Tour de California

Walk from the coast into the last of the Golden State’s grasslands by way of a lost route.

- Chuck Graham

I UNFOLD A TOPO MAP to scope out two clearly distinguished mountain ranges. To the southwest, the Caliente Range rises more than 5,000 feet, and to the east, the Temblor Range more than 4,000 feet. Between them is a broad, 50-mile swath of grasslands, the last of its kind in California’s Central Valley. No backcountry trails spiderweb through its interior, just one gravel road bisects the area, and those two ranges effectively block it off from, well, everyone. But in the bottom-left corner, on the edge of some old maps—not all—there’s a squiggly, dotted line that seems to lead into the Calientes before fizzling out just before the Carrizo Plain National Monument. 

For years it’s intrigued me. If that little, unnamed trail connects the Cuyama River valley to the Carrizo, then you could thru-hike from the coast to California’s Serengeti. It’d require a little road walking, but you could move from seaside bluffs through coastal mountains and across seldom-visited valleys and into grasslands—it’d be like an ecological tour of California.