Exploring California’s “Water Line”
Sierra crest to the sea along the 38th parallel

David Carle with Janet Carle

We were camped at 10,430 feet above sea level, just east of the Sierra crest, looking at small glaciers clinging to the north slopes of Mt. Conness and North Peak. Wispy clouds turned pink and there was the beginning of alpenglow overhead. It was our first evening on a 17-day trek across California in September 2008, closely following the 38th parallel from our home near Mono Lake to the Point Reyes lighthouse, exploring some of the mountains-to-the-sea watershed that sends water to San Francisco Bay and, finally, out to the Pacific Ocean.

At the slow pace dictated by travel on foot, bicycle, and boat, we explored the 38ºN latitude “water line,” where battles have been fought over dams, aqueducts, and wetlands, and where critical water issues still are being played out. The list includes Mono Lake, the snowpack at the Sierra Nevada crest, Hetch Hetchy, New Melones Reservoir, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, San Francisco Bay, and Point Reyes. At each site we met with experts involved with resource protection and restoration.

Our starting point at Mono Lake, east of the mountain range, might seem hydrologically separate from the San Francisco Bay watershed, were it not for relationships that Los Angeles and metropolitan southern California have with this entire “water line.” Stresses on the water supply system in one place are today felt throughout the state.

At a sendoff party at Mono Lake we spoke with Geoff McQuilken, director of the Mono Lake Committee, about such connections. Reducing diversions from Mono Basin streams required Los Angeles to conserve water, which, Geoff noted, “affects how much is drawn out of the Bay-Delta for southern California and in turn affects users right there along your route. It’s all linked together.” Of course, all water bodies are part of the planetary water cycle, sharing vapor with the atmosphere until rain and snow return it to the Sierra Nevada range.

We live just a mile north of Mono Lake. The next morning we walked out the door of our house and headed west up Lundy Canyon, where Mill Creek gathers snowmelt from the surrounding peaks before flowing below our house into the lake. The canyon steadily angled southwest and, at the top, we stood exactly on the 38º line.

The Sierra Crest
Connie Millar met us as the afternoon sun dropped toward the crest. She is a U.S. Forest Service paleoecologist who explores connections between mountain vegetation and changing climate patterns. She told us that photographs taken 80 years ago documented how the nearby glaciers had shrunk by at least 80 percent during the last century. In the last 30 years, shrinkage has accelerated. “North Glacier may be gone in a decade,” Connie told us, “and all of the glaciers in the central Sierra in our lifetimes.”

Some of the clearest signs of climate warming are visible at high elevations. Scientists have been trying to understand what global changes mean for local areas, because the effects vary. “In much of the eastern U.S., temperatures are actually cooling,” Connie told us, “while the West is warming much faster than the global average.”

A rising temperature trend has been recorded in California through the last 120 years, but the slope of that curve has steepened over the last 30 years, and “in the last ten years everything has shot up,” said Connie. Forecasts give two-to-one odds that much of California will be drier by the end of the century--a 20 percent decline in precipitation--with more water falling as rain, less as snow. A trend of earlier snowmelt runoff, shorter spring seasons, and longer summers is already apparent in the Sierra Nevada.

We were sitting near the tree line. Scattered clumps of trees across the basin were primarily whitebark pine and some limber pine. Connie explained how “drier” added to “warmer” has been killing limber pines. That year she was also seeing whitebark pines starting to die, with “whole hillsides going in a flash of mortality.”

“It sounds like worse news than I think it is,” she added. “Even where there is a lot of mortality, it’s not total.” Slower-growing trees were being taken out, producing very strong selection for trees that do better under the altered climate.

“Are trees going to move upslope, chasing suitable conditions?” we asked.

“We don’t see whitebark pine moving up; if it were, there should be baby pines right here.”

We all wondered what might happen to Mono Lake. It would be tragic if it were to die because of climate change. This inland sea has survived prehistoric droughts, but despite success in reducing stream diversions, the buffer taken away by 50 years of diversions has not yet been restored.

Connie’s concerns were broader, stretching from Mono Lake to even the smallest riparian corridors. One of her special interests is “rock glaciers,” where ice lies embedded beneath insulating rock, something we could see at the lower edge of North Glacier, just south of us hugging the mountain crest. The terminal moraine there was seeping water. Rock glaciers, with their insulating coats of rubble, should help wetlands stay lush and alive for many years during a warmer climate regime. “They won’t fill Mono Lake up,” Connie explained, “but they will serve these local wetlands and provide persistent streams where other canyons will just dry up. It’s encouraging, not for the statewide water supply, but locally for birds and wildflowers and pika.”

California’s official climate strategy is to prioritize efforts toward the most sensitive resources. “People are talking about triage these days,” Connie said. “There will be things we just have to let go. An example is on the west slope of the Sierra, where almost all of the resource plans have had a priority to reintroduce salmon. But by mid-century, waters may become too warm to support natural salmon runs, so you may not want to put the effort there if you are just going to lose.”

It was a grim picture to consider as we sat in one of the world’s most heavenly settings. We joined Connie for the first mile of her homeward trail, then headed back up to our tent to prepare for the night.

Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne
Janet: A beautiful bluebird morning at Cascade Lake. We followed a use-trail up onto Shepherd’s Crest and paused at the boundary of Yosemite National Park to gaze westward across the wilderness we would cross in the coming days. Upper McCabe Lake lay on the 38th parallel below us.

Later that day we found fish nets stretched out across Middle McCabe Lake. The national park was two years into a five-year project to clean fish out and improve conditions for native yellow-legged frogs. We saw no fish, but also no polliwogs or adult frogs, yet.

These frogs are beleaguered not only by trout predation, but they are now also infected by a fungus that is killing amphibians all over the world and has spread across much of our mountain wilderness, perhaps carried by flying insects. Some individual frogs will hopefully have resistance, but add in pesticides, which interfere with reproduction, blowing in from Central Valley farms, and the amphibians’ prospects look terribly bleak.

In the following days we descended through the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River. We dropped past California, Le Conte, and Waterwheel Falls, gravity pulling the water, and us, down and down. We left the lodgepole forest behind and walked beneath black oaks and Jeffrey and sugar pines. The canyon featured a series of cascades and pools, with massive granite walls framing the views and channeling our direction of travel through a landscape that resembled upper Yosemite Valley. We saw almost no other people.

Above 6,000 feet, it felt like everything was in a hurry to set seeds before winter, including mountain ash, with its clusters of bright red berries. Where we first encountered oak trees, acorns were plopping under canopies of yellow-brown leaves, but farther down canyon the trees had barely begun to think about autumn.

Janet: A long cascade into an emerald pool got us to stop for another dip. We had it all to ourselves. In another cascade of pools a water ouzel was working away, feeding under water. A great place for both human and avian dippers.

The canyon opened wider at Pate Valley, where the elevation was only 4,350 feet. The air felt noticeably thicker, and the trees were mostly oaks and incense cedar. Downstream from there the canyon curves south and then back to the west toward Hetch Hetchy Valley. If only we could follow the river down that way! But the National Park Service does not allow recreation access along the upper shores of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, the City of San Francisco’s water source, so we instead made a strenuous two-day detour. Having to climb 3,500 feet to Harden Lake on the sixth day of our hike cemented my resentment toward the access restriction. Still, there were fine vistas down-canyon from a couple of points along the climb.

We left late summer behind in Pate Valley on that climb and returned abruptly to early autumn at 7,600 feet (37º53N; 7.5 miles south of the line, the farthest point south on the trip).

There were day-hikers at Harden Lake who had come from White Wolf campground, only a few miles away. Though we had 12 backcountry miles to do the next day, running into those people made it clear we had finished the most remote, wild part of our crossing.

Hetch Hetchy
As we navigated switchbacks on the trail down toward Hetch Hetchy, I glimpsed below us what struck me as a big slab of gray granite. Then my wilderness-focused brain adjusted and I realized it was the paved road to O’Shaughnessy Dam. Along this stretch of trail we also saw poison oak and knew we had truly come down from the high country.

Just after we set up our tent, not far from the dam, Spreck Rosekrans found us. He is chairman of the board of Restore Hetch Hetchy, and he also handles water issues for the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). He became our new best friend when we saw he was carrying fresh food and wine!

Spreck’s organization hopes to restore Hetch Hetchy Valley, an idea that seems audacious to some people, given the water supply challenges facing this state. Yet several feasibility studies have concluded that water storage opportunities downstream make it possible to replace the water held behind the dam and almost all of the hydroelectric power from Hetch Hetchy. The organization formed back in 1999 as a split-off group from the Sierra Club, which refused to support that goal. On the day the Sierra Club reengages with this century-old battle, we all agreed, John Muir would be smiling.

“The damming of Hetch Hetchy was the event that turned the Sierra Club from an outing club to a political organization,” Spreck explained. “Congress authorized this dam in 1913; two years later they came back and passed the National Parks Act, basically ensuring that we’re going to preserve parks and not do any more Hetch Hetchys ever again. The National Park system might not exist except for what happened here at Hetch Hetchy.”

Janet: Spreck walked with us across O’Shaugnessy Dam and we looked at the exhibit panels. We found no photographs there of the valley before the reservoir. Spreck did us another major favor the next morning by driving me and our backpacks to the campground at Cherry Lake, while Dave walked the 15 miles carrying just a day pack.

The camp host was vacuuming debris off the road (shades of cartoonist Phil Frank’s Velma Melmac!). The campground was full of deer hunters. I found a site and put signs up for Dave and our son, Ryan, who was meeting us there with bicycles and supplies.

Sonora to Stockton
We had finished walking across the mountains. The next day, on the autumn equinox, we biked down through the Stanislaus National Forest, aware that all of us on the 38ºN latitude line saw the noon sun that day at 52 degrees (90º-38º) above the horizon. The 40-mile stretch to Sonora was a forested and scenic route that was extremely hilly. At one point I was pedaling uphill so slowly that a butterfly heading the same direction passed me by.

In Sonora, at the house of Kurt Stegen, we took our first showers in nine days, and then Kurt drove us to the New Melones Reservoir visitor center. He has been a volunteer with Friends of the River for about 35 years. The height of the dam to be built on the Stanislaus River, as well as how much of the canyon was to be flooded, were issues of passionate contention. In 1974, Friends of the River sponsored Proposition 17, a ballot initiative to prevent the reservoir from inundating nine miles of a popular river rafting stretch at the upper end of the canyon.

Another group, Friends of New Melones, formed expressly to defeat the ballot measure, posted billboards proclaiming: Stop “Wild River” Hoax! Stop Pollution of the River! The Los Angeles Times editorialized that “the billboards seem an absolute betrayal of the truth to us. We, too, oppose Proposition 17. But to call it a “wild-river hoax” and to suggest that the proposition would result in pollution is a resort to tactics that have no place in responsible democratic campaigning.” Proposition 17 lost, 47 percent to 53.

An exhibit in the visitor center summarizes some of that history, which Kurt and so many others lived first-hand. From there we drove to the viewpoint overlooking the dam, a massive earthen plug 625 feet high, spanning 1,560 feet across the canyon. A parking lot, restroom building, and shade shelters sit abandoned at the canyon rim about a half-mile downstream from the dam, at the end of an access road that is now closed to the public.

In 1979, as the reservoir began to fill, Mark Dubois, then director of Friends of the River, chained himself to a boulder in a secret location that would be flooded. Several others joined that protest, forcing water to be released from the dam to avoid drowning the protesters.

In 1980, the California State Water Resources Control Board set a low limit for the reservoir level, but heavy runoff after the record winter of 1982 trumped political will and filled the reservoir to its spilling point. In 1983, the Board lifted its filling restrictions; a full reservoir was a fait accompli. Despite its defeat, Friends of the River has played a significant role in river protection ever since.

Toward sunset, we stood at the Parrot’s Ferry site, where the whitewater rafting stretch once began, and looked at tree snags poking up above the water (the reservoir was at only 46 percent of capacity). For Kurt, that low level opened up an intriguing possibility: perhaps the reservoir could be managed such that the whitewater stretch could be restored, while still ensuring emergency flood storage capacity in high-water episodes like those forecast to occur more frequently with global warming. The Stanislaus River story may not be finished.

In the morning we began an all-day bike ride from Sonora to Stockton. There were too many trucks and no bike lane on Highway 4, so we dropped out of the foothills through Salt Springs Valley, passing scattered ranch houses, cattle, and fields remote from the busy travel routes. We saw white pelicans, pied-billed grebes, and assorted ducks on the reservoir at the bottom of that valley. As we approached Highway 26, the road we were traveling was lined with tailing piles, the gravel debris left by miners who had seemingly chewed their way across the surface of the land.

The hard physical part of this trip was over once we reached Stockton, since we would embark by boat in the morning. Hiking and biking had given us a new, physical appreciation for the size of this state.

The Delta
After dropping us at the Stockton marina, Ryan left to drive back home. The fact that he could return in a few hours to where we’d started 11 days before was part of the relativity we were exploring on this trek.

We watched a parade of boaters come and go: mom, pop, dog; then several lone fishermen; and five head-shaved, tattooed young men crammed into a boat built for speed rather than fishing. John Knotts’s 33-foot Catalina sailboat emerged from among a group of college rowing-crew kids launching their sculls. It was to be our mother ship for the next five days. John had been the Sierra District State Park superintendent, which included responsibility for the Mono Lake unit. With David Martin (another State Parks employee) along as crew, he had sailed from San Francisco Bay to meet us. John’s brother, Marty, came along in his smaller catamaran.

Toward sunset that first night on the Delta, we turned out of the deepwater channel and anchored near Lost Isle. David Martin had a portable GPS unit; he paddled his kayak a few yards away, then called back that he was exactly on the 38th.

Swimming in the warm water felt fantastic, though I could not help speculating about the agricultural runoff chemicals that were in the mix. I told the others that the lower San Joaquin River has been derided as the “lower colon” of the valley’s river system because it carries so much pollution. Still, it was a beautiful evening in a natural setting.

One side of the channel was green and lush and noisy with birds. The other side was a bare rock levee, devoid of life. As night fell, from behind that levee we heard the insistent beeping of vehicles backing up. The next morning we saw the source of the noise: trucks driving atop the levee, each pulling two trailers brimming with tomatoes harvested during the night.

Our westerly route took us through Frank’s Tract. Several miles south were the massive pumps that send water into the aqueducts serving the San Joaquin Valley and southern California. We anchored at the Brannan Island State Recreation Area marina (38º07'N, 121º41'W).

Janet: Life on the river is a whole different world, with pace dictated by tide, wind, and marina. It was hard to believe that the little channel in front of us could take us to the Golden Gate and the open sea. But as we chugged along that gradually widening channel, the scale of the Delta revealed itself.

You could feel the power of the water, full of life, giving life, moving life. The water has a wonderful sweet smell, like “sweet rain,” I decided. A very different feel and odor than a Sierra stream. More rich, warmer, and dense with life.

The most exciting part of our first full day on the river was a sea lion. I saw a dark head, then thrashing body, then a flash of a huge silver fish. So much is going on under there! I felt privileged to catch the glimpse--a sight becoming rare as the salmon disappear. What must it have been like 100 years ago, with the rivers teeming with multiple salmon runs?

We had been given an update on the issues affecting the Delta while we were at Hetch Hetchy because Spreck Rosekrans had just come from a Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) meeting. The BDCP group, appointed by the governor, sought agreement among water diverters, environmental interests, and Delta farmers and residents, a process Spreck characterized as “gnarly.” Spring and fall runs of chinook salmon and the tiny delta smelt, populations of fish that once were incredibly abundant, are now close to extinction. There is a huge seismic risk to levees. Water agencies want a peripheral canal around the Delta so they can continue moving fresh water if levees fail and salt water reaches the pumps. Delta landowners worry that, with a canal in place, other interests would no longer share the “common pool” that gives everyone an incentive to maintain levees. Major concerns remain that enough flow be guaranteed to the estuary ecosystem and that a peripheral canal not facilitate ever more diversions.

John Cain met us at Brannan Island. He is the director of restoration programs for the Natural Heritage Institute (in the 1990s he had worked for the Mono Lake Committee). While Janet and I toured in John’s car, the boats shifted to the southwest end of Sherman Island. Our road ran beside the Sacramento River, the major river artery of the northern half of the state. Massive wind turbines decorated the hills beyond the channel.

John told us that groundwater pumps run constantly in the Delta to keep fields dry enough to grow crops. Farm soils are constantly subsiding because the peat soil, exposed to air, is oxidizing and losing one to two inches of soil volume each year.

We stopped on Twitchell Island, 12 feet below sea level, where native tules and cattails were growing on several acres of ponds. John reached into the water and came up with a handful of dripping black mud. “The rate of tule muck accumulation is about two inches per year. We’re reversing subsidence--actually building up this island. These islands have become a substantial source of atmospheric CO2, so this converts a carbon source to a sink. We’re hoping to do this on a much larger scale.”

We mulled over “carbon-capture farming” as we drove to the south end of the island to see an experimental “green levee” covered with lush growth. Engineers prefer that levees be bare so they can see signs of failure, but during a recent flood event, John said, “when people thought the standard levee was going to go, everyone took shelter behind this levee armored with vegetation.”

To reach the Antioch Bridge and the south shore of the river channel, we drove across Sherman Island, 11,000 acres of farmland at the western margin of the Delta that are theoretically protected by levees. However, those levees were built on sand foundations that may undergo liquefaction during a large earthquake.

Across the bridge are the communities of Antioch and Oakley, with shopping malls, housing tracts, and crowded highways. On a dairy farm near Dutch Slough, a few miles east of Oakley, construction of 4,500 homes had been planned, but the farmer was persuaded instead to sell the 1,200 acres to the State, a purchase made with CalFed Bay-Delta Accord water bond funds. This Dutch Slough project, conceived by John for the Natural Heritage Institute, includes the Coastal Conservancy, California Bay-Delta Authority, Department of Water Resources, and City of Oakley as partners, and will become the largest freshwater tidal marsh restoration project in the Delta.

We walked atop a levee, trying to visualize the pasture as tule wetlands. “Come back in ten or 20 years,” John told us, “and you should see valley oaks and sycamores and walnut trees grading out into grasslands and tidal marsh.” In time, the restored wetlands should support juvenile salmon pausing to feed and grow before they finish their own treks from the mountains out to the sea.

Our final destination with John was a subdivision in Oakley built below sea level. The levee there meets 100-year FEMA standards, so homeowners are not required to buy flood insurance. With climate models forecasting a possible four-foot sea level rise by the end of the century, however, such faith in levees seems a recipe for disaster.

Strait to the Bay
The following morning, the 14th day of our trek, the tide was very low, the Bay nearly flat, the weather sunny and calm--perfect for paddling the 9.5 miles to Vallejo in handmade kayaks John Knott and David Martin had brought on the sailboat. We were rocked by the wakes of several massive ships far out in the deep-water channel. Cars looked tiny on the freeway spans of the bridge far overhead. As we paddled beneath them, I whooped out loud with exhilaration. It was a thrill to kayak under the Carquinez Strait bridges into San Pablo Bay, reaching that destination along with vital flowing water that had originated in the Sierra Nevada high country.

On the far side of the strait we rounded a breakwater and entered Mare Strait. We continued to the Vallejo Municipal Marina, where the sailboats caught up with us. There we took Marc Holmes on board. He is the bay restoration program director for the Bay Institute. Marc guided us a few miles up the Napa River to former Cargill salt ponds now being restored (at 38º09N, ten miles north of our latitude line--the farthest we strayed on the trip). Originally there were 196,000 acres of tidal marshes from Suisun Marsh out through San Francisco Bay. Eighty-six percent of that is gone. The opportunities for coastal wetlands restoration in the Napa-Sonoma marshes are enormous.

As we motored upriver, Marc pointed toward houses lining the northeast shoreline. “None of those residences could be permitted today, because they’re built in the tidal margins of the Bay. The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission was established in 1965 to regulate bayfront development and protect the Bay. By then, one-third of the Bay had been filled or diked or drained.”

Everyone transferred to Marty’s catamaran to motor into the salt pond complex, now managed by the Coastal Conservancy. Tidal marsh had been converted there in the mid-1870s to grazing land and later to duck hunting clubs. The Leslie Salt company bought the properties and later sold them to Cargill. The salt pond complex circulated Bay water through 12 increasingly concentrated 1,000-acre ponds.

“This cordgrass that you see is new growth since the levees were breached 18 months ago,” Marc said. “None had been in here in 100 years or more. Their seeds traveled naturally on the tide. I’m stunned to see that much cordgrass in so little time.”

The rest of the food chain was returning too, including invertebrates and birds. “And we haven’t even talked about fish,” Marc added. He reiterated what we’d heard from John Cain about the importance of wetlands to juvenile salmon. “And this is the farthest west habitat for delta smelt,” he added. The endangered delta smelt is at the center of controversy over diversion cutbacks, because aqueduct pumps chew up so many of the tiny fish. “This is so great; you’re seeing it right at the beginning,” Marc exulted. “Come back here in five years and the cordgrass lines will extend across the pond.”

China Camp, Point Reyes
Janet: After anchoring for the night at the mouth of the Petaluma River (38º06'42"), off we went toward China Camp. We transferred our things to the catamaran for the shallow-water landing and sadly said goodbye to Captain John and David Martin.

On the ride up onto the beach, I felt like Columbus coming ashore in the New World. China Camp beach is exactly on our latitude line (38º00'03"N). We checked out the shrimp camp museum while we waited for Ryan to show up.

China Camp’s oldest resident, Frank Quan, told us that in the late 19th century about 500 Chinese people, including his family, had lived at this shrimp camp, one of many around the Bay. Two million pounds of shrimp were harvested each year until the Chinese bag nets were banned as a shrimping technique. Frank still fishes in the Bay, but the native shrimp population is almost gone. He explained that shrimp go up to the mixing zone to find less salty water, but with water diversions from the Delta there is less dilution within the Bay. Frank does not expect the shrimp to last through his lifetime.

We spent the night with friends in San Anselmo, then continued by bicycle to the Point Reyes National Seashore headquarters at Bear Valley. Don Neubacher, the park superintendent, had attended the graduate School of Ecology at U.C. Davis with two of the founders of the Mono Lake Committee. He spread a map on a picnic table outside the park office and told us about the many projects they are working on to restore coastal marshes and reopen miles of streams to fish passage, the single biggest effort being the 560-acre Giacomini Marsh at the south end of Tomales Bay.

“It had been a dairy,” Don said, “and they diked off the bay in the 1940s. Lagunitas Creek flows through there and is the one creek in this region that still has a pretty good run of coho salmon. You’ll see three-foot fish in 12 inches of water.”

Don told us that the Giacomini project alone adds ten percent to Central Coast wetlands. “That gives you an idea how little there is left,” he said. “On October 25th we’ll open the last bit of levee, and 50 to 60 percent of the land will flood at high tide. This thing will be transformed in a couple of years.” [On October 26, 2008, 500 people celebrated the opening of the levee and watched the first high tide move across the land.]

That afternoon we bicycled over the ridge to Limantour Beach. Studying the surf swells rolling in and seeing how far away Point Reyes was, we decided to change our plan to kayak from that beach the next morning. Camping that night in a volunteers’ campground not far from the headquarters, we heard the screechy calls of spotted owls. (See “A Glimpse of the Work Required.”)

To the Lighthouse
The morning was overcast as we pedaled up the west shore of Tomales Bay, but we found the sunshine as we wrapped around Drakes Estero and turned back south toward Drakes Beach. Ryan, who had rejoined us at China Camp, had been photographing California gulls while waiting for us to arrive. We wondered if they were from Mono Lake, where three-quarters of that species found in this state are born. These birds had perhaps chosen the most direct migratory route, following the 38th parallel, as we had, to reach the ocean.

We inflated our two-person kayak and changed into wetsuits and life jackets. The bright yellow boat, our “rubber ducky,” had to carry us for 2.3 miles across Drakes Bay.

We were novices at launching through waves. Three aborted tries sent us tumbling about on the beach, but finally we made a successful launch. About halfway to the fish dock at Chimney Rock, we heard the wonderfully mysterious calls of loons and then saw several of them dive and surface, calling repeatedly. Then from the beach came the deep, resonant, vibrating “chonk” of elephant seals.

Ryan met us at the fish dock and we loaded gear into the car. Then we finished our trek across California by walking across Point Reyes to the lighthouse, where our San Anselmo hosts were waiting at the parking lot with food, champagne, and several other friends. Together we went out to the lighthouse overlook (37º59'44"N, 123º01'23"W).

The picnic food was spread out and champagne was poured. We took turns proposing toasts and speaking about the trip, with breaks to watch whales blowing offshore. “What most impressed me,” Janet said, “is how kind and how supportive all the people along the way were in meeting with us and giving us their time and sharing their passion and really being passionate. It was very hopeful and inspiring.”

The most striking lessons about California water came gradually as our journey connected the watershed from the Sierra crest to the sea. Positive feelings built as we were shown each restoration effort and the dedication of so many good people pursuing meaningful environmental goals. That does not mean we can forget the state’s many water problems. Yet, to pull a concept from the presidential campaign under way that September, we emerged with audacious hope.

How vast the distance across the state became when walked at two miles per hour, sailed at four miles per hour, and bicycled, at times, up steep hills at a “speed” easily exceeded by a cruising butterfly. In 17 days we had traveled 350 miles, 75 of them on foot, 168 on bicycles, and 107 on boats. (A direct line from start to finish would have been 220 miles.) Crossing the state slowly, with time to look at things closely and experience them directly, provided new lessons for the two of us, who were born in the state, have worked and lived in many of its regions, and always cared about this special place on Earth called California.

At the overlook, an elderly couple who had been coming there for more than 30 years said that day had the best weather conditions they had ever seen at that spot. Janet and I stared at the ocean, trying to grasp the fact that we had finished. Off to the southwest, the profiles of the Farallon Islands were visible. Over the horizon, far to the west, the 38º latitude was heading toward another landfall, in Japan.

David and Janet Carle worked as park rangers at the Mono Lake Tufa State Reserve for over 20 years and still live north of the lake since their retirement from the State park service. Their on-going exploration of the 38th parallel will take them around the world and will become a book to be published by the University of California Press. David is the author of ten books, including four in the UC Press Natural History Guide series, about water, air, fire, and earth in California. Follow their journey at http://paralleluniverse38n.blogspot.com.