Giants!

So I mentioned in an ealier entry on Van Island that I'd been to a place called Cathedral Grove. Now, I think big trees are pretty cool, and those ones were massive, and I really loved walking around that place. I wasn't quite on the same wavelength as the guy who started talking to me about the "energy" the trees give out to us, but I really liked it all the same.

I've included my awesome hire car there to try and give some perspective, and that really big one there is a Douglas Fir, and 76m. That's nearly 1.5 times the height of the leaning tower of pisa, so pretty big, and I was impressed!

Now, when in San Fran I found out that the Californians also had their own big trees. There was a place just outside the city (imaginatively named "Cathedral Grove") where they have a forest of Redwoods. Redwoods are the tallest of all trees, and ones here can hit over 90m, so I had to have a look. It was another amazing place, but I found myself thinking that whilst these were taller trees, they just didn't have the impact of the Douglas Firs. They may have been taller, but they were much thinner, and when it come to size, I've always said girth is more important than length. I mean height.

Redwoods. These are the tallest in the world, growing up to 115m, but somehow less impressive than the Douglas Firs.

Then as we were leaving Yosemite, I found they had their own grove of Big Trees (although unfortunately not called Cathedral Grove). Here they have the Giant Sequoias, trees I'd wanted to see since I was a kid. I had once thought that these were the tallest of all trees, but was dissappointed to find that even the tallest sequoias don't grow much above 85m. Still, as we were driving past I thought it'd be good to take a look as it wasn't much of a detour, and it was soooo worth it! My god these are REALLY BIG trees! They're by far the biggest in the world, I don't care how tall they are. Look at these!

It felt like being a miniature person. These things are on a scale I've never seen before, and I could have spent hours wandering around these giants. This one is called the Grizzly Giant, and is "only" 64m tall, but just look at it!

See those people bottom left? That's how big this is!

They'd even cut a hole through the middle of one for a path, but these things are pretty resiliant and after a hundred years that tree was starting to grow bark again on the inside of the hole where it had been cut. Such a cool place, and a fiting final experience in California!

Seq2