Three Californias, Coast, Sierra, and Desert

California is not one landscape. It is at least three, stacked against each other with an abruptness that still surprises people who grew up here. The coast is the California of the imagination: fog and kelp and sandstone bluffs, sea lions on the rocks, the Pacific running cold and enormous out to the horizon.

The coast range intercepts the moist marine air, squeezing it into the fog that gives San Francisco its summer identity and grows the coastal redwoods, the tallest living things on earth. Sequoia sempervirens, the coast redwood, can live over two thousand years and reach over three hundred seventy-nine feet tall. The largest verified living specimen, Hyperion, was discovered in Redwood National Park in two thousand and six.

Cross the coast range eastward and you drop into the Central Valley, the long flat trough between the coast range and the Sierra Nevada, a sea bottom two million years ago and now the farm empire that feeds the nation. Then the Sierra Nevada rises, a wall of granite that John Muir called the Range of Light. The Sierra is young, geologically speaking: the main uplift began only about five million years ago.

Its highest peak, Mount Whitney, at fourteen thousand five hundred five feet, is the tallest point in the contiguous United States, sitting less than ninety miles from the lowest point in North America at Badwater Basin in Death Valley, which drops two hundred eighty-two feet below sea level. The desert east of the Sierra is a different California entirely: Mojave, Sonoran margins, the Owens Valley, the Salton Sea. Rain shadows so deep that some desert stations record less than two inches of precipitation per year.

Temperatures in Death Valley have touched one hundred thirty degrees Fahrenheit, the highest reliably recorded air temperature on the planet. These three Californias share a state government and a phone area code system. They do not always share a sense of what California is for, or who it belongs to.

That argument has been going on since eighteen fifty and shows no sign of resolution.