Driving 140 miles to the remote and glorious Carrizo Plain at the end of April, we entered a vast dome of blue sky with surrounding low mountain ranges creating a magnificent “bowl” effect below and above, and reminding me of John McPhee’s famous 1982 book title, “Basin and Range.”

The Carrizo Plain and Elkhorn Mesa comprise the last remnants of native grasslands that once covered huge portions of inland California. Today, only about 2% of these original grassy plains still exist, and the 246,000-acre Carrizo Plain National Monument is California’s largest remaining natural prairie (grassland).

When you visit here, you jerk backward in geologic time — you actually see and experience California as an enclosed grassland. Much of the surface appeared this way hundreds of thousands of years ago. I felt a weird and scary ‘scape tormented by tectonic forces over the millions of years; the San Andreas Fault right here attests to the earthquakes and “shaking” (temblor from Spanish).

“The Carrizo” prairie remnant survives largely because of its remote location far from Los Angeles and Santa Barbara as well as the attendant highway difficulties getting there. While I have driven into the national monument from the north end near Carrizo Painted Rock (via San Luis Obispo), the easier route leads past Santa Maria and onto the long and demented Highway 166 — the loneliest highway in California (4.1.1. Driving).

The “basin” feature of this elevated sedimentary plain arises when we realize there are specific transverse mountain ranges that shape the “bowl” effect. Basin and range topography show abrupt changes in elevation (the Elkhorn escarpment here), arid and flat valleys (basins), and topographic alternations between the faulted mountain chains all around.

Here in the Carrizo we have the quaking Temblor Range and San Andreas Rift Zone framing the eastern rim (first photo) and the Caliente Range forming the western rim. Soda Lake Road, the only road, runs right up the length of the Carrizo on a more or less north-south axis.

The naturally enclosed grassland — tree-less and resplendent with thousands of colorful acres of spring wildflowers and rare native grasses — also has 13 endangered species that call this prairie their homeland, including the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the giant kangaroo rat and the threatened tule elk.

The Carrizo Plain was far larger in the past, of course, and research has shown that at least 300 Chumash/Yokuts Indigenous people lived in complex settlements around the much larger Soda Lake 4,000 years ago.  Sometime around 1000 AD (the so-called Medieval Climatic Anomaly) a climate catastrophe struck, and numbers plummeted to under 50 because of drought (see Whitley, “The Carrizo Collapse” in 4.1.1.).

Many threatened California grasses and native plants have disappeared from our local area, but way out there on the Carrizo we spotted lush fields of native spring grasses, well-protected here, distant from the humans who bring in exotic plants that displace some natives.

Another floral example came in our discovery of abundant stands of the beautiful purple flowering thistle sage, technically Salvia carduacea, and chia plant, technically Salvia columbariae. A herbaceous annual that flowers in the spring as you see in the photograph, the chia plant produces small oily seeds much prized by Indigenous collectors for high nutritional value and taste.

Jan Timbrook in her landmark “Chumash Ethnobotany” writes, “Chia was one of the favorite foods of the Chumash and many other California peoples.” The way Chumash groups harvested this important crop was to pull up the whole plants, pile them on the ground and let them dry out some. Then, they would thrash the bundles with specially-woven “seed-beater” tools to knock out the tiny seeds, then winnow out the dirt and brush from the kernels.

This method also carefully ensures some seeds will fall through and in effect this indigenous harvesting practice automatically reseeds the area for next spring’s harvest. The fields of light purple chia I saw at the Carrizo have reproduced naturally and have no competition from non-natives.

Wandering on foot from our impromptu “campsite,” we found small fields and potreros bursting with vivid wildflowers, including the ubiquitous purple lupine, California goldfields (Lasthenia californica) and fiddlenecks.

Later in the afternoon, we built a small campfire near the truck, using wood we brought along, carefully erased its coals the next day and, of course, carried off all our own trash — no trace camping.

We turned off Soda Lake Road on the way in taking a random dirt road where we had spotted a few fine, isolated car-camping possibilities and we chose one after about 10 minutes.

We never passed other vehicles and noted just one other camping group about a half-mile distant clustered around a solitary tall tree. It was a school group who later hiked by en masse, trudging their path into the Calientes and singing songs with the gusto of youth.

You will need to explore on your own to locate a prime spot, and remember there are no amenities at all in these Bureau of Land Management free sites, what they term “dispersed camping” — no table, no water, no wood, no fire circle, no trash cans, no nothing. Bring water and firewood, a shovel, all your supplies, medical, a guitar or two, and songs in the heart as you sip refreshments and escape from tomorrow.

What is boondocking? Boondocking is when you camp on public lands without any hookups to electricity, water or sewage. The term originally indicated in an RV. BLM calls it “dispersed camping,” but I’ve been boondocking in a tent next to my truck for more than 40 years, and for the past 10 years I usually sleep in the back with a fiberglass shell overhead.

Since most of these U.S. Forest Service camps, like Nira Camp beside Manzana Creek, offer only a wooden table and iron fire ring as amenities, those are practically boondocking yet charge $32 a night. (Remember: no electric, potable water, or sewage.)

When out on the much more liberated BLM lands (not national forests), there are no amenities but also very few restrictions. Best practices to follow can be found here (a BLM site).

4.1.1.

Driving: Take Highway 101 north past Santa Maria, and shortly after driving across the very wide concrete bridge, exit Highway 101 at Highway 166 East. Drive on past Cuyama and take a left turn on Soda Lake Road. Drive straight on into the Carrizo Plain from “the bottom end,” or the southern entrance.

Books: Chuck Graham, “Carrizo Plain — Where the Mountains Meet the Grasslands” (2020); Jan Timbrook, “Chumash Ethnobotany” (2007), pp. 188-193; David Whitley et al. “The Carrizo Collapse: Art and Politics in the Past” in “A Festschrift Honoring … Jay von Werlhof” ” (2007); see here for more geology and where Carrizo is called “the Cadillac of the San Andreas Fault Zone.”

Map: Download a printable Carrizo visitor map here.