Ghosts ride the wind off California’s Cape Mendocino: Sir Francis Drake rounding the globe, explorers Francis Vizcaino and George Vancouver, the German geographer Baron Alexander von Humboldt. If you squint into the setting sun, you may spot on the horizon the sails of the Manila galleon bearing its rich cargoes - silks, satins, and spices - to the New World.
 There’s magic everywhere in Humboldt County: antique redwoods that punch holes in the heavens, prehistoric-looking fronds in Fern Canyon, rivers that skip through shadows of Douglas fir and Sitka spruce.
 Human hands lie lightly on the land. The county holds fewer of the species homo sapiens than of Sequoia sempervirens or sword ferns.
 Hoary antiquity first announces itself in Richardson Grove, a 1,000-acre park on the Eel River devoted to day use: picnicking, swimming, fishing, nature trails, summer campfire programs, and visitor center. It’s an especially comfortable park for families.
Usually, I hasten a couple of bends north to check into Benbow Inn, where I will spend two or three nights “inviting my soul,” as Emerson wrote: poking along back roads, ambling at the feet of redwood giants John Steinbeck called “ambassadors from another time,” and hanging out of an evening in the lounge where Matthew Cook makes the piano sing.  One of the wonders of earth awaits just north of Garberville: Humboldt Redwoods State Park, the biggest and the most accessible of the Redwood Country parks. (Some of its soaring giants sprouted while Roman Emperor Claudius was busying himself conquering Great Britain.) 
 The parkway called Scenic Route 254, the Avenue of the Giants, veers east off Highway 101, taking drivers from the traffic of the near-21st century into the dim, green hush of prehistory. It’s a 31-mile portion of old Highway 101 and parallels the freeway, banked by 51,222 acres of redwood groves.
With a full day at my disposal, I have prowled through these forests at the pace of a truffle-snuffling pig, searching out Chimney Tree, Shrine Drive-Thru Tree, Eternal Tree (a 3,500-year-old stump some 70 feet around), and Immortal Tree. Years ago I found a wacky, wonderful site near Phillipsville, Hobbiton U.S.A., the special world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. A 30-minute stroll led through forests and along a creek where Bilbo Baggins lived. I understand this whimsy is being reborn. Watch for it.
Founders Grove Nature Trail, a short, level amble where days are permanent twilight, begins at the foot of magnificent Founders Tree, 40 feet in circumference and 346 feet tall. It’s a youthful over-achiever, only 1,300 to 1,500 years old. (Self-guiding brochures are available here.)
Farther along lies the Dyerville Giant that scraped the sky when I first stood amazed before it: 200 feet higher than Niagara Falls and estimated to weigh more than a million pounds. It was hammered into soggy earth by a vicious storm in March, 1991. The monstrous, upturned root system inspires a pagan awe. Perhaps there were Druids here; perhaps there still are.
From Founders Grove the road leads to the west of 101 into Rockefeller Forest, which may be the finest stand of trees on the globe. It seems sacrilegious to speak aloud as you stroll the path to Giant Tree, Tall Tree (359 feet), and Flatiron Tree.
Another day, another wonderment. If you thought little, dusty, silent, western towns had gone away with the Silent Screen, seek out Harris, Alderpoint, and Blocksburg, where a small dog sits in the center of the street in front of the Post Office (closed), daring your car to pass. Cows munch, oblivious to your passage; an occasional horse looks up, surprised. 
The place to picnic back here in the woods is Grizzly Creek State Park, a pretty, primitive place along the Van Duzen River, once a rest stop for stagecoaches and cattle drives and home of the Wiyot Indians. When last a friend and I lifted a glass there, a stranger nodded approvingly. “I can imagine people who wouldn’t like it here,”he grinned. “But I wouldn’t like them much.”
On a warm autumn day, so clear you can see into a fourth dimension, sweep north of Benbow on 101, take the road to the Victorian Village of Ferndale, prettiest little cow town in Northern California. Some wanderers choose to settle down here for a couple of days (at the Gingerbread Mansion, say). Others content themselves with easing by car or foot on Main and Ocean Streets, admiring houses that have stepped out of the 19th century in styles Italianate, Roman-Renaissance, Carpenter Gothic, Gothic Revival, Queen Anne, Eastlake, and Stick.
Take time to ogle the eccentricities in Hobart’s Galleries. (It was Hobart Brown who fathered the local madness known as the Great Arcata-to-Ferndale Cross-Country Kinetic Sculpture Race, staged annually on Memorial Day weekend.)
Even seasoned California travelers may not take time to idle along Mattole Road as it meanders southwest from Ferndale toward Cape Mendocino, passes through skimpy Petrolia (where Gov. Leland Stanford struck oil in 1865) and even tinier Honeydew (the postoffice is inside the general store).
Mattole Road runs almost into the sea at Cape Mendocino, the most westerly point of the contiguous 48 states, named for Don Antonio de Mendoza, a 16th-century viceroy of New Spain. It acted as landmark for the aforementioned Manila galleon that plied the wild sea lanes from Asia across the Pacific and down the coast to Acapulco and New Spain. The annual Manila-to-Mexico crossing was “the longest and most dreadful of any in the world,”consuming eight months. Between 1565 and 1815, 30 treasure ships were lost on the crossing, many pounded into pieces on the innocent-looking rocks just offshore.
The sinuous road continues inland and eastward back into Rockefeller Forest and Highway 101, from which it’s a speedy stretch 
to Benbow or north to Eureka.
On a lazy day, it is often enough to motor slowly to the Lost Coast.Much of this little-known land is officially the King Range National Conservation Area, a riot of peaks, valleys, and shoreline barely scratched by logging roads. Through Redway and Briceland, you twist, turn, climb and descend into Shelter Cove, where your way deadends.
The thing to do is to take a little something (outdoors or in) at Mario’s on its bluff perch above the cove. Fishing boats bob below, birds float on eddies of air above, and all’s right with the world.
Next month: Christmas in the north country.