Hornitos Road, Merced Falls, Mariposa County, CA, 5/18/2010
Whenever I follow my electronic navigator's most direct route from my home to Yosemite National Park, I drive past the abandoned town of Merced Falls and then south along Hornitos Road. The route goes through rolling grassland countryside here at the edge of California Gold Country. This particular old oak tree and distant vista beyond had caught my eye on earlier trips, but the weather and lighting were never ideal; usually there were absolutely no clouds. On this beautiful May afternoon I found my favorite kind of sky: deep blue with white puffy cumulus clouds out to the horizon. Such a sky completes the scene, adding interest and depth to the landscape. This is the view looking east northeast from the road at an elevation of 460 feet above sea level, with Merced County and Table Top Mountain behind us and Mariposa County and distant Cemetery Hill before us. At the horizon are the western flank of the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite National Park. Before European settlement of North America, the oak savanna ecosystem was part of a fire ecology. Fires started by lightning and Native Americans ensured that the savanna areas did not become forests; only trees with a high tolerance for fire - especially certain oak species - were able to survive. Today, grasslands in California are among the most endangered ecosystems in the United States. The Gold Country is famed for the mineral deposits and gold mines that attracted waves of immigrants during the 1849 California Gold Rush. The region lies here on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, reaching down to the Sacramento Valley.
