Guest Blogger: My Own Daughter!
I am blessed to have the two most wonderful daughters in the whole, wide world! My oldest, Faith, just returned from a trip to San Francisco. While there, Faith had the opportunity to see one of the things on MY bucket list .... the Coast Redwood trees. She graciously agreed to write a blog post about her experience in the Muir Woods National Monument. So without further ado, here's Faith!
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Faith with Kate (dear friend and awesome roommate!) |
This past week, I went on a trip with my scholarship group
to San Francisco.
We toured all over the
city for four days and saw all the sights from the Golden Gate Bridge to
Chinatown to Berkeley and more.
We had a
blast everywhere we went, but I think my favorite part of the trip was visiting
Muir Woods.
As you can tell from the rest of my mom’s blog, we’re pretty
big on nature in this family, so I was pretty psyched that this was included on
our trip.
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Friend Zack |
A few facts about Muir Woods: Muir Woods is a remnant of the
ancient coast redwood forests that covered much of the northern California
coastal valleys before the 1800s. Today,
it is located twelve miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge.
150 million years ago, redwood-like trees covered much of
the Northern Hemisphere. Due to climate change, the range of the redwood tree
is much diminished. Today, there are two
species of redwood in California, the coast redwood and the giant sequoia. The coast redwoods are found in Muir Woods and
on a thin, discontinuous strip of land 500 miles long from southern Oregon to
Big Sur. The giant sequoias are found in
small groves on the west slope of the Sierra Nevada.
The tallest redwood in Muir Woods is 252 feet tall, but the
tallest in the world is 379.1 feet tall and is located in Redwood National
Park. This makes the redwood the tallest
living thing in the whole world. The
tallest redwood is also up to 2,000 years old (though the average mature
redwood is 600-800 years old)! Its bark
is a foot thick and its diameter is up to 22 feet. The reason the redwood trees reach such
incredible age and size is largely due to their incredible bark. The bark grows from six to twelve inches
thick and protects the tree from insects, fungi, and even fire. Repeated hot fires can burn through the bark
and cause hollows in the tree, but even then the redwood survives.
Fire actually plays a fairly important role in the life of
the redwood. Fire clears the forest
floor of smaller plants and debris so that new redwood seeds can reach the
ground and take root. Furthermore the
forest fires recycle nutrients and turns debris into ash. In the 1800s, local towns and cities began
suppressing these fires and upsetting the natural cycles of the forest. The wildfires that would occur every 20-50
years were an integral part of the life cycle of the redwoods. Nowadays, the National Park Service conducts
prescribed burnings in order to re-establish fire’s natural role in the forest.
Redwoods are conifers and reproduce via cones. If a cone finds purchase in warm, moist soil
it may germinate and root. A seedling
may grow two or three inches in its first year of life. However, in well-established forests such as
Muir Woods, burl sprouting accounts for most reproduction of the redwoods. A burl (pictured below) is a mass of dormant buds that grows at the
base, roots, or sides of the tree. When
the tree is injured or the burl is affected, the burl may sprout which gives
the redwoods great competitive advantage over other trees that reproduce by
seeds only.
Another fun fact about redwoods is that they occasionally
grow in family circles. This process
that takes hundreds of years. When a redwood is fatally damaged, it will send
up hundreds of burl sprouts. Over time,
only a handful of them will reach maturity.
These mature surviving trees often take root in a circle around the old,
dying tree, forming “family circles.”
Muir Woods is a specialized forest environment that provides
the habitat for a range of flora and fauna adapted to low light and moist
conditions. Such undergrowth includes
redwood sorrel (pictured to the left), sword ferns, and mosses. Bay laurels and big-leaf maples find purchase
in rare patches of sunlight. Douglas
firs are interspersed among these other trees.
The animals of the forest include deer, spotted owls, bats, raccoons,
warblers, kinglets, thrushes, garter snakes, rubber boas, and California giant
salamanders. The most common are
Steller’s jays, Sonoma chipmucks, gray squirrels, and slimy bright banana slugs
(in the rainy season).
Though we were there on a dry day and did not get to see any
banana slugs, the woods were simply amazing.
We had spent a hot day in San Francisco the previous day and were
shocked to find that the woods were downright cold and very wet. We thoroughly enjoyed our two mile walk
through the woods, and I highly recommend it to nature enthusiasts young and
old alike!