Ninety minutes inland the South Fork Eel runs clear and cold-looking over pale gravel, and then you get in and it’s eighty-five degrees. There are deep pools you can jump into, rope swings hanging over them, and gravel bars to lie on afterwards, and most days there’s nobody else up there at all. Driving up to the river on a hot day and swimming in it is one of the best things you can do with a summer in this part of the world, and it’s a proper holiday from the coast, which spends most of July at sixty degrees and socked in with fog.
On the way we’ll stop at Smithe Redwoods for Dora Falls, a sixty-foot drop about ten minutes off the road that most people drive straight past, with a beautiful old-growth grove behind it. Then Standish-Hickey, where there are two miles of river frontage and Chris picks the pool based on what the water’s been doing that week. Swimming, the rope swing, the gravel bar, and a packed lunch out on the bar in the middle of the day. In the afternoon you can move to a second pool or just stay exactly where you are, which is what most people do.
On the way home we’ll stop at the Chandelier Tree in Leggett, a living redwood with a hole cut clean through the trunk that people have been driving cars through since the 1930s. Our van is too wide, so we’ll park and walk it, but you’ll want the photograph.
