California's High Lonesome

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I drive for a living. I am responsible for clients across the entirety of Northern California and a good chunk of Northern Nevada. A lot of these drives are ordinary and mundane, but every once in awhile I get a real beauty.

I set up a business trip to Reno to be followed directly by a visit to my most distant client in Klamath Falls, Oregon. This meant a 260 mile run through California's north east corner, the High Lonesome corner I sometimes call it for its mix of mountains and high desert, sage brush and juniper trees, dry lakebeds yielding mercifully to lush agricultural stretches, and above all, hardly any people.

US Highway 395 runs from the Mojave Desert all the way up to the Canadian border. From Reno, it is the main route leaving town to the north, rising up into the dry barren hills and quickly back across the border into California. The arroyo country below Petersen Mountain features an un-signed desert hot spring and a nice vista of naturally sculpted red rocks. The highway eventually drops into the arid bowl of Honey Lake, an enormous dry lakebed with small agricultural communities clinging to the fringes of the runoff-laden mountains of the Plumas National Forest. Sky high plumes of windblown dust soared off the lakebed. This is old family country for me, where my grandparents, aunts and uncles used to reside. My father hunted deer in these nearby mountains when he was a boy.

The region’s largest town is Susanville, population 17,000. Known for agriculture, lumber mills, and prisons, Susanville is also a very important last chance stop for gas and the supermarket before you head out into the real wilderness. Here I left 395 and caught State Route 139 heading up to Eagle Lake. This again was a road I had traveled in my youth on numerous family summer vacations. Probably 20 years had passed since I last visited here. Still I remembered the routine; up the Antelope grade, through the juniper forest, across the 5-mile flat, then another forest, and then the steep downgrade into the basin of the great blue-green lake. Eagle Lake sits at elevation 5,000 feet and is dominated at its north-eastern end by 7,900-foot Fredonyer Peak. I visited the fire lookout station on top once when I was young. The forest service rangers with their Campaign Hats had Smokey The Bear handouts for all us kids.

The Modoc Plateau is a landscape mostly sculpted by lava from what is now the southern expanse of the Cascade Range, the Sierra Nevada having ceased somewhere around the southern end of Eagle Lake. Mts Lassen and Shasta are not too far away. Long lonely stretches of sagebrush valleys give way to wetter, greener valleys where population and agriculture have settled themselves. Adin has a population of approximately 600 and Canby, watered by the Pit River, has a population closer to 400.

From Canby, highway 139 rises up a crack in the hillside to an extraordinary long, flat lava plateau covered with pines and small lakes. Mt. Hoffman and the surrounding Medicine Lake peaks dominate the westward looking view, with 9,700 foot Eagle Peak back near the Nevada border lining up nicely in the rear view mirror. As the highway turns north toward Oregon, the elevation drops. Lava Beds National Monument sits about 4,500 feet, 14 miles off the highway and the agricultural towns of Newell and Tulelake benefit from a lower, broader, wetter valley than the previous lava elevations. Newell hosts the odd and isolated rock formation known as the Peninsula, like nearly everything else here, seemingly volcanic in origin.

And a few miles further on I arrived at my destination, a Holiday Inn Express in the town of Klamath Falls, Oregon. I took my dinner at the Sizzler with a nearby local smoothie joint providing the dessert. I would meet my client first thing in the morning. Better than sitting in an office all day, don’t you think?

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Photos

Five Mile Flat
Lassen County, CA

The Peninsula
View from the west. Newell, CA.

Desolate Gas Station
Herlong, CA

Eagle Lake
Lassen County, CA

Willow Creek
Modoc National Forest

The Peninsula
View from the east. Newell, CA.