It
is sometimes hard to separate oak woodlands from grasslands, and I love them
both. The mix of trees and grass,
especially where the trees are big and the understory is fairly open. Bright
green grass with flowers in spring and yellow grass in fall, contrasting against
the dark green foliage of the oaks. All the benefits of both a grassland and a
forest. The Kern River Canyon is another
favorite place of mine. It is downstream of the Kern Valley along the Kern
River in the southern Sierra near Bakersfield, and is very deep and steep.
The Kern River flows through the bottom of the canyon, and State Highway 178
runs high above it in places and alongside it in others.
There is AWESOME rafting in the river, especially on a lazy hot
summer day, when the temperatures can hover around 100°F and the water is
refreshingly cold. Lots of fun Class III and IV rapids, with the Royal Flush a
Class V to be portaged around! There is nothing quite like slipping over the
side of the raft in a calm section, or swinging on a rope tied to a tree branch
overhanging the water while trying to direct your splash to get other rafters
wet. Be careful, though, the river has claimed the lives of over 60 people in
the last couple of decades.
In early spring 1999 I left my snowy little mountain village and drove down the Kern Canyon. The earth was rejoicing with warm spring weather and everything was so GREEN! I could hardly contain myself! All the oaks were leafing out and flowers were popping up amid the grasses. I pulled off at a turnout, hopped a barbed wire fence, and strolled through the wooded grass to a rock where I sat overlooking the river hundreds of feet below. I wanted to sing, I wanted to dance, it was all so beautiful and the sun was so warm and everything was so alive! I wanted to sit there forever! But I had to keep going in time to find a good spot to camp at the Carrizo Plain that night.
A fire burned there later that year, and I haven't seen it since. But these ecosystems are adapted to fire, and I'll bet that the following spring the wildflower display was amazing. After the 1994 Highway 41 Fire near San Luis Obispo, Cuesta Ridge had the most amazing poppy display the following spring. The lush growth of grasses against the blackened oak trunks that spring was beautiful too.
After a terribly hard crossing of the Sierra Nevada in mid-winter 1844, John
C. Fremont's party arrived near present day Coloma:
"The sun was warm; wild flowers filled the land with a fantastic range of colors and shapes--baby blue-eyes covered the moist flats and slopes; the dry regions were dominated by the striking red-purple of bush lupines, heart-shaped violets, fiddlenecks with curved yellow spikes hanging from twisted and hairy, yellowish-green stems; white popcorn flowers stood tall in the deep green grass; and wherever there was enough shade and dampness, there were ferns of every size and description. All this was foothill country, and in some of the tall oaks, there were the twisted and intricate webs of wild grapevines reaching upward toward the sunlight.
Then as the men moved out of the foothills, they were startled by what lay before them. The Sacramento Valley stretched to the western horizon, to the blue line of the Coast Range. ...Grass was belly deep for the horses and mules, and the different shades of green moved back and forth in the light wind like waves on some long-forgotten sea. In the open, under the warm sun, wild flowers were all the colors of an artist who had become addicted to all the variations of yellow, gold, and orange that he could imagine.
...As they rode through this beautiful land, they were amazed at the size of the great valley oaks that grew in groves on rolling hills or stood as islands of shade on the flat surface of the valley floor. The trunks of many of these oaks were five and six feet in diameter, and the upper limbs spread out in magnificent umbrellas of green leaves that shaded a wide area beneath.
...They nooned beneath the shadow of a large oak's spreading limbs and ate a lunch of acorn meal. As they made do with this gruel, they stared at the miles of poppies swaying in the light breeze like grounded rays of the sun, and they heard the trilled songs of meadowlarks, and the harsh queg-queg-queg of yellow-billed magpies." (quoted from Ferol Egan, 1985, Fremont: Explorer for a Restless Nation)
Notice how the transition from foothill to valley is indistinct--nowdays, the oak woodlands have been pushed out of the flat valley to occupy almost exclusively hilly land. But they are still beautiful, and they are in danger. They are becoming developed as foothill communities expand, and grazing is preventing the regeneration of seedling oaks. Lack of fire must also be taking its toll. Let's protect what we have left!
Click here for more photos of oak woodlands.
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Copyright © 1998-2008
Gregory J. Reis
