Despite our fears about road closures, we left Richardson Grove and headed south on US-101. Recent fires have ravaged the counties where we are headed and we are not entirely sure we will be allowed to proceed south on this route.
101 along the Eel River in Humboldt County was beautiful with clear skies and no indication of any fire. Soon we passed out of the Eel River watershed and into the Russian River Valley in Mendocino County. We drove along miles of scorched terrain on the east side of 101, only occasionally seeing areas where fires jumped the road and both sides were scorched. At one particularly challenging section, we passed more than a mile where the guardrails had melted and the support posts had been incinerated down to skinny jagged sticks. The southbound right lane of the highway was closed because the surface was melted and broken into little jigsaw puzzle pieces.
After the burned area, we headed further downriver and broke out into smoky but undamaged country near Ukiah. The remainder of our drive was pretty uneventful and soon we got off 101 at Geysers Road and pulled into Thousand Trails Russian River. This campground is situated on the side of a hill and backing into many of the RV spaces can be challenging. Fortunately, due to the recent evacuation of this campground due to fire, there were plenty of good spaces available. We even got a pull-thru which is pretty rare around here. There is no wifi or sewer but we will be okay for a few days until we take off on what we expect to be a miserable trek through the San Francisco Bay area. There are no open parks north of the Golden Gate because they burned up in the last week. There are virtually no parks in the 75 miles south of the Golden Gate because the property values are too high. The next TT park south of us is in Morgan Hill and we understand it flooded recently and we won’t be staying there in the immediate future.
There are some photos of scorched stuff we saw if you click here