The living carpet beneath the redwoods — redwood sorrel, sword ferns, the banana slug, and the spotted owl overhead; the small life that makes the big trees possible.
We've spent all our time looking up. Now look down — because the floor of a redwood forest is its own little world, and it's easy to miss while you're craning your neck at the giants.
That low carpet of green clover with the three heart-shaped leaves is redwood sorrel, and it's built for the deep shade down here — so little sun reaches the floor that the sorrel will actually fold its leaves down flat within minutes if a bright shaft of light hits it, to keep from scorching. Those big, arching, shoulder-high ferns are sword ferns, and their ancestors were here with the dinosaurs. And keep an eye on the damp trail edges for the mascot of these woods: the banana slug, a slow, yellow, genuinely-the-size-of-a-banana slug that eats the fallen leaves and mushrooms and helps turn all this litter back into soil for the trees. He's doing the forest's cleanup, so let him be.
Up above, if you're lucky and quiet, this canopy shelters the northern spotted owl — a rare, dark-eyed owl that needs exactly this kind of old, tall, unbroken forest to survive, and can't live in the young woods that replace it. That owl is one more reason old growth like this is precious: cut the forest and you don't just lose the trees, you lose everyone who can only live among trees this old. Every layer here, from the slug at your feet to the owl in the crown, is holding up all the others. All right — eyes back up. Let's head for the top of the loop.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.5
