After spending the morning on the foggy coastline of Van Damme State Park, we headed a few miles up US-1 to Russian Gulch State Park.

I’d read that there’s no parking at the trailhead, so we parked at the visitor center’s parking spots and walked ~0.5 mile on a gravel road through the campground… only to find a mostly-empty tiny parking lot at the trailhead haha. This was around 10AM on Friday morning in early September.

This was the first morning of our road trip trek, so we still weren’t very used to seeing banana slugs and were enamored by them.

The Fern Canyon & Waterfall loop is a meandering, relatively flat, 6 mile-ish trail through lots of tall trees and – duh – surrounded by ferns. Would I come here specifically to do this hike? Probably not. Was it a pretty cool way to slowly transition into being surrounded by mega trees for the next few days? Definitely.

For the first mile or so of the trail, there were a few people around – both biking and hiking – but the farther we went, the muddier it became and the more sparse they were.

Everything was so. incredibly. green. There was a constant misty haze in the air that kept everything moist in the thinnest sheen of water (including ourselves).

Isn’t the scale so crazy? Don’t mind us just casually standing inside of a gigantic hollow tree trunk…

The layer of moss on everything gave me serious Olympic-National-Park vibes. I don’t think I realized how similar the two areas would end up being.

My favorite burnt out tree trunk situation yet. How are you still standing?

And then the opportunistic trees that just place themselves on the stump of others…

And like I said before: baaaaanana slugs 🍌.

Then they started doing x-rated things so we walked away to give them some privacy haha.

There were so many clover! I swear, we hiked ~70 miles on this road trip and stared down at the forest floor the entire time looking for a four leaf. Between the two of us, isn’t it insane that we never found one?

Green and ferns and bridges and ferns and trees and snack break.

By this point, we’d been walking for about an hour and a half and now basically had the forest to ourselves.

I said before that I wouldn’t recommend coming here just to come here. And that’s because this area of California has so many cool things to do, that there’s no way I’d recommend spending six miles of steps here when there’s so much else. You know what I mean?

With that being said, the campground here is super cute and I’d totally stay there. And in that case, this would be the perfect hike to have in your back yard.

With that being said, it’s not like there’s not pay off to the trek. It has plenty of cute wooden bridges, aesthetic stairs, a million adorable wildflowers, and such a pretty waterfall.

The sound here was so relaxing, I wish I could bottle it up and bring it home with me.

The rainbow colors of redwood bark is so underappreciated.

By 1PM-ish, we (finally!) made it back to the car. We were staaaarving and so looking forward to stepping foot into our next stop, a tiny town we love so much: Fort Bragg, California.

Russian Gulch Fern Canyon & Waterfall loop via AllTrails:
https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/california/russian-gulch-fern-canyon-and-waterfall-trailloop

More about Russian Gulch State Park:
https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=432