Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

North Coast Roadtrip travelog #2
Garberville · Fri, 25 Jul 2025, 10pm

In my previous blog I wrote about our Friday Night Halfway trip to the tiny town of Garberville. I pushed out thats blog as quickly as possible this evening after arriving in Garberville and settling in to the hotel because I wasn't sure how much time I'd have for more. Well, there's a whole lot of nothing to do in this town on a Friday night, so here comes part 2. I'm calling this Postcards From Garberville.



The drive up US 101 this evening was pleasant once we got out of the San Francisco area. Once past the 8- to 10-lane stretches of superhighway— and the loss of lanes in the Novato Narrows as my friend Dave says it's called— 101 is a really pretty road. The photo above comes from somewhere above wine country in Mendocino County. Yeah, the road is narrowing there, too. It's one of the few places in far northern California where 101 isn't a 4-lane highway.

Of course that spot, climbing through the golden hills, isn't the narrowest....



In a few spots in Humboldt County US-101 narrows considerably as it winds through groves of redwood trees. Yes, there are redwood parks up here, including Redwood National Park, but you don't even have to go into a park to see these magnificent trees. They're right on the road. You have to slow down and steer not to hit them.



We pulled off Highway 101 into Garberville just before sunset Friday evening. You can actually see most of the town in this photo if you squint. 😅 That's our motel with the "MOTEL" sign just down the hill.



In a town this small you don't expect your motel to be the Waldorf Astoria... or even the Hampton Inn. We stayed at a no-name motel that was strictly basic accommodations. A bed, a roof, a shower... and, since it's not 2005 anymore, a mini fridge, a microwave, and wifi. This room ran us about $100. That's kind of the ante nowadays for basic accommodations. We could've stayed at the Best Western Plus down the street, with a pool and a hot tub, for $200+.

Speaking of the mini fridge, I'd packed some drinks and breakfast food from home in a cooler bag to store in the room. I brought a bottle of beer to enjoy this evening... but just one bottle. One was all I had cold in my mega fridge at home, and I didn't feel like going down to the cellar to pull up more. 😅 No problem, I figured; I could check one of the stores nearby in town and buy more beer.



At a gas station convenience store down the hill I was all set to buy a six-pack from a north coast microbrew I rarely see carried in stores around home. Then I noticed something I've never seen before, in any store. Red Tail Ale.

Once upon a time Red Tail Ale was my favorite beer, hands down. I discovered it when I moved to Calfiornia back in the 1990s. Then around 2010 or so the brewery, Mendocino Brewing Company, was acquired by a Japanese conglomerate that started fiddling with the recipe and ruined it. The company folded up in 2018.

No, these aren't 7 year old cans of beer from before the company dissolved. They're also not 15 year old cans from before the foreign buyer fucked it up. They're a new beer, made by a new local brewery, that found the original recipe for Red Tail Ale and got access to the name and beautiful artwork. You know I had to give it a try!



Back at our motel room, there wasn't much of a place for me to enjoy my beer. Just two chairs around a small table under the TV. So I did like I noticed several of our neighbors doing.... I dragged a chair out to the breezeway and set up on a railing overlooking the parking lot. It seemed like such a trailer park thing when I first saw it— and yes, there's a trailer park across the street, complete with crying kids walking around in diapers and yapping dogs—but then I figured, "When in Rome...."

And yes, the Red Tail Ale is good. It reminds me of the beer I fell in love with twenty-some years ago. Is it just as good as the original? I'm not sure. It's hard to compare to something from that long ago. But now I know to start looking for this in stores near home.

My blog about our hike Sunday at Russian Ridge Open Space unexpectedly grew large— just like the hike itself more than doubled in length based on choices we made on the fly— so I've split it into a second blog entry.

I left off in part 1 of our hike at Russian Ridge with us angling up a wide-open hillside just beneath the ridge. After climbing gradually for a while with 180° views across the mountains to the Pacific Ocean (not that we could see the water, it being totally socked in with thick fog) the trail dipped under tree cover and began descending.



Hey, look, fall foliage! Is it time to stop and smell the roses? ...No, wait, that's poison oak! 😰

Shortly after this photo op we reached the next trail junction. This is where I thought we'd loop back up to the ridge and then back to the trailhead, making a nice little hike of just over 2 miles for the day.

"How about we go further, to the Hawk Trail?" Hawk suggested.

It would not only more than double our mileage but add at several hundred additional feet of ascent. The weather was nice and we were enjoying it, so I agreed.

We even saw an actual hawk on the Hawk trail. 😂



Usually when we hike the Hawk Trail at Russian Ridge we loop around so that we're hiking down it. Sunday we went up. It's steep! Going up it makes it a different kind of challenge. Going down it's all ankles and trying not to slip on the dry, dusty surface. Going up it's all cardio and muscle tone.

Finally we got up to the top. ...Not that the top is even the top!



From atop the Hawk Trail there's still plenty more hiking, including another few hundred feet of ascent. On the whole day we hiked over 5 miles, more than we estimated even when we made the choice to extend our hike. By the time we were done we were tired and sore. But it was a good kind of tired and sore! It's been too many weeks— six of them, now— since we got out like this. Hopefully we won't wait another 6 before doing something like this again.

North Las Vegas Travelog #15
Desert National Wildlife Refuge - Mon, 19 Feb 2023, 1pm

After our morning scenic drive beneath Mt. Charleston (previous blog in this series) we ate a quick lunch in the northeastern corner of Las Vegas then drove back out to the Desert National Wildlife Refuge (DNWR). At the visitor's center they had a nice display about Bighorn Sheep.



The Sheep Range is the principal mountain inside the park, so would we see any bighorns? Alas, no. They're generally reclusive animals, and the high desert is a tough environment that doesn't encourage them to take extra risks. We've seen them up close in other places, though, so we'd have to satisfy ourselves with that plus the fact that they'd like be watching us from well hidden positions.

While we scoped out DNWR for today's adventures thinking we might go hiking, it turned out that the hiking was lame, so we switched to Plan B— actually Plan C, as taking that scenic drive below Mt. Charleston was already Plan B— and chose to drive the Mormon Well 4x4 road through the park.



Mormon Well Road is 41 miles of gravel and dirt road between paved endpoints. Would we make it in our rented Toyota Rav4 AWD cute-ute? The rangers at the visitor's center thought the road was in fairly good condition, but I could tell from their wording and body language that they really didn't know. I chose to trust in my skills at offroad driving that I could get through more challenges than most people and also know when to turn back if necessary.

The first many miles of the road, at least, were easy going. We started with a few miles of climbing up to Yucca Gap at elev. 4,000 ft. The road surface, as you can see in the pic above, was graded gravel.



The exposed rock in Yucca Gap features a lot of fossils. We drove down a short side trail and parked the car while Hawk went exploring on the rocks.

We're a little worried about time on this trip so we didn't stay too long. The time issue is that we've got to get back to Las Vegas for a flight this evening. To do that we need to be off this trail by 5pm. To be done at 5pm we have to... well, that depends on how long it takes to drive 41 miles. 41 miles offroad is not like driving 41 miles on pavement. Here we're doing well if we're averaging above 10mph. And that's not counting time we want for stops like this one.



Our next (brief) stop was in a Joshua Tree forest. This pic doesn't look very forest-y, does it? That's because we're in high desert, at 5,000 ft. elevation. There's not a lot of water here. These Joshua Trees— yucca brevifolia, also called Yucca Trees— are hardy, but this is the best even they can manage in this austere environment.

The adventure continues! Read about our drive through Peekaboo Canyon.

We made our hike last Sunday a twofer. Not only did we hike through Corte de Madera Open Space to the Tafoni Monolith (aka SKULL ROCK); after that we visited the Methusela Tree. It was right next to where we parked, so in that sense us parking at the "wrong" parking lot to hike to Sku— I mean,Tafoni— wasn't really wrong.



Methusela is a reference to the biblical character Methuselah, in the Book of Genesis, who lived 969 years. (The name is spelled various ways in English because it's translated from a language with a different alphabet. In Hebrew it's מְתוּשֶׁלַח.) This particular tree has lived almost twice as long as that patriarch, an estimated 1,860 years.

This tree is a California Redwood. While 1,860 years is very old for this type of tree— really for any living thing— it's not like the Bristlecone Pine. A grove of Bristlecone Pine on Wheeler Peak in the Great Basin desert are 3,000+ years old. A grove in the White Mountains of California has Bristlecone Pine trees over 5,000 years old. Even other redwoods, especially the Sequoia Redwood (different species from California, aka Coastal, Redwood) can live to 3,500 years old.

While Methusela here isn't the oldest tree, she's the oldest in the area. Most other redwoods around here are thought to be only several hundred years old. And because this tree is a redwood it's big. She topped out at 225' tall before a storm in 1954— a few month ago, in her life span— damaged her top, and it broke off. The base, where you see us standing in the pic, is 14' diameter.