RECOGNIZING PARADISE

On a cool June day in 1884, the pioneering California botanist Thomas Jefferson Howell urged his tired horse up yet another ridge in the southern Siskiyou Mountains. Howell was probably as weary as his mount, but his keen eye spied an unfamiliar and distinctive tree growing along the rugged track. This was a medium-sized conifer, a spruce, with strange, drooping branchlets. Howell collected specimens of the odd little tree, which proved to be a species new to science. Today, it is called the Weeping, or Brewer’s, Spruce. Found only on exposed mountain ridges in northern California and southwestern Oregon, it was the very last tree species to be discovered in North America.

The discovery of Brewer’s Spruce illustrates two themes that have marked the natural history of our region: its extreme wealth, and its great obscurity. Only at the very end of the 20^th century is this obscurity beginning to lift, as the world becomes aware that one of its greatest biological treasuries lies a few hours north of San Francisco. Here, in a tangle of sharp-edged mountains and wild rivers lies a world that geologists call the Klamath Knot, ecologists call the Klamath-Siskiyou Ecoregion, and almost everyone reading this calls . . . home.

Nature places life on the land in endlessly subtle and intermingled patterns. Humans, on the other hand, delight in boundaries of all kinds. Both nature and humanity have given free rein to their pattern-making artistry in our region, resulting in a very complicated landscape. This provides plenty of room for individual opinion on exactly where the region begins and ends. Geology gives one answer, hydrology another, botany a third, while politics has complicated matters by adding the California-Oregon state line, among other things. But there is no question about the core of the region: it is the rugged mountains that are called the Siskiyous north of the Klamath River and the Klamaths south of it.

This is a land of magnificent wilderness: Kalmiopsis, Siskiyou, Red Buttes, Marble Mountains, Trinity Alps, and Yolla Bolly, to mention only the largest of the officially designated wilderness areas. From this core, the region extends to the banks of the Umpqua River on the north and to the headwaters of the Eel River on the south. It includes the fog-bound Pacific coast from Port Orford south to the mouth of the Klamath River, and reaches its eastern boundaries in the arid foothills of the Rogue and Shasta Valleys.