California Wilderness

The California Wilderness is envisioned as encompassing the wildest and least populated California lands of a within the Mediterranean climatic zone. As illustrated below, it would stretch south from the San Francisco Bay Area to the mountains just north of Los Angeles. East to west it would extend from the Central Valley to the Pacific Coast at Big Sur.

One of the best places today to examine the ancient Pleistocene life of Southern California is the La Brea Tar Pits. This video demonstrates the Pleistocene environment in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Grizzly Bear - Its return to California is a goal of many

The rebirth of the future California Pleistocene landscape began in the late 1970s with the relocation of tule elk into the Diablo Range in the northern wilderness reaches. This successful move was followed by the reintroduction of pronghorn antelope and tule elk to the Carrizo Plain in the central lands east of the Big Sur.

Beside wildlife currently extant in these lands, the wilderness would include representatives or relatives of animals once inhabiting California. 

The California Megafauna Chart below lists potential wildlife inhabitants in the ultimate wilderness. 

African Elephant

One example would be the African Elephant to represent the place of the Columbian Mammoth in the reconstituted pleistocene landscape. 

Most symbolic of the animals is the grizzly bear, whose only current residence in California is on the state flag. Its closest American relatives are found in the Yellowstone region of the Rocky Mountains south of the Canadian border.

The California Wilderness would be linked by wildlife corridors to the Mohave Desert and the Sierra Nevada Wildernesses. The Mohave corridor would cross the Tehachapi Mountains that enclose the south end of the Central Valley. 

Pronghorn Antelope

The Sierra corridor would cross the Central Valley, connecting across former oil fields to the Kern River Valley as it emerges from the Sierras. This corridor would pass through the north end of the City of Bakersfield where oil facilities currently are occupied. 200 years in the future this area would be ripe for cleanup and rebirth as a corridor for wildlife migrating across the Central Valley grasslands between the Coast Range and the Sierra Mountains. 

The major Highway 5 north/south arterial would most likely tunnel underneath the Mohave/Tehachapi corridor and bridge the Central Valley/Sierra corridor.

A corridor in the north would connect the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta with the northernmost extension of the California Wilderness. Given the potential increase in sea level over the coming 200 years, the 'Delta' may embrace a greatly increased expanse of open water and marshland.

Click chart below and expand to make readable.