Decker Creek — South Fork Eel River, Bull Creek Wilderness
There is a well-known trail in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park that contains Fern Canyon, a dramatic ravine of rock walls covered in ferns. As described in SFGate:
Ensconced in Redwood National and State Parks, located about 300 miles north of San Francisco, the narrow, dramatic canyon is famous for its 50-foot rock walls festooned in oversized ferns. From the top, tiny waterfalls trickle down through fuzzy mosses, and down below a creek rushes through the center over a multi-hued pebble floor.
But this image is not of or from Fern Canyon. It's from small Decker Creek—a mosquito-infested confluence of a small creek and redwoods—near the South Fork Eel River in the Bull Creek State Wilderness inside Redwood National Park. It's not difficult to reach, though it isn't all that easy to find. But it's worth the effort. It is a timeless place, without crowds, where the water and the mist and the sunlight and the trees are the only sounds.
Provenance: Phase One XT | IQ4.150 | Rodenstock 23mm 2-image stitch
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For a very different California redwood experience: the Cathedral Redwoods at Felton and the train that takes you there.
Just up the coast in the same spirit of solitude: the cathedral quiet of Prairie Creek Redwoods at dawn.
From the same forest floor, a meditation on scale: a sword fern dwarfed by the ancient redwood giants.
Further north along the same redwood coast, another waterfall in the forest: Trillium Falls in the northern reaches of the same redwood country.
For the history behind why wilderness like this is protected at all: the Centennial Stump in Kings Canyon — the tree cut down to prove it was real, and what it cost.
