We were about a third of the way into the first big climb before we entered the park, and we started seeing big trees right away. These trees are so tall that there's no way you can get them all in one photo. This is a composite that I made from three photos. My bike is leaning against the tree and JT is standing there for scale.


The trees were inspiring but the traffic was awful. This stretch of US101 in the park is very busy and features high-speed trucks and RVs, as well as the normal cars and pickup trucks. In some places the shoulder was huge, in other places it was nonexistent. It actually felt safer when we were climbing because there were two lanes for traffic to get by. The top of this climb is the highest elevation we've reached yet--over 1200 feet. The descent was long and fast. We had one close call with a car, but no problems with logging trucks. By the way, on this stretch of road, fully loaded logging trucks travel in both directions. It just doesn't seem economical.



I rolled my jersey sleeves up a little bit to try and blur the extremely distinct tan lines on my arms. Now I have three distinct areas and two distinct lines: the tanned area, the burned area, and the unexposed area.


We stopped for lunch in Klamath and spent about an hour there, not because we wanted to. First we visited the post office and mailed my old rain jacket and some maps and receipts back to Maryland. While we were there we met a guy who was riding from Seattle to San Jose. He said the guy he had been riding with was grazed by a trailer in Washington and crashed into a ditch. The guy was okay and continued until Crescent City.

Then we rode down to a local deli and spent a long time waiting for some sandwiches. After a brief stop at the market, we got back on the road and climbed out of Klamath. At the top of the hill we met Norm, who is riding up the coast to the Columbia River as the first part of a journey that will eventually take him all the way to Maine. That's the way to spend a summer.

Soon we left the busy highway and started up the Norman Drury Parkway, which runs through the redwoods. After the initial climb, the next 10 miles was a long, slow descent. We made frequent stops whenever a particular tree struck our fancy.


There are lots of big trees in the forest, but there is only one "The Big Tree."  Like all the other big trees, you really can't take a good picture of it.



Next we rode into the surprisingly dumpy town of Orick. Most of the businesses involve the sale of animals carved from redwood. We stopped at the market and bought food for tonight's dinner and tomorrow's breakfast. Then we moved a couple of miles down the road to the National Park Visitor Center. The last few miles around the freshwater Big Lagoon (everything is big here) had us fighting a stiff crosswind. Then we climbed up to Patricks Point State Park. The Park's hiker/biker sites are being renovated, so we were stuck in a field somewhere and we had to walk about a half mile to the shower. There was a couple camping there when we arrived. They were heading north as part of a short tour up the coast. We ate our dinners and crawled into our tents at about 9pm (it's still light at that hour around here). It was quite cold.