Great Western Road Trip: The Roads and Scenery of California

California is an immense state and although we stayed mostly in the northern portion of California, it still has an immense variety of beautiful and intriguing landscapes. These are road notes from central and northern California.

We entered California from the east on Highway 374 (Nevada) through Death Valley. Driving through Death Valley is quite an experience and if you do it in the evening, not only is it better on your car, but you won't have to pay the park entrance fee.

When you enter Death Valley you drive down through deserted hills, down and down, and come out into the valley itself. It's a long ways down, but as you're descending you can see the sand dunes in the distance. Near the bottom of the valley, you drive through dark-brown dirt hills that look more like sand dunes in their shape, but they're tall enough you can't see past them.

When you make it past them, you seem to be continually driving towards the sand dunes, but they're constantly further away. When you finally arrive, they're within about 100-m walking distance and are easy to walk up on or see as you drive by.

The heat of Death Valley is like a hot sauna and can be very bad for your car in the middle of the day. You then drive up and up the other side of the valley thousands of feet in a relatively short time to escape the heat. The mountains are interspersed with piles of black rock which seem to be ancient lava.

For a while after, you're driving through some very windy roads on the mountains (I don't recommend this at night) which should give some great vistas of the valleys below. You then drive just as far back down towards what looks like a river from far off (about 5-10 miles). When you get there it's just a big patch of light dirt/sand where hardly anything is growing. Then you go up and up again through windy roads and mountains before you go down and down again towards 395. It's an adventurous stretch, but still very scenic.

California's Highway 395 is mainly along a valley in this portion which provides for fairly flat and straight driving. When driving north, the dirty, lower mountains of the Death Valley mountain range are on your right/east and higher mountains (Mt. McKinley and the Sierra Nevada) with patches of remaining snow are on the left/west. Also, although much of the vegetation is the prairie/desert type, there are also quite a few short trees spread around from time to time.

Further north (about 15-30 minutes from Lone Pine), you pass a couple short stretches of uneven hills of black rock just by the roadside that are mainly covered in the yellow bushy plants, but not enough that the black rock isn't quite noticeable. They look similar (on a much smaller and more worn-down scale) to the lava boulders of the Valley of Fires, New Mexico.

As you go further north and closer to Yosemite, you drive through several stretches that take you up into the mountains. The pine trees that were previously dotting the distant mountains become more numerous until you're soon in the middle of a nice pine forest with red trunks and green fully-needled branches. The pine forest eventually disappears but the snow-capped mountains appear more prominently on all horizons.

When you get to Highway 120 and head west towards Yosemite, you head straight into the mountains. The pine forest reappears and is now accented with other short trees. The mountains loom right next to the roadside and are similar to those found in Zion National Park (with sharp-angeled rocks jutting out everywhere), but more gray and white than red/pink and their rocky tops retain blankets of snow.

This eastern portion of Yosemite provides some very beautiful scenic views. There are lots of little ponds and lakes, streams, and meadows with the forests and huge mountains in the background. The trees throughout the park are a mix of various pines and even some small Sequoia trees. There are many wild flowers and some ferns growing right along the sides of the road.

Leaving Yosemite National Park on Highway 41 South towards Fresno, you continue to pass through windy mountain roads covered in the same type of pine forest. As you finally come out of the mountains and forests, you're driving through constantly rolling hills covered with yellow grasses and green trees.

After passing through the edge of Fresno and heading east on 180, you see a very faint blue outline of the distant Sierra Nevada with a few other mountains a bit closer up. You pass through a fairly flat land with quite a few farms of vegetables, orchards, and vineyards. There are also lots of fresh fruit stands. After driving through these you come back to some yellow grasslands with some low-lying mountains and more green trees. Soon, you drive straight up into the mountains.

The Sequoia National Park mountains are full of massively tall pines and even taller (and much more massive) Giant Sequoias. The Sequoias themselves are limited to certain groves where the conditions are just right, so it's in the last half of the General's Highway loop that you'll see the most of them. You can even drive through a tunnel carved through a fallen one.

On the way down and out of the forest, you arrive in the foothills with the Sierra Nevada behind you. Here, there are compacted rolling hills of yellow grasses and many multi-colored trees so that it looks much like an early autumn. It makes for pretty nice scenery.

As you leave the park on Highway 198 West towards Visalia, the majority of the trees disappear, but there are still enough left to go with the grasses and hills. At first you're driving alongside a river and soon you drive a short loop around a very scenic lake surrounded by hills of grass and a few trees and occasional sharply jutting rocks.

After the loop around the lake, you drive through farm after farm after farm, mainly of orchards (oranges especially), but some vineyards and some vegetables. When you get on Highway 99 North towards Modesto, you're mainly driving through city after town after city with little to see on the sides of the road except the faint outline of the Sierra Nevada to your east. At least the road has some nice landscaping with flowering tree-bushes lining both the divider (at many points) and the outer walls of the interstate (at almost all points).

When you head west on towards San Francisco the interstate changes designations several times, and it takes you through some larger smoothly rounded hills with less trees but the same yellow grasses as earlier in California. Many of these hills have tightly packed clusters of windmills on them. Also, I'm pretty sure that when these hills are green, that's where the main Windows XP background picture came from, to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

Finally, you drive through more urban cityways, across a very long bridge (about 7 miles) and you arrive in San Francisco. San Francisco has several main hills/ridgelines with houses clustered all over them, but it still maintains a healthy amount of trees.

As you head north out of San Francisco on Interstate 101, you cross the bay area by the Golden Gate Bridge. This is definitely a very enjoyable and memorable experience as the Golden Gate Bridge is one of the most photographed sites in the world.

As you continue to head northeast and take Highway 37 to wine country, you leave the cities and enter low-rolling hills covered in vineyards. It's a very beautiful countryside. As you head north on either the Silverado Trail or Highway 29 through wine valley, the climate turns into about 75-85 degree weather with a slight breeze. Basically, the weather is perfect.

Along these two roads, there are wine estates everywhere and they are all fabulously executed. Remember the scene in Gladiator with Russel Crowe's Spanish Estate? Many of these estates really look that immaculate. They're often done up in the Italian/Spanish style (or the French style if neither of those) and have accompanying landscaping and gardens that are incredibly impressive. Directly alongside the manicured parts of the estates are always the ever-extending vineyards.

Since Highway 29 runs through the floor of Napa Valley, you have the valley walls, covered in a combination of vineyards and forests, sloping up to your east and your west. These are some of the nicest views we've seen yet. We headed out on "Skaggs-Springs Road" and it was a very windy road, but went by a very nice lake and through some nice-looking and often dense forests.

As you head north on Highway 1 up the California coast, you frequently receive nice ocean-views. It's not entirely ocean-view the whole way like you may have heard, nor is it lined with palm trees like (if you don't live on the western coast) you may expect. But it is almost always beautiful.

It's often a slightly curvy road and at times it is very curvy. It mostly winds around the coastal hills and around coves and bays. About 1/3 of the time, the western side ocean-view is blocked by forests and gates that people put up to claim the space. But about 2/3 of the time, you have an either completely clear view of the ocean, or still a good view of the ocean through a thin and sparse line of trees or other plants.

The trees are mostly cypress but with a few others and occasional evergreens. The types of plants that grow in place of grass at most of the coastal access areas are ones I've never seen before, so I can't even tell you what they are. They're mostly rough plants though and occasionally thorny... not pleasant to walk on or too near.

The Pacific coastline itself is often amazing. It's rough with many sheer cliffs and the occasional sandy beach. When you get a good view of it, the dark and massive rocks that rise up near the shore make a nice contrast to the houses on the grassy edges of the nearby cliffs.

There's also one lighthouse on this section of Highway 1 which can be driven out to from a well-marked access road. It looks very scenic in a typical lighthouse sort of way. For $5 each visitors can climb the lighthouse to the top. Many of the small towns on Highway 1 are also made up of quaint Victorian or colonial-style buildings and there are plenty of lodges and spas if you're interested.

Once Highway 1 ends along the ocean, it curves inwards towards Interstate 101. As it's curving in, there are some nice parts (but very curvy) through tall forests of every variety of tree: evergreens, oaks, maples, etc.

Where Highway 1 turns into 101, you can take a short 5 mile detour and drive through a tunnel carved into a living coastal redwood tree. It's the only living one of its kind and only costs $5 a car, so I think it's worth it. There's also a nice pond and picnic area at the Drive-Thru Tree Park and at the gift shop you can buy good-sized and healthy redwood or sequoia saplings for less than $10 if you're interested.

Highway 101 is mostly curving, but not too much, alongside a nice-looking riverbed and through similar forested areas with the occasional coastal redwood towering over the rest of the trees. Here, you drive by such touristy sites as "World's Tallest Treehouse" (which was closed as we went by, but as far as I can tell it was the first room of a house cut through a giant, living redwood and was connected to the rest of the house) and "One Log House" which was a house about the size of a large freight-train car and was indeed made from one horizontal log, complete with windows, door, and everything.

When you get to the turn-off for "Avenue of the Giants" scenic route, you should most certainly take it. As a scenic route, it only goes through a few extra turns which add up to just a few more miles and its curves are rarely too sharp. It takes you right alongside 101 and there are probably 5 or 6 areas where you can get back on anytime you want.

But the great thing is that just alongside 101 on Avenue of the Giants, you drive straight through several dense groves of redwood trees. Here, the generally open and sunny road becomes dense shadow (almost like a tunnel carved through a mountain) as the redwood trees tower overhead. Their trunks are massive (at the base, barely less skinny than their Sequoia cousins) and there are far more of them clustered together than even the Sequoias in Sequoia National Park.

Avenue of the Giants even takes you by one tree, the "Chimney Tree," which survived a fire that burned straight up through the middle of it in the early 1900's, hollowing out the entire tree. Now, the hollow base is a 12-foot wide room which can be entered through a door in the side. From this room you can view straight up through the hollow tree to its top where its own leaves can be seen overhead. It's completely free to enter the tree. At the end of the scenic route, it takes you by another tree called the "immortal tree" which has survived a lighting bolt scarring its side, being put to the ax by a would-be logger, and a flood over 30 feet high.

When you get back on Interstate 101 North, it continues to travel near the same river and turns towards the ocean as it gets near Redwood National Park. It goes through a few major towns located on small bays, providing a few more ocean views, but not quite on par with Highway 1.

As Interstate 101 goes through the national forest and park, you first drive by a nice lagoon on your right and the ocean on your left with a beach in the middle that provides plenty of opportunity to enjoy either. It's a very nice sight.

Then, there's a scenic bypass, Newton B Drury scenic parkway, that takes you through another grove of redwoods that's nearly as nice as the Avenue of Giants. This grove, though, is primary growth (which means it has never been cut down by humans) and has very lush and thick undergrowth. It reminds me a lot of a rainforest but more of the recent King Kong movie because of the huge size of it all.

The Newton B Drury scenic byway isn't too long and when you get back on Interstate 101, it takes you through another scenic strip by the ocean. Then the road travels through some more regular forests and a couple more redwood groves before you come out of the National Park area to Crescent City.

At Crescent City's south entrance, it has a nice strip of sandy beach that attracts a lot of people. Just past Crescent City on Interstate 199 heading northeast you drive through the Jedediah Smith State Park, another nice but short stretch of redwood trees. Then you follow the road through lower forests and around curves that run along a small creek gorge as you drive into Oregon. California definitely has a huge variety of landscape!