http://www.hotwired.com/worldsurf/weird.htm (HotWired Trade Show Demo, 11/1995)
This little weird-n-wacky travelog starts at Leggett Valley, at the intersection of Highways 1 and 101, and works north along 101 until it hits "Avenue of the Giants." There it takes off onto the Avenue and continues another 33 miles along The Avenue. The things on this travelog are my "personal picks" of the many off-the-wall tourist sights here in redwoods country.
Click here for a picture of the Drive-Thru Tree.
Yep. You can drive right thru this tree. Hole as big as a Buick through it. One of three drive-thru trees in California, and in my opinion, the best of the bunch.
You'll drive through a beautiful redwood forest, and around the bend you'll suddenly come upon the tree itself. Go ahead -- be el touristo, have someone take your picture in front of the tree; every one else does!
After you've gone through the tree, park and look back at the tree. It really is a magnificent specimen of a coastal redwood!
The tree is at the south end of Leggett, on Drive-Thru Tree Road (pretty clever of 'em, eh?, to get the State to name the road after their tourist trap!)
What's the Leggett Duckpond's main claim-to-fame? Well, in the early 1970sRobert Pirsig and his son took their famous motorcycle ride across America, and down the Pacific Coast, and wrote about the trip Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, they relate that "we stopped to feed the ducks in the tourist duckpond at Leggett."
Yep. Fed 'em crackerjacks. Says so right here on page 399 of my copy of "Zen."
The spot ought to have a shrine and be a pilgrimage site for all the Zen-Trekkies in the world! But it isn't. Alas, it was paved over when the new Highway 1 & 101 intersection was put in. But right there at the intersection, just beside the "Carvings for Christ" redwood chainsaw carving shop, under the pavement, is where the Cracker Jack tourist duck pond once was.
I suppose, in a bit of spiritual homage to the duckpond, one could still feed crackerjacks to the ducks at duckpond over at the Drive-Thru Tree, sort of a communing-in-memorium to the lost duckpond in "Zen." It wouldn't be quite the same, but it would come close.
Two miles north on Highway 101 there's the Peg House Deli. Someone once got the idea to build this place without any nails, all with wooden pegs. And they did, too! There's not a nail in the place. I doubt you could even buy a box of nails in their little hardware section.
But you can see the bullet holes from the shoot out down the road a few years ago, between the cops and some bad guys. Ask owners Stan or Beverly to show them to you. They knew the bullets were coming through the side window, but they didn't know where the landed, 'til they realized one had passed through a loaf of bread; that showed the trajectory, and the ballistics guys dug out the bullets from the far wall.
Click here for a picture of the old stage coach stop at Bell Glen.
Stage coaches used to run all over northern California. The building that is now the dining room and pub at the Bell Glen Bed and Breakfast and the Bell Glen Bunk'n'Breakfast hostel, was a stage stop on the Pinkerton line. They even have an old mail pouch from the stage in the pub downstairs. And owner Gene barnett can show you old wheel ruts from the stage, where it used to cross the Eel River on the way to the stage stop. The Bell Glen is another half-mile north of Peg House.
Howling Wolf, you see, was a retirement home for over-the-hill movie animals. The bear was Walt Disney's Gentle Ben; the elephant was the elephant from Daktari; and the cougar was the cougar from the Mercury Cougar commercials.
It's a private residence, now, so don't disturb the occupants, but if you want to see the location, it's the long low building at 71700 Highway 101, on the west side of the road.
No one knows where the World-Famous Tree House went. To that Great Outhouse-In-The-Sky, I suppose.
Click here for a picture of the World-Famous Tree House.
Oh, this has to be the biggest tourist trap on all of 101, and one of the best. Free, too, so it's definitely worth a stop. Called the World-Famous Tree House because it was in Ripley's Believe-it-or-Not back in the 1930s as "the tallest one-room house in the world," and it's been living off that reputation ever since.
The inside of the tree is spectacular. Burned out completely hollow in a forest fire about 300 years ago, and still living and perfectly healthy. Truly glorious. You can still see the charcoal pn the inside of the tree from the forest fire, and it's burned out as high as a five-story building inside!
Now here's one place where I want you to blow a couple of quarters. Fifty cents, total; less than a bag of popcorn at the movies, and better for your heart.
There are two small animated displays in the Treehouse. Put one quarter in the blacksmith shop, and another in the sawmill. Watch 'em whirl and bang, and cut logs, and shoe horses, and play checkers.
And if you have a little one with you, blow another quarter on the little miniature merry-go-round. If you really want to be a big spender for the little one, put your fourth quarter in the logging train inside the gift shop. Total cost, for all the adults and all the little ones together? One dollar. Such a deal!
Now I'll let you in on a little secret. Ripley called the Tree House "the tallest one-room house in the world," but in fact, no one ever "lived" in the tree house. It started out as a tourist donut shop.
The only people who've ever even slept in the tree house was a road construction crew who put cots in it and slept there for about a week when they were building the road back in the '20s. Their picture is on the wall.
Click here for a gravity-defying look into
the Anti-Gravity House.
Click here for a picture of
Old Mother Hubbard's Wooden Shoe
Click here for a picture of the
train ride
Well, it's real name is "Confusion Hill," but I come out so confused that I call it "Confusing Hill." You could call it "Gravity-Run-Amok Hill," and you'd be right-on.
Water runs up hill. You can't stand up straight in the house; Gravity acts differently in the north-south direction than it does in the east-west direction. Your child looks taller than you do.
Oh, the vertigo of it all! I remember seeing Confusion Hill on an old black-and-white tv program called You Asked For It back in the 50s. It's the first tv program I ever remember seeing. On a farm down in Potosi Missouri. And it's still there (Confusion Hill, I mean; not the farm in Potosi.)
Take the logging museum train ride, too, up into the hills to see logging equipment from each decade of the 1900s (more, or less).
Have a little one along? He or she will love the Old Mother Hubbard Shoe made out of redwood. And the world's talles redwood carving, dancing bears chainsaw-carved out of the stump of a tree that lost it's top many years ago.
It's hard to tell the age of an abalone, but this one is believed to be the world's oldest. And at 12 pounds, it's also the world's heaviest.
North of Garberville, turn right onto Avenue of the Giants. At Phillipsville, you'll come to the One-Log House: A three-room house hand-chiseled into a single log of a redwood tree.
The motto of the tree? "George Washington Never Slept Here." But I'll bet ol' George would've slept here if he had the chance!
The house is on a truck, and has traveled all over the world. I once saw a picture of it in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
The undercribbing is a fascinating feat of engineering, using hundreds and hundreds of redwood logs, all interlaced together, to form a bridge across the canyon that the Avenue traverses high above you.
The town of Weott was one of the towns that obliterated by the 1964 flood. Near the intersection of the Avenue and tbd road, look for the sign that shows the high-water mark on -- 235 feet up in the air -- at what once was the main street of the town. You can still see sidewalks and driveways from before the 64 flood.
Before 1948, only two kinds of redwoods were known -- the coastal and the giant redwoods. In 1948 a rare "dawn" redwood was found in remote mountains of China; these dawn redwoods turn out to be remnants of trees that existed before the Ice Age.
One dawn redwood is across the street from the high-water mark in Weott. Trust me. I'm an authority on ugly trees, and this is dawn redwood in Weott is the world's ugliest. Some kind of a genetic defect has caused dozens and dozens of trunks to grow out of the roots where only one trunk should be. The whole tree is contorted into a twisting mass of weirdness. And another weird thing about this tree -- it's deciduous; it loses its needles in winter and re-blooms them again in the spring.
But who knows? Perhaps there is something really potent about this genetic defect, and it might propgate and repropgate and repropogate, and some day it might become the dominant strain and all the rest of the redwoods as we know them today might look weird to our descendants ten million years from now.
Yes, there are albino redwood trees, colorless trees with no chlorophyll. Their branches and needles are almost pure white. Because they lack chlorophyll, they can't make food on their own and they live as parasites on the roots of healthy redwoods. One rare albino redwood is in the Women's Federation Grove, on the banks of a small creek that runs through the grove near the park entrance. Ask a ranger to point you toward the tree. Please don't pick souvenier branches from the albino; albinos are rare trees and surely perform some unknown function in Mother Nature's scheme of things. Enjoy it, take pictures, but don't molest the tree.
From the parking area at Founders' Grove, walk over to the beautiful Founder's Tree (the first branch on Founder's tree is 20-stories up in the sky -- the first branch!)
After you've ga-ga'd at Founders' tree a while, you will want to take the nature path back to the redwood graveyard. Ignore the state park's signs telling you which way to go. Listen to me; I'm the expert! Instead of going to the left around the tree as the signs say, you go to the right! After a short walk you'll come to a beautiful burned-out tree stump, and then the Redwood Graveyard; the only way to describe this graveyard is, "PREHISTORIC." Watch out for the dinasours!
Plans were being made to re-measure the Giant when it was struck by another falling tree in a windstorm, and on the night of March 28, 1991, came crashing to the ground, no longer a contender for the world championship!
But oh, what a tree it was. And laying on its side, back in the redwood graveyard, it's even more impressive on its side than standing up, for on it's side it you can take the true measure of the tree by walking up to it, walking along and around it. You can sense the hulk of the tree, the age and history of the tree.
"Awesome" is the only word to describe it. The undisputable champion for its new title, "the world's longest fallen-down tree,"