Central Valley Grassland and the Carrizo Plain

In April 2017 we were on our way to Carrizo Plain National Monument, and we stayed a night in Taft at a relatively new Best Western with toilets that were too full and lights that were excessively bright. Views of the starry sky would have to wait for a camping trip at another time. The view of Buena Vista Lake full of water was very gratifying, however.

It is so nice to see terminal lakes filling up. Our watersheds are so heavily developed that the only water that makes it past our dams usually is that which is required by law. But in a year like 2017 there is too much to take, and terminal lakes on both sides of the Sierra start filling up: the Walker River flows to Walker Lake, the Owens River flows to Owens Lake, the Kern River flows to Buena Vista Lake, the Kings River flows to Tulare Lake. Just to name a few. What was once typical is now extraordinary.

I first saw the Carrizo Plain in March 1993 from the top of Caliente Ridge. A dayhike from Cuyama Valley to the highest mountain in San Luis Obispo County was exhausting (30 miles) but revealing--I looked down to the north on a valley filled with colors. Vast blooms of yellow, orange, and purple flowers filled the San Andreas Rift Zone in that wet year following record drought.

I wrote the following essay and published it on my former Website between 2001 and 2005. I reprint it here in my "Best of" category.

There's something about a grassland. The sound of the wind in the grass, the wide open horizons, the spring wildflowers, and one of the most beautiful songs in the world: Western Meadowlarks. The Carrizo Plain is my other favorite place in the world, for these reasons primarily. It sits in a high valley between the Temblor Range and where the Transverse Ranges transition to the Coast Ranges, out of the way of modern "progress," more accurately modern destruction (although it used to have more farms, since abandoned). Since it hasn't been destroyed, but most of the Great Central Valley has, it is the best example of what the Central Valley uplands probably used to be like. Also, not a coincidence, it harbors one of the greatest concentrations of endangered species in California. I think I saw a California Condor there once, and I definitely saw San Joaquin Kit Foxes.

Soda Lake sits in the lowest spot in the valley, swelling with the winter rains and shrinking with the summer heat. Lesser Sandhill Cranes overwinter here, venturing during the day to grain fields near and far. During 1998 it didn't dry up, the first time in a long time according to one long-time local. During the spring of 1995 the abundant rainfall engorged it enough to make it the largest lake in San Luis Obispo County--for a couple of months.

The first time I laid my eyes on the Carrizo Plain was in March of 1993, on a dayhike up Caliente Mountain from the Cuyama Valley. As I hiked along the ridge, I looked north and saw beautiful carpets of wildflowers coloring the valley floor impossible blues and oranges amidst the green grass. It was a magical moment, and a glimpse at what we've lost in California's Great Central Valley.
John Muir, impressed by the grasslands of the Central Valley and Coast Ranges when he first crossed them, even after almost 100 years of colonial degradation, wrote:

"The last of the Coast Range foothills were in near view all the way to Gilroy. Their union with the valley is by curves and slopes of inimitable beauty. They were robed with the greenest grass and richest light I ever beheld, and were coloured and shaded with myriads of flowers of every hue, chiefly of purple and golden yellow. Hundreds of crystal rills joined song with the larks, filling all the valley with music like a sea, making it Eden from end to end.
...When at last, stricken and faint like a crushed insect, you hope to escape from all the terrible grandeur of these mountain powers, other fountains, other oceans break forth before you; for there, in clear view, over heaps and rows of foothills, is laid a grand, smooth, outspread plain, watered by a river, and another range of peaky, snow-capped mountains a hundred miles in the distance. That plain is the valley of the San Joaquin, and those mountains are the great Sierra Nevada. The valley of the San Joaquin is the floweriest piece of world I ever walked, one vast, level, even flower-bed, a sheet of flowers, a smooth sea, ruffled a little in the middle by the tree fringing of the river and of smaller cross-streams here and there, from the mountains.
Florida is indeed a 'land of flowers,' but for every flower creature that dwells in its most delightsome places more than a hundred are living here. Here, here is Florida! Here they are not sprinkled apart with grass between as on our prairies, but grasses are sprinkled among the flowers; not as in Cuba, flowers piled upon flowers, heaped and gathered into deep, glowing masses, but side by side, flower to flower, petal to petal, touching but not entwined, branches weaving past and past each other, yet free and separate--one smooth garment, mosses next the ground, grasses above, petalled flowers between."

A year later, in 1869, he observed:

"In the great Central Valley of California there are only two seasons--spring and summer. The spring begins with the first rain-storm, which usually falls in November. In a few months the wonderful flowery vegetation is in full bloom and by the end of May it is dead and dry and crisp, as if every plant had been roasted in an oven."

In 1844, John C. Fremont led an expedition through the Great Valley:

"On the third day out, they approached the wide and deep San Joaquin River. They noticed that the soil was not the same as that of the Sacramento Valley. It was much more sandy, and there was not as much vegetation. This sparseness did not include the whole San Joaquin Valley. They entered a region where flowering lupine gave the ground a bright blue color as though some frantic artist had smeared the earth with a giant brush. Beyond the thickets of lupine--some standing as much as twelve feet high--past the sweet aroma of the spiked flowers, there were great stands of live oaks. Then the color of the landscape changed to a rich orange as the men rode through acre after acre of California poppies.
Flowers and oaks were only part of the wild beauty of this valley. There were vast herds of wild horses and cattle, tule elk, pronghorn antelopes, and blacktail deer. Overhead there were flights of ducks and geese that passed like small storm clouds and momentarily shut out the sunlight. Instead of lightning and thunder, the waterfowl squawked, honked, and made a drumlike sound as thousands of flapping wings beat steadily against the wind.
...Wolf packs also roamed the southern part of the San Joaquin Valley. Along with the coyotes, these predators were always on the hunt for sick, weak, or young animals in the great herds of the grasslands. To Fremont and his men, the whole valley was almost unbelievable. ..." (quoted from Ferol Egan, 1985, Fremont: Explorer for a Restless Nation)

Almost all of this grandeur is now gone, replaced with sterile mechanized unsustainable intensive agribusiness. Unfortunately, cities are also expanding, and hope for restoration of this part of our heritage seems dim. In the works are things that give me hope though, and as long as our environmental laws are enforced more and more and good people try to do the right thing, I believe that someday the ecosystem of California's Central Valley will be healthier--and hopefully have a hint of wildness that is essential to maintaining both ecosystem function and human spirit. Until then, I will visit the Carrizo Plain to engorge my life with a taste of the richness John Muir so poetically described.
The Carrizo Plain Natural Area is now one of Clinton's new National Monuments. My only requests are: don't pave anything that isn't already paved; and don't take any actions that would preclude restoring the entire assemblage of native plants and animals to the area. In fact, spend any additional money special designations bring ONLY on eliminating non-native species, reintroducing fire, and restoration and resource protection. 

In 2017, the perfect storm of a wet year bloom following drought, National Monument status, and social media attention brought crowds on Easter Weekend larger than I had ever seen. 

I was curious to see how the conditions compared to previous years. Even though the winter rainfall wasn't even close to setting a record, and most roads were dry and passable, and Soda Lake was still relatively low due to low groundwater levels from the drought, the bloom was equal to if not superior to previous wet year blooms I had witnessed.

The most striking changes since my last visit about ten years ago, aside from the visitation, were outside the Monument. New solar photovoltaic power plants covered California Valley just to the north. The scale of the change was astounding and worrisome--remote grassland gobbled up by utility-scale renewable energy projects while degraded land, highway medians, rooftops, and other more suitable areas closer to the electricity demands were left uncovered. The energy industry has long been the biggest threat to the area. And on Hwy 58 near La Panza the scale of dead oak trees due to the drought was jarring. And due to over grazing along the seasonal streams, riparian vegetation was almost absent. My heart leaped every time a broadleaf tree with bright green foliage infrequently came into view.

Also somewhat disorienting: Cuesta Grade on Hwy 101 north of San Luis Obispo is now a six-lane highway.

Signs of progress--in the wrong direction.

I took the photos on this page in the late 1990s. Click here for more photos of the Carrizo Plain that I took in 2006 and 2017.