Willits, California.

In 2021, on our journey along the west coast, out of San Francisco, we headed up California Highway 1 through Mendocino County toward Fort Bragg. Our goal was to see those mighty redwood forests. A right turn on California Highway 20 just south of Fort Bragg was our next goal. This east-west highway ends at Willits where we picked up U.S. Highway 101 and headed north to see more of those northern California redwood forests.

Highway 20 winds through the Jackson Demonstration State Forest for views of redwoods aplenty. Also along the way, you’ll cross the South Fork of the Noyo River and at the eastern regions of the state forest, there are plenty of campgrounds to choose from if you’d like to sleep under those giant redwood canopies. After a beautiful drive of about 60 minutes, we stopped at Willits where we noticed signs referencing the Skunk Train. We stopped at the depot to check it out. Of course, we rode the Skunk Train (featured in my upcoming Travel Tuesday post on April 11).

About the photo: On our September travels, my usual place in the vehicle is behind the driver in the slightly elevated back seat. It’s a great place to capture photos while moving, but you must set the shutter speed high enough to keep the foreground from blurring. With my Samsung S20U, that means shifting to Pro mode so I can adjust the shutter speed and the other manual photo controls. I set the shutter to 1/1500 and let the camera determine and adjust the f/stop to 1.8 and ISO 320. Luminar Neo’s Noiseless extension cleaned up the image noise nicely. From there, I applied my usual small collection of tweaks and sent it back to Lightroom for final adjustments.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone or even a dashcam, that’s acceptable as well. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment. Oh, and, you don’t have to post it on a Sunday.

John Steiner