Modoc National Forest: The Lava Beds and the High Desert Above Them

The Modoc National Forest occupies the high volcanic plateau of northeastern California, roughly one point seven million acres of ponderosa pine, juniper, sagebrush, and lava fields that most Californians have never visited and could not place on a map. It lies east of the Cascades, south of the Oregon border, and north of the Great Basin, in a topographic and ecological zone that does not fit neatly into any of the standard California narratives. It is neither coast nor Sierra, neither desert nor redwood country. It is a place that defined itself by resisting easy description.

The Modoc Plateau was shaped by volcanic activity more recent than the Sierra Nevada. Warner Mountains at the forest's eastern edge are fault-block mountains formed by Basin and Range tectonics, a reminder that the geological forces operating in Nevada extend into this corner of California. The forest itself is less a continuous canopy than a patchwork: pine forests on the higher slopes, sage flats and juniper in the lowlands, wetlands around the Tule Lake and Goose Lake basins that support some of the most significant waterfowl concentrations on the Pacific Flyway.

The southern edge of the forest abuts Lava Beds National Monument, where the Modoc War of eighteen seventy-two and seventy-three was fought. What is worth adding here is that the landscape you are driving through was the land the Modoc were defending. Not just the lava beds. All of this: the plateau, the marshes, the obsidian outcrops they used for tools, the deer migration corridors they had hunted for generations, the seasonal gathering grounds, the fishing spots at Tule Lake before it was drained for agriculture. The war was fought in the lava beds. The land that was worth dying for extended to every horizon you can see.