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Hiking Journal - Big Basin - 1/31/2010

This was a much nicer day than last time. The sun had a difficult time penetrating the redwood cover (leaving considerable moisture on the ground despite having no rain for 48 hours) but it wasn't too cold. I may miss snow, but I do enjoy being able to hike in January.

The full gallery (complete with full-sized images!) can be found below:

http://photos.nick.johnson.name/view...ods/Jan312010/

We took the Shadowbrook trail this time, ~5 miles round-trip. The first half of the trail sadly follows the paved road to a fairly nice campground (closed in Winter) at the base of Sempervirens Falls. I dislike following roads. The trail itself was nice enough. A bit bland, but not bad.

Note that we didn't hike on the road. Unseen in these pictures is an actual trail around 20ft away from the road itself. While the road takes a nice even climb through the mountain, the trail yo-yo's in elevation above and below it. We considered shifting to hike on the road instead but decided we'd prefer the better workout of the trail ;) In any case, the road was nearly always visible, which irked me.

The waterfall itself was quite nice. The water is fairly muddy at its base due to how shallow it was. I wish we could have approached the base itself (or squeezed in behind it!)--alas there were tons of "access restricted" signs everywhere and we didn't feel like angering the rangers that day.

Shortly after the falls came Slippery Rock. Better picture times may come up in the future, although it wasn't really that much to look at. Just a huge rock surface that climbs around 300 ft uphill. And it's very slippery...I nearly fell a few times walking across the damned thing to the other side of the trail.

The scenery after this point was much improved. The roads were gone and there were far fewer hikers (I think we saw 3 total the entire rest of the day). Shadowbrook proper (which is basically a brook, covered in shadow) was the highlight of the trip for me. Sadly I think we were too enthralled with some of the more majestic scenes to remember to take pictures ;) Next time...

Lots of spiderwebs and spiders. Luckily most seemed to prefer to avoid human contact and go after the delicious flying bugs instead.

The tree below was quite awesome to admire. Plants in general are just amazing.

We arrived back at our truck long before sunset. The trek was still fairly short but quite enjoyable :) Sadly, it seems that was the last sunny weekend for at least another two weeks.

Fucking. Rain.

We did get some nice scenery on the way out. The first is our attempt at a bracketed HDR photo without a tripod. It worked out OK, although the tripod is really a necessity for really nice-looking ones. The second is just an example (taken from a moving truck, at that!) of the wonderful vistas you see driving into and out of the basin.

Posted on Friday February 5th, 2010 at 4:25 PM by DranoK
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Tags: big basin, hiking, journal, redwoods
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1 Comments:

At 04:34 PM on Friday February 2th 2010 (33 Days 2 Hours ago)
LiQUiD_X posted the following:

Originally Posted by DranoK

Just a huge rock surface that climbs around 300 ft uphill.

Google map of Slippery Rock I actually found slightly more interesting than the rock in person.. afterall, it's just a big slippery rock =) I look forward to hiking to the top of it, though.

This trip was great fun, DranoK retells it nicely =)

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