drop back to the road below. I passed four people on the way. The first, a pair, mentioned that they never see anyone on this loop. The third said she'd carefully studied her guide to see what would be least crowded. Generally speaking, I'd say there's fewer people as you get away from the visitor center except for the crazy number going for Fern Canyon. It's a nice little loop, but I think the Western Ridge is the place to be on your own.




©2020 Valerie Norton
Written 6 Sep 2020