Arcata Community Forest Walks

Arcata, CA has a Community Forest with trails for hiking, bicycling and horseback riding.

Our house rental was just off of California Avenue so most of the time we parked at the end of that road to access the forest.  Once we went in at the 14th Street trailhead.  We didn't walk on the trails further away from the trailhead.  We downloaded an app that showed us the trails and our location on them. 

 

This is the single track portion of the #10 trail.  It went down to creek level then back up.

This tree had fallen over the trail but it might have fallen before the trail was even built.

as the other trees had grown around it.

It also rested on this stump.

You can see the end of the tree on the top left of this photo.

End of fallen tree

Don't know what caused this trees wrinkled trunk

This tree had fallen but it must have remained rooted because the branches grew straight up.

We tried but we never found a four leaf clover.

We don't know what this ground cover was called.

Even though it looked dry in places, the slugs were still out.

Should we be expecting some little slugs soon?

This trail marker almost needed a haircut.



Twisted tree.

Someone had put pink ribbon around these two tree roots so they were more visible.

Looks like an old stump was fertile ground for two trees to grow up around it.  The rectangular holes were put there by the loggers that harvested the tree years ago before chain saws.  They would carve out these holes then stick in planks they called springboards.  They would then lay other planks over the springboards to create a platform which they stood on while sawing on the tree.

We called this stump at the start of the trail "Smirk" as the two springboard holes looked like eyes.

This hollow stump looked like a fortress.

JoAnn by a stump just so you can see the size of it.



Looks like someone created a home in this stump.



This is the only tree we saw that had saw marks on it.



Stump grotto at Redwood Park.