A Necessary Journey
At the beginning of August 2025 I was compelled to journey from Los Angeles up through Oregon to Seattle. To my surprise, many of my friends in Los Angeles had already escaped to destinations in the Pacific Northwest, and they offered dozens of recommendations for places to stop along the way.
I chose to focus on recommendations along US Route 101 between San Francisco, CA and Newport, OR; this took me through the Redwood National and State Parks, and along the hay-stack rock formations of the Oregon Pacific coast.
Hunting With A Camera
For many years now, I’ve enjoyed “capturing” and “hunting” for animals and other natural spectacles with my camera (currently a Panasonic Lumix GH5). Only once in my life have I participated in a true hunt, though variations on the activity are very popular across my home state of Wisconsin. Maybe for this lack of experience, or for my love of conserving wild spaces, I find great satisfaction in getting as close to nature as possible and entrapping only its likeness in my camera. “Take only photographs, leave only footprints.”
Walking The Redwood Forests
The forest floor is so far below the canopy, that walking the trails is almost silent. The gride of ones own feet on the gravel, the rarely encountered other-hiker, and infrequent bird calls are the only sounds. The wind in the trees is so far overhead that it barely registers as noise, and the light that reaches the ground is so sparse that it makes sense of the fact that there is only a low cover of ferns and no plant life of any intermediate height. The atmosphere is near-magical and ripe for coercing introspection, so visitors beware, haha.
Photography Gallery
Here are some photographs I captured in the old growth Redwood forests along US State Highway 101, a 30-mile corridor aptly named “Avenue of the Giants“.
