Lady Bird Johnson Grove

We got an early start this morning to ensure that we could get a parking space at the Lady Bird Johnson Grove trailhead, a popular hike in the Redwoods National and State Parks. We were held up by road construction up Bald Hills Road, a narrow, windy road, but still managed to arrive by 8:00 AM and had a great place to park to enjoy breakfast before taking our first hike of the day. As were waiting for our turn to go up the one-lane road due to the construction, we got out of the van to snap the photo below.

The Redwood National and State Parks consists of one national park and 3 abutting California state parks. All the campgrounds are in the state parks.

President Richard Nixon dedicated this area of the Redwood Forest to Lady Bird Johnson in 1969 to honor her conservation and environmental work in helping to preserve the old-growth redwood forests that were being ravaged during decades of unregulated clear-cut logging.

Trillium Falls

Our next stop was Trillium Falls further up “the 101” (as the locals call US 101). The Lady Bird Groves Trail actually connects to the Trillium Falls trail, but it would have been another 6 miles roundtrip back to Usain in addition to the 2-mile hike we had just taken. Most of the Trillium Falls visitors chose to walk to the falls and then turn back around but we were excited to see another section of old-growth redwoods, so we hiked the entire falls loop and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park

Mill Creek Campground in Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park is our home base for 2 nights. One mile down another long winding road gets us to the park gate and another mile down the same winding road gets us to the campground. We know that any hikes here will have to go up since we are as low in elevation as one can go here.

All the sites here are very small, which means lots of small RVs like ours, and even more tent campers. They seem to be carved out of the forest. Our site is fairly close to the bath house where we end the day with nice, hot showers, but not until after Lisa took Catnip out of the van to check out our site.