Coos Bay, Redwood Forest

 September 21-22
Our friend from Yellowstone, Tim, lived in Coos Bay for years and entertained us with his descriptions of the place.  So that was on our list of need-to-visit.  Wow, what a neat area.  At Coos Bay State Park, there is a wonderful trail that skirts the cliffs overlooking the rocks and surf of the Pacific Ocean.
We saw seals sunbathing and playing in the water. 

While watching the seals, I heard what I thought was a blow from a whale and sure enough, there was the whale!  Click on it to enlarge it.  We saw it much better than this but the eye-to-hand co-ordination didn't work that well.








We heard the barking way before we saw these piles of male sea lions.

Just piles and piles on a number of rocks.  Just barking away.  We come out early the next morning (7 AM) and they were still barking.

Alas, the campground was full of smoke.  It was in a low spot and our site was near the bottom.  I had a terrible headache and sounded like a frog so after one night and half a morning, we made the tough call of leaving.  Tim had told us that we could skip lots of the views on our way south but we had to cut over to the Pacific at Coos Bay and follow 101.

What a road!  What views of the Pacific.  Here are a few of our photos.

We left the Pacific coast drive and headed toward the Redwood forest.

The trees were not as wide as in Olympic but were taller as a group.  We decided to spend the night in the Redwoods at Elk Prairie State Park.  When checking in, I spyed a bike path to the ocean.  I easily talked Lew into a bike ride.  We left around 4:30 PM and what a bike trip it was.  We couldn't take any photos because it was soooo dark and spooky.  I kept expecting a bear or mountain lion to leap out of the woods!  It was nearly out of the world in scary bike rides.  The trail we wanted was under construction near the Pacific so we didn't make it out of the deep woods.  But I can say we biked through OLD trees that reminded me of lions and tigers and bears OH MY!