While camping in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park in August 2013 my family and I hiked the 5 mile James Irvine Trail from our campground to the Pacific Ocean and the incredible Fern Canyon. Here are my best photographs from this hike followed by images from a solo hike I did along Prairie Creek.
Poem: Oceans Roaring in Moonlight
Walking alone in the moonlight along the edge of Elk Prairie
Seeking a silent audience with a great Tree
I enter a tall dark wall of redwoods and switch on my
headlamp
Thinking of mountain lions
The canopy opens up and I douse the light
As eyes adjust to filtered moonlight
I feel the looming gravity of this Ancient One
With my light I trace the gnarly trunk of the Arco Giant
Twenty-four feet in diameter and 227 feet high
Candelabra-like multiple trunks, some broken off in storms
Spiraling bole peppered with huge burls
Massive crown hosting a hidden ecosystem of epiphytes
As I lie down in a pool of moonlight beneath this Great One
A single delicate-winged insect flutters up into a shaft of
light
Quieting myself I notice a distant eternal roar
The western ocean pouring over miles of redwood-clad hills
No beginning or end to these waves crashing into this Turtle
Continent
My brief time runs its course between the moth and this tree
For thousands of years witnessing storm and fire
Standing here beneath the coursing moon and sun and stars
Standing here beneath the coursing moon and sun and stars
Listening to the eternal roaring
For a moment a link in time
Joined by the ancestors and our children—born and unborn
I rename this tree “Oceans Roaring”
Tonight this tree is my father and the ocean my mother
Tonight I am their moonstruck child
Emerging blinking from the dark tunneled forest
Into the bright moonlit meadow now blanketed in cool silver
mists
