America's Ugliest State

I had the absolute pleasure of living in California this summer, taking every spare minute of my time to explore all of the natural beauty is has to offer. I could spend years doing this and know that I still wouldn’t be able to see it all. I was recently talking to someone I had just met about the experience, and he stopped me a couple of words in. “Why would you want to do that?” He asked. “California is such an ugly state.” After taking a second to recover, I asked him (not verbatim) what the hell he was talking about. “It’s all huge freeways with bad traffic and old buildings and hills of dead grass!” He continued. “I hate when I have to drive through there.”

I asked him what parts of the state he had seen and he told me he had driven through LA and the surrounding countryside several times for business trips. (He also told me how many eyesore windmills there were on that drive, but that’s a story for another blog post.) I asked him if he had ever driven the coastal highway or been to Yosemite. He told me he hadn’t but traffic in California was so bad that he had no interest in doing so. Well lucky for him, we were about to spend the next two weeks exploring those places he had thus far deemed unworthy of the effort. He was the tour bus driver and I was on board as the tour guide.

We rode that tour bus along the winding mountain roads of Stanislaus National Forest as we entered Yosemite, my hands gripping the Oh Shit handle and my head swimming with motion sickness. We coasted along Highway 1 as the waves from the Pacific Ocean lapped the rocky shoreline. We took our time driving through Sonoma, pointing out all the different grape vines and watching the color of the sunlight change on the verdant hillsides. We rounded a corner near the Nevada State Line and the sparkling water of Lake Tahoe revealed its strikingly blue surface. It was, in a word, magical. Though I had lived here and visited all those places, they still took my breath away. California is such a vast area of diverse natural beauty that it’s hard to ever grow used to it. The driver, this being his first time seeing any of it was, as I expected, equally impressed. “I had no idea,” he said. “Who knew there were places like this in California?”

As someone who has explored literally thousands of miles in the state, the beauty seemed obvious. As a tour guide, I love sharing that beauty with others who haven’t experienced it yet, but it also makes me sad. I’ve led tours for Californians in their own state who had no idea these places existed, and it makes me realize how disconnected so many Americans have become from their environment. Not only are they not getting the opportunity to enjoy the natural landscapes surrounding their homes, but they don’t get to experience the healing effects of nature, and they’re unable to recognize the impact we’re having on these spaces. How are they supposed to care about the effect of air pollution or deforestation or urban sprawl or dams if they didn’t know the purity of the land before humans took over?

California contains nearly every type of ecosystem - from mountains to forests to deserts and valleys and the coast and more. The tallest mountain in the contiguous US, Mt. Whitney, rises to 14,505ft in the Sierra Nevada Range, while the lowest point in North America sits 100 miles east in Death Valley - Badwater Basin at 282ft below sea level. It grows the oldest, tallest, and biggest trees in the world (Bristlecone pines, Coastal Redwoods, and my beloved Giant Sequoias, respectively). Its western boundary stretches along 1,500 miles of shoreline with cliffs and caves and sea creatures dotting the entire corridor. Joshua Trees, the amazingly weird cacti, grow in the Mojave desert, mostly in California, and nowhere else in the world (seeing a trend?). There are 9 National Parks to explore (more than any other state), and 5 million acres of public land. The farmland is so fertile and conditions so favorable (especially before the ongoing human-induced drought) that 25% of the food grown in the United States comes from the Central Valley. Don’t even get me started on the amount of wildlife that you can find in all of these different regions.

As beautiful as it is now, I’m concerned California is headed for a much uglier future, one that we’re actively creating for it. Not only are we building more houses along the coast, which obviously affects its natural beauty and the ever-changing nature of a seashore, we’re building them in places that lead more indirectly to their destruction. What do I mean? I mean all of the homes, offices, and other human spaces popping up alongside our National Forests. California has the third-largest area of public lands in the country (behind Alaska and Nevada) and a lot of that is in the form of National Forests. You know what else they have a lot of because of these forests? Wildfires. Wildfires are natural occurrences that help the forest develop and grow, and until relatively recently, the best strategy for dealing with them was to let them burn and manage themselves in their own natural way. After all, this has been the way of the world for a few hundred million years! When we build our houses in the forests or on the outskirts, however, this strategy becomes dangerous and destructive. Wildfires can spread quickly and unpredictably. So what have we done? We’ve created a “forest management strategy” that involves a conspicuous amount of timber sales and unnatural wildfire protection that suppresses even the beneficial ones. Add the consequences of these actions to the climate change-induced drought in California and you’ve created forests ready to burst into flames without adequate defenses to preserve themselves.

An unfortunate example of this phenomenon can be seen in the aftermath of this summer’s KNP Complex Fire. Ignited by a lightning strike, this fire spread quickly through areas in the southern Sierra, including Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, famous for their population of Giant Sequoias. Though these trees are designed for wildfires - they can’t reproduce without them thanks to heat-reactive cones, and they have thick bark to protect themselves - the drought + suppression of wildfires meant the KNP Fire burned very hot and spread rapidly. Firefighters raced not only to contain the flames, but to preserve the history that calls the parks home.

The KNP fire threatened to destroy some of the most remarkable natural features in the state and yes - the world - when it raged through those forests this summer. California is the only place in the world where Giant Sequoias naturally grow. These true testaments to the grandeur of nature are hard to even imagine until you see one in person. The scale is nearly impossible to wrap your mind around. While I can understand how many people who hear about this year’s fire might think “They’re just trees, what’s the big deal?”, I can’t help but imagine the unparalleled lives these giants have lived. The parks are home to Sequoias that are thousands of years old, and larger than any other trees on the planet. Some of them have been around since the Roman Empire was a thing and survived weather from droughts, floods, and yes, fires in the meantime, still standing today. They’ve seen more than we can ever hope to see and have incredible stories to tell. They do eventually die, but they’re honorable deaths that return life-giving nutrients to the soil for the next generation of gentle giants who have their own stories to tell. Wouldn’t it be a shame if our actions cut these magnificent lives short? Would that not be an uncomfortable foreshadowing of our own futures if we cause the demise of such a powerful and mighty species?

The author with the largest tree in the world.

California is uniquely, incomparably beautiful. There are incredible places to discover beyond the sprawling cities and vast highways it’s known for. Some people are just now learning that, which I’m so thankful for. Without their desire to preserve its natural wonders, we could see California become truly ugly in our lifetime. What a painful reminder of our negligence it would be to see blackened Giant Sequoias topple or powerful waterfalls in the Sierra stop flowing, or temperature-sensitive Joshua Trees run out of hillsides to climb for tolerable conditions. I don’t want to see the drought kill the fertility of the Central Valley or conversely, rising sea levels inundate the rugged coastline and its famous beaches. I want to tell everyone I know - blog readers, tour bus drivers, and Californians alike - that there are so many irreplaceable treasures in this one state who have thrived for thousands of years without us but now need our help to make it through the 21st century. Will we acknowledge their value, even if it's not monetary? Will we give them their home back, even if it means ours must be moved somewhere else?

There are no easy answers in today's complex society. The best I can hope for is that we can begin to recognize the value of non-human lives, from the trees and water and animals who shouldn’t have to suffer the consequences of our actions. The first step in this process is searching for and identifying the beauty around us. It requires a patient and empathetic desire, but I believe we all have that somewhere inside us. If you are lucky enough to live somewhere as beautiful as California, it shouldn’t be too hard to do.