Journeys›Photograph

Summer Day Hiking Among Muir Woods Redwoods

·San Francisco, California·#hiking#summer#bay area#forest#redwoods
Two young children look towards the camera, standing between massive tree trunks, one wearing a purple arm cast.

A summer day hiking at Muir Woods, twelve miles north of San Francisco on the flank of Mount Tamalpais. It's the only old-growth coastal redwood forest left in the Bay Area — some of these trees are documented at seven hundred to a thousand years old, and Roosevelt made a monument of the place back in 1908 — but the girls mostly cared that the fire-hollowed trunks make caves you can walk into and pop out of.

The older one wore her white cap and a pair of toy binoculars on a string the whole hike, doing serious reconnaissance from behind trunks and dead snags. The little one, purple cast and all, kept ahead on the trail with a stick, unbothered.

At one point their mom climbed up into a gap between two burned trunks, high enough that we had to crane back to find her under the burls. The trees just keep going up past where anyone can climb.

Two young children stand near a large tree trunk and a dark, cavernous interior; one wears a purple arm cast.A child with binoculars and a white cap peeks from behind a tree trunk in a sunlit forest.A child in a white cap and blue dress holds a thin tree trunk, with bright green foliage in a forest.Two children walk on a sun-dappled forest path; one wears a purple dress and arm cast, the other a hat and binoculars.A person stands smiling between two massive redwood trees, touching a large burl on the right trunk.Looking up at a person navigating between two giant tree trunks, framed by green leaves against a bright sky.From below, a person stands between two towering tree trunks, with green leaves visible against a bright sky.A person stands between massive redwood trees, looking up at the bright green leaves and sun-drenched sky.

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