Day 7 |
December 24, 1997 | Outbound Trip Home Page |
659 Miles Today: 39 Miles |
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Mystic
Forest RV Park Klamath CA |
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| Leisurely morning; jogged a ways down Hwy 101, then had a long shower. Wonderful sunshine and blue skies - unseasonable, apparently, but the locals reckon it'll hold for a few days. Lunch in the sun next to the rig after S. came back from the site office with lots of news about parks and hikes. | |||
 30 secs at 28.8 |
I was planning to do some work on the web journal, but we decide to go out; it's too nice a day not to go walking . Drive down to Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, and take the short self-guided "nature walk." | ||
| The Redwoods have a wonderful cathedral-like atmosphere. Perhaps, alternatively, the early cathedrals were designed to evoke the spirit of the old-growth forest: tall, massive pillars/trunks, with light filtering down from the upper clere/stories. I haven't seen such a pagan basis for cathedral architecture mentioned, though they were surely built on the site of old shrines. It's often noted that Greek, Islamic and Asian sacred architecture has arboreal references - why not the (especially Gothic) cathedrals? | The
Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park 'Nature Trail' leaflet on redwoods: "Some reach over 360 feet in height and live to 2.000 years or more. ... Redwood bark is is a [fibrous and furrowed] non-living material that provides excellent insulation against fire and resists insect invasion and fungus. This ability is unique among trees and may well account for the redwood's long term success." |
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| How to tell conifers apart | The Redwood forest is discernibly different from the pine/spruce groves at South Slough: there is lush undergrowth, unlike the barren mat of needles I associate with pine forests. I wish I wasn't so uninformed about the difference between pines, cedars, spruce, etc | Bought a great book on Day 10 - Tom Watts'
Pacific
Coast Tree Finder. From that I learned: Pine: needles in bunches of 6 or fewer Fir: smooth round scars where needles fell off Spruce: stubby pegs on twigs where needles fell off Cedar: scaly needles, ends of branches look ironed flat Cypress: scaly needles, roundish woody conelike fruits |
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| Back at the campsite at 5.30 pm; bean soup tonight. The rig is still not level, though I tried a different location; still makes me nauseous. | |||
| I've been without TV for six days now, and I'm not missing it. Same holds for NPR, and to some extent, newspapers. Don't know how well I'd cope without reading matter in general, though. I suspect many people have this experience with e-mail and other lifestyle technology: not a necessity, but it can become an important part of your daily life if you have easy access to it. Tellingly, I miss being able to zap the web quickly for a piece of information much more than I miss cable TV. I want access to net info anywhere, as envisioned in my Ambient Internet paper. | Did in fact buy USA on Day
9... Statistics Snapshot, USA
Today12/26/97 Life section |
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