The Carrizo Plain is a national monument on the southwest edge of the San Joaquin Valley, set aside for valley flora and fauna conservation. It has an enormous grassland area that has been likened to the African savanna because of its enormous importance as a wildlife habitat. The grassland’s featureless, even treeless, appearance doesn’t seem like much, but it is the largest contiguous habitat for endangered species such as the San Joaquin kit fox and the giant kangaroo rat, and provides crucial nesting, wintering and roosting space for many species of raptors, plovers and cranes.
We had the place to ourselves on the day we visited, not even seeing much wildlife. It’s an unfortunate habit of ours to show up at a lot of places at midday, when the wildlife has the good sense to sleep or otherwise lie low. We were unable to visit the Painted Rock, a sacred spot for native Chumash, because birds had started to nest in the area just a day or so before.
From a distance, we could see Soda Lake (above), which is a large salt bed whose stark white appearance makes it look like a mirage.
Believe it or not, this is what the mighty San Andreas Fault looks like (below). It runs some 800 miles north and south through California, caused the great San Francisco quake of 1906, and keeps Los Angeles waiting for its own apocalypse.
Here on the Carrizo Plain, it's visible as this rift; it's actually the scar of the massive Fort Tejon earthquake in 1857 that split the ground here so violently it changed the course of the nearby Wallace Creek and moved the fault some 30 feet. On a warm and peaceful day, it’s hard to imagine water, let alone a groundshifting quake.
Someday, we will arrive in time to see the wildlife, and we’ll time our visit to see Painted Rock.
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