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This chapter addresses the immediately south of the Cascades in the Sierra Nevada bioregion, extending nearly half the length of the state of California. This bioregion is one of the most striking features of the state of California, extending from the southern Cascade Mountains in the north to the Tehachapi Mountains and Mojave Desert 700 km to the south. Moreover, the fire responses of important species and fire regime-plant community interactions in the foothill shrubland and the woodland zone, the lower-montane forest ecological zone, the upper-montane forest, the subalpine forest, the alpine meadow, and the shrubland zone and eastside forest and woodland are explained. The success of the management of the Sierra Nevada is contingent on the ability and willingness to keep fire an integral part of these ecosystems.

This chapter discusses the montane and subalpine coniferous forests and other vegetation of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Ranges in California, vegetation patterns and environmental factors that affect distribution, and the role fire in spatial pattern and landscape. It also discusses some of the factors affecting vegetation, such as insects and pathogens, wind and avalanches, invasive species, air pollution, and logging.

This chapter discusses the occurrence of alpine vegetation in California—including high-elevation patterns of nonforested vegetation, which is considered to be either alpine or subalpine—and considers three alpine landscapes in California: coastal mountain, Sierra Nevada, and Great Basin. It also describes the floristic relationships, timberline conditions, and vegetation patterns at high elevations throughout the state.

In the process of the making of building nation-state, numerous mountain ridges have been mobilized as "natural" borders between states. On the opposite, recent initiatives try to shift from this notion of mountains as barrier to mountains as bridges among communities. The transboundary character of the mountains is considered as an asset. These regional initiatives are part of the general rise in influence of transnational regions, which the imaginaries of globalization seem to encourage, even as the exclusive prerogatives of nation-states evolve and transborder practices intensify.

There is much excellent phylogenetic work on California plant species, but the molecular tools used thus far are generally more useful at discerning evolutionary relationships that occurred prior to the Pleistocene. Some species were survivors of disjunctions among previously widely distributed taxa and some arrived via dispersal. There is good evidence that many California plant clades are the result of Miocene migrations across Beringia. Although likely originating from the Old World, several California genera have evolutionary divergence centered in western North America and illustrate the phylogeography of flowering plants of California. Diversification on complex substrates during fluctuating climates has resulted in high levels of endemism throughout the state, but particularly in the Klamath-Siskiyou and Coast Ranges. Evolutionary processes within California’s many endemic species undoubtedly included allopolyploidy, autopolyploidy, and apomixis. Secondary contact resulting in hybridization—as a result of colonization from multiple refugia—has led to interesting genetic patterns of reticulation in many taxa. Much phylogeographic work remains to be conducted on the flora of California, particularly those species that occur in the Klamath-Siskiyou region and those with distributions in the Transverse Ranges and southern Sierra Nevada. Endemics with the most restricted distributions are present in the central Coast Ranges, the Sierra Nevada, and the San Bernardino Range, with the youngest neoendemics identified from the Desert and Great Basin.

California insects surveyed for their phylogeographic structure display a variety of patterns, depending on their vagility, habitat requirements, and reproduction. Although insects have been present since the Paleozoic, they experienced significant extinction during at the end of the Permian. Modern insect lineages expanded and migrated in the mid-Mesozoic with the expansion of freshwater ecosystems and with associations with angiosperms in the Cretaceous. Later colonizations of western North America by insects were likely the result of repeated migrations across Beringia and from eastern North America. Molecular evidence from taxa in the Klamath-Siskiyou region, southern Cascades, and northern Sierra Nevada support migration from Asia. Endemism in the Sierra Nevada is surprisingly low (at 0.9 percent) and occurs primarily at higher elevations; however, mountainous species—particularly alpine taxa—reflect the effects of Pleistocene climatic change on their genetic structure. Butterflies, in particular, have the capacity for long-range dispersal, but because they are vulnerable to environmental change, they provide a good model for the study of phylogeographic change. Low-dispersing species have emerged as particularly useful in providing genetic signatures of past vicariant events.

The northern provinces encompass all of California north of the Transverse Ranges, which dissect the state in an east-west fashion just north of the Los Angeles Basin. This chapter deals with the discoveries of Mesozoic reptiles in the Klamath Mountains Province, Sierra Nevada, Great Valley Province, and the Coast Ranges Province. The Klamath Mountains Province is the geological northern extension of the Sierra Nevada. It is in this province where more than two hundred Triassic reptile fossils have been found. The first discovery of reptilian fossils in the Sierra was made in 1954 and the remains were those of a plesiosaur. In the Great Valley Province, a multitude of discoveries has yielded a rich trove of Late Jurassic and Cretaceous dinosaurs and marine reptiles. Three specimens of Mesozoic reptile remains from the Coast Range rocks were discovered. Two of them were found in radiolarian cherts: highly contorted, thinly layered beds originally deposited in the deep ocean well offshore from the continent. The third specimen is the first evidence of a Jurassic plesiosaur discovered west of the Rockies. The fossil came from a limestone concretion weathered out of the so-called Franciscan-Knoxville shales.

This chapter seeks to understand the relationship of settlement booms and gold rushes, and to use each to gain insight into the other. In 1848, gold was found inland of San Francisco, California. The United States had just wrested this region and more from Mexico in the war of 1846–1847. The subsequent gold rush brought California's first great inflow of people in 1849, and unfolded thereafter in what was to become the standard pattern. Gold presented in two main forms: ‘placer’ or alluvial deposits of gold dust, grains, and small nuggets distributed through soil or gravel by erosion, which could be acquired simply by washing and sifting, and seams or veins in quartz rock which required expensive deep mining and crushing. The Californian rush proper peaked in 1853 and ended with a local bust in 1855, but gold continued to be crushed and washed from the Sierra Nevada for decades thereafter.

This chapter focuses on the David Belasco work, The Girl of the Golden West. This was seen on its first peformance by Giacomo Puccini in 1907, while he was on his visit to New York. Puccini was searching for his next project when he saw the play of Belasco. Belasco specialized in melodrama emphasizing naturalism. The Girl of the Golden West is about a young woman living in a mining camp mostly populated by men. The setting of Belasco's play and Puccini's opera are situated within the Sierra Nevada mountains. Their works sparked the modernist ideologies which governed the civilizing process. Lastly, the two envisioned the time–space relations.

This book examines the role of the Chinese in the lumber trade in the American West during the late nineteenth century, with a focus on the Sierra Nevada in the 1870s to 1890s. It looks at Chinese laborers' contribution to the building of the American West by analyzing their migration, their communities and lifestyles, lived experiences, transnationalism, and their work in relationship to mining and railroad construction. It also considers the timber barons and companies that employed Chinese workers, their departure from the Sierra Nevada forests, and the anti-Chinese sentiment that they endured. It shows that Chinese immigrants new to North America were first attracted to mining, but they turned to other work, such as logging, when they met with resistance and opposition from miners. The book also challenges some of the popular stereotypes that developed during this period of emerging unionism, along with the assumption of “cheap Chinese labor” that has been used to interpret the Chinese experience in late-nineteenth-century America.

This concluding chapter discusses the departure of the Chinese from their involvement in lumbering, years after making a significant contribution to the building of the American West. In the 1880s Chinese immigrants constituted the majority of the men employed in the lumber trade in the Sierra Nevada. They undertook a variety of jobs, from wood transportation and mill operation to digging ditches, grading roads, cooking and cleaning, and caring for the animals. The wages they earned were determined by the type of job they did. This chapter shows that Chinese laborers in the logging industry had moved either into other occupations or to work in other forests—some even returned to China—by 1920 due to a variety of factors, such as the emerging forest conservation movement, technological improvements in logging, decreased demand for lumber, and the rise of large corporations that drove the smaller lumber firms out of business.

Chapter 2 follows the early travels of John Muir to get a glimpse of the highly mobile landscape of the decades that followed the Civil War, particularly in the South and West. Before he rose to fame as the founder of the Sierra Club, Muir walked the country’s roads alongside mobile laborers, newly freed African Americans, and Native peoples. For them, as for the itinerant naturalist, sleeping outside could constitute a marginal and perilous, if all-too-familiar existence. Muir alternately knocked on strangers’ doors, slept outside in fear of disease and alligators, and herded sheep in Sierra meadows. His interpretations and criticisms of Black and Indigenous people figured into Muir’s seminal perspectives on wilderness, which in turn influenced changing views of public nature, including recreational and nonrecreational campers alike in the late nineteenth century.

Alfred Haunold’s hybrid hops saved the Oregon hop industry by appealing to macro brewers such as Anheuser Busch, Miller, and Coors. But, at the same time, a craft beer revolution unfolded on the Pacific Coast. This chapter explains that, while the big brewers helped sponsor the hop breeding efforts, they did not always want the end result. In fact, the big brewers used only a handful of the two dozen hop varieties that Haunold released until his retirement in 1996. The hops we have in our microbrews today are the result of newfound collaborations resulting from the craft brewers of the 1980s and 1990s. And, unlike the 1950s and 1960s, the hop has become a visible component of beer marketing.

This chapter discusses the annual grassland systems occupying the coastal ranges, central valley, and Sierra Nevada foothills, describing the common non-native invasive species in California Valley and foothill grasslands, including their growth form, classification, and ecological and economic impacts. It also describes several techniques for invasive plant management in California grasslands.

Epicenters from numerous earthquakes fall approximately along two parallel lines that stretch from southeast to northwest through Yellowstone National Park. During the past 630,000 years, lava flowed from eruptive vents located roughly along the same lines. The alignment of earthquakes and small volcanoes suggests that zones of weakness are deep beneath them within the Earth. Those zones may be the still-active roots of faults that once ran along the base of towering mountains. Such mountains would have made ancient Yellowstone resemble today’s Grand Teton National Park. Indeed, a few million years ago these mountains may have stretched northward through Yellowstone and hooked up with the Gallatin Range, which now extends from Montana south into Yellowstone’s northwest corner. So why is today’s Yellowstone Plateau relatively flat? What happened to the mountains that once may have rose thousands of feet skyward like the Tetons do today? The answer, quite simply, is that they were destroyed 2 million years ago during a caldera eruption, which is the largest, most catastrophic kind of volcanic outburst—an explosion so cataclysmic that it dwarfs any eruption in historic time. North America had continued its southwestward slide over the Yellowstone hotspot. After blasting and repaving the Snake River Plain, the hotspot was finally beneath the place for which it later was named. The power of its rising heat and hot rock began to shape Yellowstone into what it is today. The first eruptive blast at Yellowstone 2 million years ago left a gigantic hole in the ground—a hole larger than the state of Rhode Island. The huge crater, known as a caldera, measured about 5o miles long, 40 miles wide, and hundreds of yards deep. It extended from Island Park in Idaho to the central part of Yellowstone in Wyoming. During the volcanic cataclysm, hot ash and rock blew into the heavens over Yellowstone, then rained like hell from the sky. As heavier pumice and ash particles debris piled up on the ground, their heat welded the debris together to form a layer of solid rock called ash-flow tuff or welded tuff.