Old Growth Forest

Okay here are a few photos as promised. This is me at the Smokey Hollow campground entrance on Long Island. Named so because it is a long island in the great Willapa Bay on the east side of the Long Beach Peninsula. The island sits just west of Hwy 101 but east of the north'ish end of the peninsula. Grab a map of the peninsula at www.funbeach.com and you can find it easily. Not a very flattering photo of moi, but it's okay. All of my clothes are getting to big for me, but I'm going to wear them as long as I can. These are my favorite hiking clothes.

This is the entrance to the old growth forest. You walk up a hill a bit from the campground and make a right turn and follow an old logging road to this sign. It's mostly ferns and not very big trees. But after you make the turn in to the cedar grove everything changes.

It was a gorgeous day, but back in the cedar grove it can be a lot darker so it's kind of hard to get good photos with a point and shoot camera. There were a couple of women that had tons of 35mm equipment, lenses, filters and other goodies. But I did okay with the little point and shoot. You can't really tell, but this tree stump is about 15 feet tall. The things you see that look like holes are where loggers cut in so they could stand on the tree to cut it down. Ouch. Poor tree. There was logging on this island up until about 1982 or so. Sad....I'm glad it's all preserve now. Oh I did mention that this island has bear, deer, elk, raccoon, slugs, and all sorts of animal life on it.

This guy was a naturalist who gave a really good talk about tree rings and the impact that tsunamis and earthquakes have had on the forest. He was really good. They found one set of tree rings that dated to the year 991 and the impact a tsunami had on the area. Cool.

I was walking along the trail and there was a tree that had fallen over and when I looked in I saw all of the lichen growing there. When I looked in it looked like emeralds. The photo didn't quite capture how it really was, but I thought it was still very interesting.

I have more photos, but they are not very discriptive so I'm going to leave them out for now. It's a good thing to get out and take a hike.