Page:California a guide to the Golden state-WPA-1939.djvu/45

Rh the Tehachapi Mountains thrust their barrier from east to west across its southern end.

California, with a total area of 158,297 square miles, is the Union's second largest State. In the language of the geographer, its latitude extends from 32° 30' to 42° N., and its longitude from 114° to 124° 29' W. Its medial line, from Oregon to the Mexican border, is 780 miles long. Its width varies from 150 to 350 miles. Its coastline is approximately 1,200 miles—somewhat less than one-tenth of the total coastline of the United States. So pronounced is the eastward curve of the State's southern coast that San Diego lies farther east than Reno in Nevada, although Eureka, a northern port, is the most westward city in the United States. On the east the State is bordered by Nevada and by the Colorado River, which separates its southeastern corner from Arizona.

Beyond each end of the mountain-walled Great Valley, which is California's most distinctive topographic feature, the terrain is broken and rugged. Northward lie the Siskiyou Mountains, a natural barrier between California and Oregon. In the northwest, wild timbered slopes reach to the Pacific; in the northeast, mountain spurs hem in barren lava-bed plateaus. South of the Tehachapis' dividing line lies southern California comprising one-third of the State's area. Here the complex network of the Sierra Madre, the San Bernardino, and other ranges separates the so-called Valley of Southern California, a broad strip of broken country near the coast, from the arid wastes of the Mojave and Colorado Deserts in the hinterland. From Point Concepcion, where the Coast Range breaks into numerous ridges and the coast swings in sharply to the east, the Valley of Southern California, which includes the V-shaped coastal plain of the Los Angeles Basin, stretches southward to the Mexican border.

These chief geographical districts—the Sierra and Coast Range regions and the Central (Sacramento-San Joaquin) Valley in the north, the coastal lowlands, the mountains, and the desert country in the south—present startling physiographic contrasts and extremes, from active volcano to glacier, from arctic flora on mountain tops to cotton plantations below sea level. From the peak of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the United States, it is but 60 miles to Death Valley, the continent's lowest area. Human activities range from fur-trapping in the snows of the Klamath region to prospecting for minerals in the furnace-like heat of the southeastern deserts.

California's contour is marked by lofty mountain peaks towering above precipitous gorges and canyons. Of the 41 peaks that exceed 10,000 feet in height, the tallest is Mount Whitney (14,496 alt.) in the southern Sierra. The Sierra's abrupt eastern slope has one of the steepest general gradients on the North American continent. Over a