I went to Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve. It’s about 2 hours from SF. I stopped at Della Fattoria Downtown Café for breakfast. It’s a beautiful cafe. The vibe is fun and the coffee is out of the world. I haven’t seen such beautiful latte art. Don’t know how can one make it. I have taken a class and it’s incredible hard to even get the most basic shape right. I love flat whites and I am always on the look out for a good one. Will say, this one is so spectacular it would put SF to shame. Here’s a photo.
Here are some notes from that day.
I’m sitting on this burnt redwood log. It’s immense. My feet are dangling three feet from the ground. My shoe soles have charcoal on it. It’s quiet and tranquil in here. I hear birds, a plane, some voices and car tires and bugs.
The ground is full of foliage from the trees that you can barely see the mud. It keeps on falling like rain. For a few seconds, there’s complete silence without the human voices. Then you hear wind rustling the branches, mosquito buzzing around my ear, the constant sound of falling foliage, birds at a distant and this hum coming from far away — my guess is those the cars on the highway.
The tree in front has burn marks that reaches a 100 feet and the one next to it has basically none. It’s so uneven. Did the fire choose its victims? They’re about the same size. There’s a fallen tree with burn marks all over it. When was this fire? Was it recent? Will these trees bear these scars till they die? The scar looks like paint. As if nature decided to paint one side black for contrast. Not all trees got the full wrath of the fire, some have tiny amounts of scarring, some scars are uneven. The trees are resilient, they didn’t bow to the inferno.
The oldest tree I saw was the Armstrong. The plaque said it’s 1400 years old. That’s 600 AD, when the world was much bigger. When this place was covered with bigger and older redwoods. When giants surrounded the Armstrong tree.
I feel peaceful right now. I don’t want to leave. I want to continue to exist this way.