North Table Mountain Reserve looks down on the town of Oroville and its man-made lake, about an hour-and-a-half drive north of Sacramento on I-5, CA 99, and CA 70. A few minutes north of Sacramento the bustling post-rush-hour traffic thins out quite a bit and from then on I encounter mostly farm vehicles—pickup trucks and lumbering field contraptions. Now I can see that I am out in the middle of California's perfectly flat Central Valley. Orchards and seemingly empty fields stretch in all directions. Soon, over to the east on this hazy morning, the outline of the snow-capped Sierras begins to emerge.
The reserve sits on the top of an ancient basalt mesa reached via a narrow, winding six-mile road. No signs along the highway, in town, or at the turnoff at Cherokee Road. No signs at the reserve itself, just about fifty parked vehicles and half a dozen porta-potties. The reserve is fenced with barbed wire, but at the parking area several stiles allow easy access.
I don’t understand the hydrology of a mesa, but rivulets, streams, and vernal pools crisscross the land. Piles, sheets, and mini mountain ranges of black basalt sometimes make walking difficult. The reserve looks flat, but as I walk I encounter gullies, ravines, and canyons, as well as a noisy waterfall. Many miles to the west, out of the mist shimmers the ghostly bulk of Sutter Buttes, a menacing, forbidding-looking jumble of rock rising straight out of the valley floor.
I wander at will across the trackless expanse of the mesa and, despite the number of cars at the entrance, I most often find myself alone as far as I can see, alone with myriad wildflowers. Thousands of white meadowfoam inhabit the wetter areas, some even in the middle of streams. Blankets of Lobb’s poppy, a tiny version of our familiar California poppy, spread over acres. Goldfields and blennosperma add their varieties of yellow to the color scheme. Blue dicks and lupines, pink checkerblooms, white popcorn flowers grow in between the yellows, most in great profusion. I find startlingly red Kellogg’s monkey flowers at the bottom of a pile of black rock. Dwarf cliff sedums seem perfectly happy on the otherwise bare rock and nearby grows a lovely little pink and white onion.
So there you have it, an unusual landform, with an unusual collection of plant life, in an unusual year. You have to arrive there within a narrow window of time; in a few weeks it will be a brown California grassland. But I found it, as did at least a hundred other people on that windy April day, and to each of us it was as if it belonged to us alone.
North Table Mountain Reserve
Kellogg's monkey flower
Ancient basalt and this year's wildflowers
Pink-flowered wild onion
Milkmaids