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Redwood National Park

Redwood national park

American Indians

The native people of the North Coast region have made the redwood forests and associated ecosystems their home for thousands of years. These American Indians spoke many different languages and held numerous and distinct identities. Today, the descendants of these people continue to live on and off reservations in the redwood region.

Prior to Euro-American contact, American Indians had adapted well to this environment. Their profound religious beliefs, extensive knowledge of the natural world, languages, customs, and perseverance continue to be a source of admiration for other cultures.

American Indians in the region belonged to many tribes, although no one tribe dominated. Indeed, the concept of "tribe" does not describe very well the traditional political complexity of the area. There were scores of villages that dotted the coast and lined the major rivers; each of these villages was more or less politically independent, yet linked to one another by intricate networks of economic, social, and religious ties.

Food sources important to the native peoples included deer, elk, fish from the ocean, rivers, and streams, nuts, berries, and seeds. Efficient and reliable hunting, fishing, and gathering methods were always paired with a deep spiritual awareness of nature's balance.

American Indian plankhouse

Redwood plankhouse

Traditional homes of the region's American Indians usually were constructed of planks split from fallen redwoods. These houses were built over pits dug beneath the building, with the space between the pit and the walls forming a natural bench. A house was understood to be a living being. The redwood that formed its planks was itself the body of one of the Spirit Beings. Spirit Beings were believed to be a divine race who existed before humans in the redwood region and who taught people the proper way to live here.

Once gold was discovered along northwestern California’s Trinity River in 1850, outsiders moved into the area in overwhelming numbers. The initial contact with native peoples was gruesome.

The newcomers pushed the American Indians off their land, hunted them down, scorned, raped, and enslaved them. Resistance – and many of the American Indians did resist – was often met with massacres. Militia units composed of unemployed miners and homesteaders set forth to rid the countryside of "hostile" Indians, attacking villages and, in many documented cases, slaughtering men, women, and even infants. Upon their return, these killers were treated as heroes, and paid by the state government for their work.

Treaties that normally allotted American Indians reservations were never ratified in this part of California. Although treaties were signed, the California delegation lobbied against them on the grounds that they left too much land in Indian hands. Reservations were thus never established by treaty, but rather by administrative decree.

To this day, the displacement of many tribes, the lack of treaty guarantees, and the absence of federal recognition of their sovereignty continue to cloud the legal rights of many American Indians.

American Indians Today

Over the passage of time, some aspects of northwestern California Indian cultures began to merge. Many customs, beliefs, and ceremonies grew similar, but the languages have remained distinct. Four of them – Tolowa, Yurok, Hupa, and Karuk – are still living languages, spoken yet by a handful of cherished elders. Encouragingly, in a revival that is now sweeping the entire area, these languages are once again being learned by members of the younger generation.

Despite the dreadful history of the past 150 years, the American Indian community of northwestern California has persisted. It has, in fact, done more than persist. Whether in politics, art, religion, or any other area of life, the community exhibits great variety and astounding vigor.

There is currently no one in the area who is living the way American Indians did prior to 1850, any more than there is a member of the dominant culture who is living the life of a mid-nieteenth century miner, farmer, or merchant. While some American Indians live on reservations, near or on the land of their ancestors, others live in local towns and cities. Culture is not a "museum" set in time and statically preserved. Living cultures need to grow, change, and adapt, and this has certainly been the case with American Indian culture.

Yet, while no one is living a strictly traditional life, few have wholeheartedly opted for an entirely "modern" lifestyle. Most people straddle an area between "mainstream" and their evolving American Indian culture. The people of northwestern California form a vital, changing community, whether Yurok, Hupa, Tolowa, or Karuk.

Yurok and Tolowa ancestral territories include land and resources now contained within RNSP. Today, the Yurok reservation runs from the mouth of the Klamath River 40 miles upstream, and the Tolowa have two rancherias in Del Norte County.

Logging

When Euro-Americans swept westward in the 1800s, they needed raw material for their homes and lives. Commercial logging followed the expansion of America as companies struggled to keep up with the furious pace of progress. Timber harvesting quickly became the top manufacturing industry in the west.

When gold was discovered in northwestern California in 1850, the rush was on. Thousands crowded the remote redwood region in search of riches and new lives. These people were no less dependent upon lumber, and the redwoods conveniently provided the wood the people needed. The size of the huge trees made them prized timber, as redwood became known for its durability and workability. By 1853, nine sawmills were at work in Eureka, a gold boom town established three years prior due to the gold boom. Large-scale logging was soon underway and the once immense stands of redwoods began to disappear by the close of the 19th century.

At first, axes, saws, and other early methods of bringing the trees down were used. But the loggers made use of rapidly improving technology in the 20th century that allowed more trees to be harvested in less time. Transportation also caught up to the task of moving the massive logs. The locomotive replaced horses and oxen. The era of railroad logging became the fastest way to transport the logs to mills.

Land fraud was common, as acres of prime redwood forests were transferred from the public domain to private industry. Although some of the perpetrators were caught, many thousands of acres of land were lost in land swindles.

By the 1910s, some concerned citizens began to clamor for the preservation of the dwindling stands of redwoods. The Save-the-Redwoods League was born out of this earnest group, and eventually the League succeeded in helping to establish the redwood preserves of Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park, and Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park.

But still logging continued in those parts of the forests that were privately owned, accelerated by WW II and the economic boom of the 1950s. By the 1960s, logging had consumed nearly 90 percent of all the original redwoods. It wasn’t until 1968 that Redwood National Park was established, which secured some of the few remaining stands of uncut redwoods. In 1978, Congress added more land that included logged-over portions of Redwood Creek. Today, these lands are undergoing large-scale restoration by the parks' resource managers. Logging continues on privately-held lands nearby and throughout the redwood region.

http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/redw/historyt.htm

History of Fire Trucks

History of Fire Trucks

The gargantuan vehicle with sirens and ladders and hoses that we see today is not how firefighters have always travelled. It is interesting to take a look into the history of their transportation and how firefighting has evolved along with the evolution of the fire truck. Here is a timeline of this history:

1700’s—the very early fire engines were in fact water pumps on wheels. They were intended to come to the aid of those days’ real firefighters, the so called “bucket brigades”. These were used back when British built pumps began being used to put out fires in Europe and the US as well.

Mid 1800’s—the introduction of the paid firefighters made room for horses to be largely put to use and pull the fire pumps. This improved the response time of the fire brigades, but still didn’t solve the firefighter transport issue. People literally ran to the fires and despite the fact that the pump was already there; they had some resting to do before getting to it.

1841—the first self-propelled, steam powered fire engine in the US came to be and it was built in New York. Strangely enough, it wasn’t immediately popular. Fire fighters considered such a propulsion solution dangerous and unreliable. It took tens of years before the steam powered fire engines really caught on.

1930’s—the ladder began being installed on the trucks, which was important due to the fact that sizes of buildings were increasing and the fire fighters were in need of a way to reach upper floors. These installations allowed firemen to reach heights of up to 150 feet.
1940’s—fire trucks received the aerial work platform, which is nothing more than a bucket attached to a bending arm installed on a fire truck. The so called “cherry pickers” allow fire fighters to position the mechanical arm into unreachable corners of any building.

1960’s—the modern day fire truck that we all know of today was introduced. The trucks now came with modern water pumps, ladders and “cherry pickers”. A very important development was the introduction of the enclosed seats for the crew.

http://www.abcofire.com/2012/04/history-fire-trucks/

Why Stop Signs are Red?

The Stop Sign Wasn’t Always Red
By HILARY GREENBAUM and DANA RUBINSTEIN

Published: December 9, 2011 23 Comments

In the early automobile age, American streets existed in a Hobbesian, drive-or-be-plastered state of anarchy. “Not only were the streets in those days completely disgusting and filthy, but there were horses and bicycles, and it was just completely chaotic,” says Joshua Schank, C.E.O. of the Eno Transportation Foundation, whose namesake and founder, William Phelps Eno, is widely credited with conceiving the stop sign at the turn of the 20th century.

Great Moments in Sign History

Over the years, street signs have populated both our roads and our pop culture.

At a time when there were no driver’s licenses, speed limits or clear lane demarcations, the notion of a stop sign was revolutionary. In fact, aside from the occasional road markers letting riders on horseback know how far they were from the next city, there was no road or street signage at all. Eno, scion of a wealthy New England family who never learned to drive, helped change all that. In a 1900 article titled “Reforming Our Street Traffic Urgently Needed,” for Rider and Driver magazine, he proposed placing stop signs at intersections. It was a civilizing notion.“That was a new concept and really did introduce the idea that you had to watch out for other people,” Schank says.

THE SIGN ENGINEERS

Eno became a key figure in a traffic-control awakening that would make great strides in the early 20th century. In 1911, a Michigan road got a center line. In 1915, Cleveland received an electric traffic signal. Detroit, the center of the automobile industry, is credited with installing the first proper stop sign that same year. According to Schank, it took the form of a 2-by-2-feet sheet of metal with black lettering on a white background.

We have the Mississippi Valley Association of State Highway Departments to thank for the stop sign’s iconic shape. In 1923, the association developed an influential set of recommendations about street-sign shapes whose impact is still felt today. The recommendations were based on a simple, albeit not exactly intuitive, idea: the more sides a sign has, the higher the danger level it invokes. By the engineers’ reckoning, the circle, which has an infinite number of sides, screamed danger and was recommended for railroad crossings. The octagon, with its eight sides, was used to denote the second-highest level. The diamond shape was for warning signs. And the rectangle and square shapes were used for informational signs. “You have to realize this was done by engineers, and engineers can be overly analytical,” says Gene Hawkins, a professor of civil engineering at Texas A&M University and the nation’s pre-eminent expert on the history of the stop sign.

BIG RED

It took a bit longer to determine the stop sign’s color. It wasn’t until 1935 that traffic engineers created the first uniform standards for the nation’s road signage, known as the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. It was 166 pages long and recommended a yellow stop sign with black letters. The 1954 revision, however, called for the stop sign to be red with white letters, in step with the color-coding system developed for the railroad and traffic signals. “Red has always been associated with stop,” Hawkins explains. “The problem was they could not produce a reflective material in red that would last. It just was not durable until companies came up with a product in the late ’40s, early ’50s.”

Today the stop sign is so ingrained in collective international driving culture that some experts are, counterintuitively, recommending doing away with it entirely. (Ejby, Denmark; Ipswich, England; and Ostend, Belgium, are already experimenting with a post-stop-sign world.) “The theory is that people will pay more attention to pedestrians and other vehicles and slow down in pedestrian areas if there are no signs, because they won’t know what to do,” Schank says. “That wouldn’t be possible if [Eno] hadn’t first introduced the stop sign.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 10, 2011
An online summary for this article incorrectly described the stop sign’s shape as hexagonal; it is an octagon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/magazine/stop-sign.html?_r=0

Redwood Tree facts

Discover Your Local Redwood Forests—Rare, Vital and at Risk
by Sempervirens Fund staff

No doubt, redwood trees are huge, and redwood forests are super-quiet and peaceful. But did you know...?

1. As old as the dinosaurs — almost
The earliest redwoods showed up on Earth shortly after the dinosaurs—and before flowers, birds, spiders... and, of course, humans. Redwoods have been around for about 240 million years, compared to about 200,000 years for “modern” humans.

2. See 2,000-year-old redwoods here
Officially, the oldest living coast redwood is at least 2,200 years old, but foresters believe some coast redwoods may be much older. You can meet up with old-growth redwoods at Big Basin Redwoods State Park on trails such as the Redwood Trail, the Berry Creek Falls loop and the Sunset-Timms-Skyline loop; at Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park's Redwood Grove Loop Trail and at Portola Redwoods State Park, where you'll see the third-largest grove of ancient redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains—as long as you're willing to take an 11-mile round-trip hike to get there!

3. Tallest tree on Earth
Your local coast redwood tree can grow to 300 feet or more—the tallest tree on Earth. Right now, there are about 50 redwood trees taller than 360 feet living along the Pacific Coast. Compare that to the tallest pine tree at 268 feet, the tallest tanoak at 162 feet or the tallest human at a mere 8 feet 3 inches. Yet their root system is only 6 to 12 feet deep. Redwoods create the strength to withstand powerful winds and floods by extending their roots more than 50 feet from the trunk and living in groves where their roots can intertwine. Redwoods are quite an armful to hug, too—8 to 20 feet in diameter.

4. Ancient old-growth – and aspiring youngsters
While there are 2,000-year-old redwoods in our neighborhood, most of the redwoods we see are much, much younger—about 50-150 years old. That’s equivalent to about age 2-6 in human years! That’s because since California’s Gold Rush (beginning in 1848), about 95% of the local redwood forest—which once stretched across the Santa Cruz Mountains—was logged to build (and rebuild) cities like San Francisco, San Jose and beyond. (Coast redwoods can grow 100 feet in their first 50 years, so they quickly look like grown-ups.) So, when you walk or ride through the Santa Cruz Mountains, remember you are in a nursery of young redwoods that, with protection and proper management, can live for 2,000 years and can help rebuild a healthy redwood forest for wildlife, people and countless generations to come.

5. Here and only here
Coast redwoods grow only one place on Earth—right here on the Pacific Coast, from Big Sur to southern Oregon. Earlier in the Earth’s history, redwoods had a much wider habitat, including western North America and along the coasts of Europe and Asia. Today, there are two other types of sequoia trees still living—both of them close relatives of our local coast redwood. The “giant sequoia” (officially sequoiadendron giganteum) grows only in California’s Sierra Nevada range and is actually shorter—but heftier—than our coast redwood. You can see them in places like Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon National Park. The “dawn redwood” (officially metasequoia glyptostroboides) grows only in a remote area of central China and is about one-third the height of our coast redwood.

6. Latin or English: Semper-who?
The familiar local redwood tree has an official Latin name, sequoia sempervirens. That fancy name (the last part means "always green") is why the local nonprofit organization working to protect, expand and care for the local redwood forests is called “Sempervirens Fund.” That’s not to be confused with the U.S. Marine Corp’s motto, “Semper Fidelis,” which means “always faithful.” Here on the ground, it’s fine to call these magnificent trees by their American name, “coast redwood” or simply redwood.

7. Climate change heroes
Trees are crucial to maintaining a stable, human-friendly climate. Studies show that coast redwoods capture more carbon dioxide (CO2) from our cars, trucks and power plants than any other tree on Earth. So, by protecting our local redwood forests, we make a major contribution toward stabilizing the global climate. If these redwood trees are overcut, burned or degraded, the climate is harmed two ways: (1) by losing the trees’ power to capture CO2, and (2) by releasing enormous amounts of stored carbon into the atmosphere. (Globally, deforestation and other destructive land use account for nearly 25% of CO2 emissions.) Keep in mind that as the climate changes, the redwood forests in the Santa Cruz Mountains are one of very few areas that can provide a refuge for plants and animals to survive, because the area has many microclimates, is cooled by coastal summertime fog and is still largely unpaved.

8. Wild animals thrive here
Wild, endangered creatures like mountain lions, coho salmon and marbled murrelet depend on the local redwood forests. They need large, contiguous areas of diverse habitat to survive, especially as the climate changes and they need to adapt quickly. Mountain lions often travel hundreds of miles in a week. Coho salmon depend on unblocked, free-flowing streams to spawn. The endangered marble murrelet, a sea bird, only nests in the tallest old-growth redwoods and old-growth Douglas fir trees. Right now, it’s crucial to protect and manage the areas between existing parklands to create migration corridors and provide larger chunks of safe, healthy habitat so that wild mammals, fish and birds can thrive among us humans.

9. Sturdy survivors
Redwoods live so long—and are treasured by humans for building—because they are extremely resistant to insects, fire and rot. At one time, San Francisco’s building codes required redwood lumber to be used in the foundations of new structures. A redwood’s bark can be 1 foot thick, and it contains tannin, which protects the tree from fire, insects, fungus and diseases. There is no known insect that can destroy a redwood tree. Fire is not a big threat because the trunk is thick, there’s lots of water inside the tree, and the bark doesn’t have flammable resin like a pine tree does.

10. We can all help the forest recover — and help us thrive
Today, we have a rare chance to reassemble the once-vast and vibrant local redwood forest into a magnificent, self-regenerating ecosystem between Silicon Valley and the Pacific Ocean. Once we put the pieces of forest back into a whole, connected landscape, the natural systems can re-assert themselves and the forest can recover from the massive logging and fragmentation that took place during the last 150 years. Imagine a gorgeous, thriving redwood forest connecting Silicon Valley to the Pacific Ocean and supporting thick populations of wild animals, plants and human possibilities! With a little help from us to get started, the forest will take care of itself—and us—for hundreds and thousands of years to come. You can help Sempervirens Fund buy redwood lands, keep local parks open and enable private landowners to set aside their land as protected forest while it stays in private hands.

http://santacruz.hilltromper.com/article/ten-amazing-facts-about-redwoods

Red Mountains

Red Mountain is a set of three peaks in the San Juan Mountains of western Colorado in the United States, about 5 miles south of Ouray. The mountains get their name from the reddish iron ore rocks that cover the surface. Several other peaks in the San Juan Mountains likewise have prominent reddish coloration from iron ore and are also called "Red Mountain".

Nearby Red Mountain Pass is named after Red Mountain, and the ghost town mining camp of Red Mountain Town is located at the foot of the Red Mountains.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Mountain_(Ouray_County,_Colorado)

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Redwood National Park

History of Fire Trucks

Why Stop Signs are Red?

Redwood Tree facts

Red Mountains