Carrizo Plain

Why should it be a National Park?

Most Americans have never heard of Carrizo Plain, although it lies only 130 miles to the Northwest from Los Angeles. It is located between San Luis Obispo and Bakersfield in California's Central Valley and was established as a Bureau of Land Management administered national monument in 2001. Unfortunately, the 250,000 acre Carrizo Plain Monument attracts only 30,000 visitors a year. At the same time, Joshua Tree National Park, although 10 miles farther from LA, attracts 1.6 million visitors a year. Containing vast wildflower-covered grasslands dotted with dry ponds and salt flats, Carrizo Plain is 15 miles long and 45 miles wide. Two striking, rugged, and nearly impassable mountain ranges, the Temblor Range to the north and the Caliente Range to the South, rim the grasslands. The area boasts cultural and natural features, such as the exposed portions of the San Andreas fault, Soda Lake, historic farmsteads, and 2,000-year-old petroglyphs. Native animals like pronghorn antelope run free on the fenceless valley, and wildflowers light up the hillsides in rainbows of color each spring. Despite the important cultural, natural, and recreational features of Carrizo Plain, BLM continues to allow extractive uses like commercial livestock grazing, oil, and gas drilling that threaten to destroy the largest remaining natural grassland in California. In the 18th Century, small groups of Spanish and Portuguese immigrants began moving into the valley, displacing the native population. However, the European settlers, desperately searching for water and farmable land were confronted with an incredibly tough terrain. Steep hills and badland ravines create a protective barrier along the northern and southern borders of the plain, and the San Andreas Fault cuts across the land adding further danger due to seismic activity. For centuries, the range was considered virtually impassable, but over the last century roads were built, many of them dirt, allowing more access to the plain.

The handful of abandoned farmsteads scattered through the valley document the brave, but failed attempts at making a living here. Even today, there are no inhabitants as the terrain, lack of water and isolation prove too difficult. The remaining dilapidated buildings provide a stark relief of the challenging and lonely lifestyles the settlers once faced.

Carrizo Plain allows visitors to see something hard to find in Southern California, the way the region looked before it was overrun by pioneers and the urbanization that followed. This is perhaps the final opportunity to view an environment humankind has long since altered. To preserve and protect this environment from legalized extraction of its natural resources, as well as let people know this undisturbed setting persists, Carrizo Plain must be redesignated as a National Park.