Sunday, June 30, 2013

Day 7 Crescent City to Elk Prairie Campground 35 miles (total miles 281)

Today was a tough day in the mountains.   Riding out of Crescent City we hit hour first mountain almost immediately.   It was a good 4-5 miles to the summit at what the signs said were 6% grades so about an hour of solid endless climbing except that over the summit there were to more summits to cross.  I kept hearing Phil Liggett in my ear announcing "and the elastic band is stretching...oh, he's cracked!"  Here we are taking some rest breaks part way up.  

And a view back at Crescent City and Crescent Beach from the road

First Redwood!

The higher we climbed the more we were riding in the shade of giant redwoods so there was that.  Finally after the third summit we descended off the mountain to see the ocean again

The arrived at the tourist trap called Trees of Mystery where we had lunch and found a 60' talking Paul Bunyon.

Leaving Trees of Mystery we had two more mountains to cross until we finally left highway 101 to descend into the Redwoods National Park where we found our campground called Elk Prairie for good reason.  Arriving at the campground the signs all said "campground full" which one would expect on a summer weekend but they had plenty of room in the hiker/biker section at the rear which was nicer than most of the regular spots   We camped among the redwoods out of cell phone range of anything and didn't ride back into coverage until the middle of the next morning when my phone started beeping like crazy with all the stored up texts and emails.  Here are some photos of Elk Prairie Campground in Redwoods National Park.  

1 comment:

  1. Wow, those are gorgeous pictures! I know what you mean about the cell phone coverage, we lost track of you guys early in the morning and at night Grandma called asking if we'd heard about the adventurers.

    ReplyDelete