Page:The Tourist's California by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/53

 GENERAL INFORMATION 33 fiedly chill. The winter is much the pleasanter season for, strangely, the winds are less insistent then. The greatest difference registered by the cli- matometers of superior and southern California lies in the degree of rainfall. It is one of the contradictions of the California climate that in the Sacramento Valley oranges ripen and can be marketed a full month before they are ready to be picked in the citrus zone about Riverside. The fig and the olive mature in a belt which, if drawn eastward, would pass through Denver, Pittsburg and New York. This fact exacts faith in the state- ment that it is " not latitude, but altitude and distance from the sea that determines the climate of a given place in California." Some one says there are as many climates in the State as there are counties. Of Bounties there are fifty-eight. But expert computation has resolved the Cali- fornian climates into six, each of which is gov- erned by local influences. Certain localities are cooled in summer by fog- veils which screen the sub-tropic sun, others are shielded in winter by the abrupt circling of a mountain wall. In The Silverado Squatters, Stevenson speaks of the warm wind which every evening " about nine o'clock blew down the can- yon, fanning it well out, airing it as a mother airs the night nursery before the children sleep . ..