We were on Road Z. At one point, the road’s pavement just ended and turned into gravel. There were no other cars around for [...]]]> Elizabeth and I drove through the Central Valley on our way to the Klamath Mountains today. The farmland was so flat, the roads were perfectly straight and named after letters in the alphabet.

We were on Road Z. At one point, the road’s pavement just ended and turned into gravel. There were no other cars around for miles.

It’s late November and all the fields were brown and yellow, separated by rows of trees with fall colors. Rain clouds billowed to the west over the Coast Ranges and to the east over the Sierra Nevada, but the sky was placid above us.

We were going to spend the night in Weaverville, but we amused ourselves on the way by visiting wildlife refuges in the Central Valley. One of our stops was the Gray Lodge Wildlife Area.

On the way there, we saw a group of parked cars with people milling about nearby. What were they doing? Was it an accident? We slowed down. Everybody had big binoculars hanging from their necks. They even had a scope on a tripod. These were birders—serious ones. Elizabeth rolled down her window and asked if they were looking at anything unusual. “Sandhill cranes,” one of them said, “about 200 yards west of the road. Nothing unusual, but something good to see.”

We stopped our car and got out. All I had was an old pair of pocket binoculars. I felt embarrassed looking through them. I could barely see the cranes.

Fortunately, the birders let us use their scope. The sandhill cranes were nearly four feet tall. They were slender and gray with bright red crowns. We heard their high-pitched rattling calls. Elizabeth watched a pair dance. A few cranes took off and circled gracefully before returning to the group. Then we thanked the birders and left for the wildlife area.

The Gray Lodge Wildlife Area is directly north of the Sutter Buttes. Known as the smallest mountain range in the world, the Sutter Buttes form a perfect circle of hills rising directly out of the Central Valley. They aren’t particularly tall, but the immense flatness that surrounds them ensures that they are often visible from hundreds of miles away. I’d seen them many times while driving Interstate 5.

Gray Lodge Wildlife Area was the closest I’d ever been to the Sutter Buttes. They were right in front of me. But now they were completely obscured by low, gray clouds.

We did the gravel auto tour route through the refuge. The landscape started out pleasant enough: a mix of brush, tall cottonwoods, and marshes. The wetlands were filled with ducks, geese, and other birds. Nice.

Things got better when the clouds cleared a little. It was late in the afternoon and the sunlight came in at a low angle. It lit up the yellow and umber leaves of the trees next to the marshes. I could finally make out the western hills of the Sutter Buttes. Their grasslands were gold and the oaks and pines scattered upon them were dark green spots.

Storm clouds were piling up over the Sierra Nevada. Thousands of white geese were flying past the clouds, illuminated by the setting sun. They were far enough away to look like dots, but there were so many that they turned into an endless stream of white Vs crossing the sky.

The white geese were snow geese and Ross’s geese. They’re both big white fowl with black wingtips. They’re similar enough that I couldn’t tell them apart. But because of their colors, their silhouettes alternate distinctively between black and white as they flap their wings.

Near the end of the auto tour we passed one last wetland backed by the Sutter Buttes. It was filled with ducks and geese, much like the others. We stopped our car, rolled down our windows, and turned off the engine. The only sounds were wind, honking geese, and flapping wings.

Then the sound of a distant plane startled the birds.

The geese lifted up from the water in one giant wave. They blocked the view of the buttes behind them. Their white bodies and black wingtips made the entire mass flicker light and dark. Geese kept lifting up from the water, filling in the mass, as the others climbed higher. They filled the sky above us, swirling in different directions. There were thousands upon thousands of them.

I thought of the old accounts of endless herds of bison on the American prairie, how they once stretched to the horizon. And I thought of the old accounts of passenger pigeons, how their flocks could at one time darken the sky for days. Even California’s Central Valley once sustained some 40 million waterfowl on nearly 4 million acres of wetlands. Today, only 400,000 acres of wetlands remain. Waterfowl populations, predictably, have fallen to a tenth of what they once were. I wondered: If we could see so many birds on the wildlife area’s puny 9,200 acres, what was the entire Central Valley once like? I imagined the birds returning from their summer breeding grounds in the Arctic only to find the wetlands they had used for thousands of years drained and plowed. Starvation, disease, or hunting finished them off. It made me sad to think of the abundance that was once commonplace and of the millions of animals that had been sacrificed for wealth. The geese we saw were a reminder of what had been lost and what our land could still support.

We drove away. Dark clouds closed in. Rain pelted the roof our car. The Sutter Buttes faded behind the downpour. The huge flocks of birds we saw were no longer visible, vanished into the air.

We’d gone to Las Trampas in previous years, but today I wanted to try somewhere new, yet still nearby. I chose to hike the northeast part of Briones Regional Park. It’s just 20 minutes away and [...]]]> Elizabeth and I have gone on a morning hike every Thanksgiving for the last three years. This year was no different.

We’d gone to Las Trampas in previous years, but today I wanted to try somewhere new, yet still nearby. I chose to hike the northeast part of Briones Regional Park. It’s just 20 minutes away and would leave enough time to prepare for Thanksgiving dinner afterward. The last time I’d been to that part of the park was a clear October day in 2006, when there were nice fall colors on the leaves of the blue and valley oaks.

I sometimes complain about the monotonously perfect weather we get in the Bay Area, but on days like today, when it’s 60 degrees with only a slight haze from overnight fog, I have to admit that it is nice to hike in a t-shirt and shorts in late November. I brought my fleece jacket in case I got cold.

We hiked south on the Alhambra Creek Trail. It’s a dirt road on the west side of Alhambra Creek with grassy hills on one side and the creek itself on the other. The hills bore a few blue oaks and the creek was lined with leafy oaks and California bay. The creek also had a few California buckeyes, but their leaves were long gone and only their mottled gray branches remained.

In the canyon ahead of us was a dark evergreen forest. It closed in as we climbed. The air grew cooler, the grass was replaced by ferns, and the trees cast a deep shade. I put on my jacket.

We walked a half mile through these shady woods until we reached a small crest where the forest gave way to a sunny grassland. Coyote brush was blooming, just as it was at Las Trampas two weeks ago.

We stopped at the Maricich Lagoons. Their water was muddy and their shores had been stomped into mud by cows. Despite being an unappealing scene to humans, the murky lagoons are perfect habitat for California newts and California tiger salamanders, which come there to breed. We walked around one of the lagoons, stepping carefully to avoid any cryptic amphibians, but could find none.

The haze layer was some 1,000 feet thick, which covered Mount Diablo’s lower elevations but left much of the 3,864-foot mountain exposed. Hiking above the haze at 1,400 feet on the Table Top and Spengler trails gave us excellent views of the peak.

The views ended on the Blue Oak Shortcut. We left the grassy highlands and were again plunged into a dark ravine where a stream trickled next to the trail and the tree trunks were covered with moss.

Why are the changes in vegetation so dramatic here? In the Appalachian Mountains, the difference in vegetation between a ridge and a ravine is unnoticeable if you’re not really paying attention. This isn’t because the plant species are the same, but because their growth forms are the same. Everywhere you go, the plants are mostly broadleaf deciduous trees with some conifers mixed in and shrubs in the understory. Here the differences are obvious. The climate, I guess, is on the borderline between what will support a forest and what will support a grassland. A slight change in aspect, soil, grazing history, or fire history is enough to tip the balance toward one or the other. But if we ignored the growth forms, would Appalachian hills exhibit the same variety of plants as Bay Area hills?

After passing by the park boundary and seeing a few roofs poking out from behind the trees, we climbed uphill, walking through a lovely woodland of blue oaks. We stopped for a little lunch at the top of the hill. At 1:30, we finished our hike with plenty of time to get ready for a big Thanksgiving dinner with family.