The Carrizo Plain was known to the Obispeño Chumash as tšɨłkukunɨtš, meaning “Place of the rabbits,” but there is a great deal more to be seen here than cottontails.

The Carrizo today is exploding with life, just as it was12,000 years ago when the first humans arrived and beheld its beauty and vastness.

The Carrizo Plain stretches 50 miles north and south and is 15 miles across in some places.

When you look down at its expanse from the mountains that sandwich it on either side you get a sense of the eternal, of what has come before and what will last long into the future.

The Carrizo can trace its story back 20 million years, to a time when the earth heaved and shook, uplifting the Caliente and Temblor ranges that span it east and west.

You are seeing what the land looked like before the Europeans came, and you get a sense of what the  Chumash, the Salinan and the Yokuts saw when they traversed this country in 10,000 BCE.

If you were to enter the Carrizo Plain near the end of the last Ice Age, you might see herds of native horses grazing on the open grasslands while camels moved gracefully across the valley. (Yes, camels once lived here, a species unique to North America).

In the distance, Columbian mammoths lumber across the plain, their immense size dwarfing everything around them. In a nearby grove, a giant ground sloth uses its 10-inch claws to pull down branches or dig for roots and tubers.

The scene seems peaceful until a pack of dire wolves emerge from the brush. The horses bunch together instinctively, while several camels wheel and trot away, unwilling to risk an encounter with one of the Ice Age’s most formidable predators.

The horses, the camels, the mammoths, the ground sloths and the dire wolves are all extinct now, as are the mastodons, the saber-tooth cats and the ancient bison that once roamed here.

But all left traces of themselves behind, as did the human beings, for there are more than 100 archaeological sites on the plain, giving us tantalizing clues as to who these people were and how they lived.

The Carrizo is home to more than 300 animal species: Among them are the San Joaquin kit fox, Tule elk, mule deer, golden eagles, prairie falcons, and during wet years, sandhill cranes.

There are rattlesnakes living along with tarantula hawk wasps and ground squirrels that whistle and disappear if a predator like a coyote comes near.

After the spring rainy season comes the world-famous super bloom, a blast of wildflowers covering tens of thousands of acres in orange, yellow, purple, white and blue.

During exceptional super blooms, the Carrizo becomes one of California’s largest natural displays of color, so extensive that, like the Himalayas of Tibet and the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, it has been photographed from space.

There are some 300 species of wildflowers and flowering plants here, including Baby Blue Eyes, the Blazing Star and the California poppy — the state flower.

While the Super Bloom fades with the coming of summer, the natural beauty of the Carrizo is not diminished in the slightest, and the sense of permanence remains, if anything, stronger than before.

That sense of timelessness is especially acute at Painted Rock. For centuries, Painted Rock was a sacred place where Chumash and Yokuts gathered to conduct ceremonies, mark important events, and create vivid pictographs whose meanings are only partly understood today.

Like Stonehenge in England, Painted Rock was likely a multigenerational undertaking — an ongoing ceremonial site whose origins may reach back as far as 2000 BCE.

For as many as 3 millennia, Chumash and Yokuts used red and yellow ochre, white clay, charcoal and soot to paint with their fingers or brushes fashioned from plant fibers images that reflected their spiritual beliefs and their relationship with the world around them.

Among the most remarkable examples of rock art in North America, these pictographs are widely believed to represent sacred powers associated with the landscape and the spirit world.

Some researchers also interpret certain images as relating to ancestors, fertility rituals or celestial bodies such as the sun, the moon and stars.

Over the centuries, new paintings were often added over older ones, creating the richly layered masterpiece that survives today.

Standing in the Carrizo Plain and looking out at its silent vastness, you are overwhelmed by the deep and all-encompassing silence. The present drifts away, and you are looking at thousands of years of natural history.

That sense of the eternal can only come from an unspoiled place like this one, and is the most valuable gift you can take with you — that and the memory of this limitless beauty.

On the Carrizo Plain you can understand the words of Lord Byron: “There is pleasure in the pathless woods. There is rapture on the lonely shore.”