Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park

At Daybreak (Christian) Camp, Felton CA

The Monterey/Santa Cruz area is the southern most region for Costal Redwoods to grow.  Big Sur State Park, south of Monterey is a very popular park.  Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park is just above Santa Cruz, in Felton, and is less known, less busy, and they have a very nice ADA trail called “Redwood Grove Loop Trail” where you can walk among old growth Redwoods..  There is a second part of the park just a little to the North that they call the Fall Creek Unit, and it has what they call “second growth” Redwoods, or trees which are 100 years old or younger.

 

 

  

This cutout of a Redwood Tree is of a tree which “fell” back in 1934, and it was 2,200 years old when it fell.  They have little plaques showing significant historical events during the tree’s lifetime.  The bottom two pictures show the far left plaques on the tree, and the far right near the center…click on either of those pictures and you can see the events for yourself.  Marcia is pointing out the plaques in the top picture.

Those of you who have tried to take a picture of a Redwood Tree, or those who have followed other blogs which have talked about the Redwoods, know that capturing the magnitude of these great trees in a picture is just so hard to do.  The park expects you to stay on the paths, understandably…but that gives you less angles from which you can try to capture the fullness of large Redwood in a picture.

    

Taking a picture in landscape mode, like the two above, just can’t capture half of the tree.  The far left looks straight up along one portion of the path…the one on the right shows trees with Marcia looking at them…it shows how big they are, making her just a speck in the picture.

    

Above are two pictures, taken from different angles, of the largest tree in the grove, aptly called, “The Giant”.  The brochure they give you at the start of the trail says it is 270’ tall…but a volunteer worker told us they measured it just a a few months ago and it is now 274 1/2 feet tall.  It is thought to have started growing around 628 AD, give or take 200 years.

   

They say that the trail is just under a mile long, and it was an easy walk, and Marcia (in picture left) had no problems traveling along the pathway.  Near the end is the Burls Tree (picture right), a profusion of bumpy growths, harmless to the tree, due to a mass of dormant buds.  Most Redwoods have Burls, not as massive as this tree does.  They can be found down near the bottom, or partway up, or even near the top…this tree seemed to have them all over.  There are other large trees at the State Park…giant sycamores…but that was on another trail which was not as ADA friendly as this one, so we did not see them.

Next to the park is the Roaring Camp Railroads.  In the 1830's, Isaac Graham, a mountain man, settled in the area, and the Mexican authorities named Graham's wild settlement "Roaring Camp."    (In the picture above you can see a locomotive traveling not far from our trail)

He opened a saw mill by 1842, but the Redwood Trees here were spared, and 25 years later they became the first virgin stand of coastal redwoods to be protected from logging.

The Santa Cruz / Felton Railroad opened in 1875, carrying tourists between the beach and the Big Trees, and logs to the port of Santa Cruz. In 1876, the South Pacific Coast Railroad narrow gauge network completed its line from Alameda to Los Gatos, then over the mountains to Felton, absorbing the Santa Cruz & Felton to complete the line to Santa Cruz.  By 1887 South Pacific Coast Railroad was a major California transportation concern; and Southern Pacific paid six million dollars to merge it into their California transportation system.

These last three pictures above are from the Roaring Camp Railroads.  They have various train rides you can take.  The larger rails, as seen directly above, will go all the way to Santa Cruz.  The narrow gauge, shown in the second picture above by the water tower, is also used.  Visit their website if interested…we were not, but some of them go right through the Redwoods!

But what did interest me was the history of the railroad…you see, as I have mentioned before, my Great-grandfather Charles Huntington Burdick was a conductor, retiring in 1924, passing away in 1933, on the train that ran from Santa Cruz to Alameda (Oakland area).  I was hoping that someone at the Roaring Camp could confirm that the Railroad passed through where Roaring Camp currently is located.  Although we did not find anyone, it does look like it is the same tracks.  It is very heartwarming to know that Great-grandpa passed along this area many times.  The pocket watch above was given to him at his retirement, and has been now handed down to my son Michael.  Found Great-grandpa’s obituary in the Santa Cruz Newspaper, page 6, Saturday, April 15, 1933:

Burdick, Former S. P. Conductor, Succumbs In S.F. Charles Burdick, Southern Pacific train conductor on the Santa-Cruz San Francisco run for many years and on the Boulder Creek run prior to that, died Wednesday at his home in San Francisco. He was 69 years of age. Mr. Burdick, prominent Mason and former resident of Santa Cruz, had "been ill ever since his retirement from the railroad a year ago. Surviving him are the widow, Mrs. Nellie Burdick, and a son, Edwin, of San Francisco.

As obituaries go, there are errors.  Unless he continued to work past the date on the watch, he retired way more than a year before he died.  Also, my Grandfather is Edwin, and he did not live in San Francisco, but he had lived in San Francisco, being born in Portland Oregon where his mother was from.  We have never figured out how Charles and Nellie met one another, but she was from near Portland in Oregon, and grandpa was born 10 months after their marriage.  We just figure that he worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad and met her through his travels.  But we do know that he was a conductor on this railroad between Oakland and Santa Cruz…with ferry service between San Francisco and Oakland before people got on the train.