travel

Jefferson State: Separate and a Lot More Than Equal

In honor of Independence Day, here’s a story on the part of northern California and southern Oregon known as Jefferson State–the state that declared independence as a new territory in 1941, only to see its dreams of autonomy fade away. By chance, the adventure potential in Jefferson is off the hook. By coicidence (or not), your truly is heading to a family reunion along the Rogue River in Oregon and spending the next week in the heart of Jefferson. I hope this piece holds you over–and I hope you get there and check it out for yourself.

Northern California is green, nothing but green, KGRN on your FM dial, all green all the time. Under a wash of sunlight, it looks sere and faint, but when the fog settles over the hills, as it so often does, the colors harden and darken until the trees seem to be dripping pigment of a green so elemental it deserves a place in the periodic table.

I am driving through primeval woodlands along the State of Jefferson Scenic Byway—aka California 96—and around me the green is a frenetic blur, dappled by slanting columns of sun. The tires of my van sigh into the seemingly endless curves that connect the outside world to Happy Camp (population 1,277), deep in the hairy heart of Bigfoot country. A giant footprint was found recently, but hey, there’s plenty of room for all, including the spotted owl, Paul Bunyan, and enough recreational opportunities to satisfy multiple lifetimes. It’s a long way from anywhere and it’s also, as the name of the road hints, not exactly California. Oh, the license plates prove taxes paid to Sacramento, but emotionally speaking this isn’t the Golden State at all. It’s Jefferson, Jefferson State, the state that declared secession more than 60 years ago, and don’t let the lack of the 51st star on Old Glory tell you otherwise.

Everywhere I play on this summer road trip lies within the boundaries of a little known and mostly forgotten breakaway republic, from the crumbling volcanic top of Lassen Peak to the misty redwood maze along the coast, from the chilly class IVs on the Upper Klamath River to the wildflower-lined footpaths of the Trinity Alps. California possesses natural treasures of such diversity that I’m still awed by its unparalleled promise of adventure twenty years after fleeing Vermont’s fickle snowfall. But Jefferson, this funky relic of the radical past, is as abundant as the state it wants no part of. World-class ocean, mountains, rivers, whitewater, skiing, fly-fishing, mountain biking—jeez, did I forget hiking?—pick your sport, and with the exception of British ferret-legging and Ukrainian sword dancing, Jefferson has it in spades.

I DON’T READ. GIVE ME THE GALLERY OF PHOTOS.

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The Jefferson separatist movement is at least 150 years old. Locals have long felt more kinship with their neighbors in southern Oregon than with the effetes in San Francisco or the materialist-pagans of Los Angeles. And though it’s typical of distant rural communities to grumble about tax collectors and politicians and not getting much in return, after 90-some years of bitching, in Jefferson the malcontents acted: On December 4, 1941, they drew boundaries, elected a governor, announced their secession, and barricaded the highway to hand out proclamations of independence. But talk about bad timing. D’oh! If not for Pearl Harbor and four distracting years of war, today’s tax money could very well be heading to Yreka.

Diminished but not defeated, Jefferson has lived on since World War II as a rallying cry of regional pride—Dixie without the guns and slavery–one part cranky militancy, one part cultural unifier, and one killer way to wrap your head around an awesome place to play. The hardest part is deciding where to begin.

On the way to my week in Jefferson I stop at Sportsmobile West, in Fresno, where I borrow one of the coolest customized four-wheel-drive vans ever made. With a garish yellow paint job, it screams promotional model, but what lies beneath is an adventurer’s dream: hot and cold running water (including a hose shower in the back), a mini-fridge and two-burner stove, GPS navigation, drop-down DVD screen, satellite radio, and sleeping for four, including a hydraulic pop-up penthouse with screen windows on three sides. If ever there was a vehicle for independent Jefferson, it’s this diesel fueled, go-anywhere, sleep-anywhere basecamp. Were it only outfitted with the converter to burn zero-emission vegetable oil, I would steal it.

To make the most of my new self-reliance, I camp the first night in a meadow outside Lassen Volcanic National Park, where one nearby creek sounds like subdued applause and another like the tinkling of bells. Morning light awakens me to a clearing of simple, flawless beauty: Ranks of evergreens hold back the forest, and long stalks of cheatgrass sway on the whiff of a breeze. As the pale sky brightens, bees buzz sleepily. Before long, I will enter the park and hike to 75-foot Mill Creek Falls through blooming mule’s ear as showy as my van, but this meadow, with its carpet of soft green grass and curtains of dark green pines, is worthy of lingering.

Lassen holds my attention but a while. It’s beautiful—national parks generally are—but I’ve made a tactical error by arriving on Saturday. The 3.5-mile hike to the falls is an exercise in solitude (as are most of the 150 miles in this 106,000-acre park), but the main draw is 10,457-foot Lassen Peak, and the two-and-a-half-mile trail to the summit has attracted a crowd. In the two hours it takes me to run 2,000 feet to the top and back, I pass 60 to 70 people—more than triple the number I will see in my backcountry excursions all week. I make notes in my Moleskine to learn more about volcanoes, get snow gaiters for my trail running shoes, and come back to Lassen in the off-season, or at least midweek.

I STILL DON’T READ. GIVE ME THE GALLERY OF PHOTOS.

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I head west through faded logging country and stop in Mt. Shasta to pick up Jen Carr, who, along with her husband, Chris, owns Shasta Mountain Guides. We continue on to the Trinity Alps Wilderness: 550 miles of maintained trails within 800 square miles of federally protected backcountry. Although the Trinitys are more Sawtooth than Alpine—with peeling gray shoulders and shawls of shaggy greenery—it becomes evident a few miles up Canyon Creek Trail that they are no less striking than their European namesakes. They’re serrated with sharp-etched ridges, grounded by granite riverbeds, profuse with summer blooms, and rich with swimming holes and shadowed trout pools. Wildflowers on slender stalks guard trickling side streams like palm trees around oases—gaudy paintbrush, exotic leopard lilies, and dozens I can’t name. Mayflies hover and dart; a monarch butterfly poses.

Several miles into the trail, we hear the first of three major waterfalls, Lower Canyon Creek Falls, a name too prosaic to evoke the softly foaming, stair-stepped cascade or its chilled, humid spray. All along Canyon Creek the aesthetic is Zen garden perfection: the trees are placed just so, the Coke-bottle green water slips neatly through curved granite sluices, and deep pools appear just when your eye needs relief from the frantic shimmy of surface riffles.

Maples, oaks, and Douglas firs yield to incense cedar, willows, weeping spruce, and ponderosa pine as we climb along the eastern bank. The trail switchbacks to gain the tops of waterfalls. We dive in swimming holes full of cold snow melt and warm ourselves on sun-baked boulders, reptilian in our stillness. We push on against the fading day until at seven miles we find ourselves on the shore of Lower Canyon Creek Lake, fourteen acres of flat water in a massive granite amphitheater. As payoff, it’s gorgeous—and all the more rewarding for the knowledge that this is terra incognita to most of the southern hordes—but we don’t tarry. There are miles to hike and many more to drive and we’re in the middle of the middle of nowhere.

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Chris Carr, Jen’s husband, knocks gently but firmly on the side of the Sportsmobile at 3 a.m. the next morning. I’m tempted to say something rude, but the co-owner of Shasta Mountain Guides has come bearing word of a nearby pot of strong, dark coffee, so instead I grumble to myself. Alpine starts suck, and my muscles haven’t even begun to uncork from 14 miles in the Trinitys. But there’s no better way to get up a glaciated mountain in the summer than to start early, before the frozen snow has softened into mush and the ascent is a post-holing hell slog. So, by 4:35 we’ve downed the java, driven to the Bunny Flats trailhead on the south flank of the peak, lashed skis to packs, and begun a 7,000-vertical-foot climb.

Mt. Shasta is a recreational center in its own right and the crown jewel of Jefferson adventures. The 14,162-foot stratovolcano is California’s most popular mountaineering summit and the single-best ski-mountaineering peak in the country. Its flanks host mountain biking trails, both cross-country and new-school chutes-and-ladders parks, plus hiking, backpacking, bouldering, and more. At 10,000 feet, however, the most pertinent activity is trying not to trip over your crampons. One foot in front of the other, and by 5:25 we’re at Horse Camp, by 10 a.m. we’re most of the way through the iron-rich cliff band known as the Red Banks; by 12:40 we come through the howling winds on Misery Hill and gain the top. It’s taken us just a tick over eight hours.

Chris retrieves the summit register. Every line is filled with oxygen-depleted squiggles. About 4,000 climbers a year top out and these notebooks fill fast. He replaces it with a blank one provided by the Forest Service.

A good chunk of Jefferson can be seen in the 360-degree view, and he looks southwest toward the tilted granite climbing routes of Castle Crags State Park and muses on the wider renaissance of Jeffersonia: the local NPR outlet renaming itself Jefferson Public Radio; a Jefferson State website hawking t-shirts. “People here are very independent,” he says. “You have to be creative to make a living up here, be self-sufficient. And Jefferson is a point of pride. It draws a distinction between us and the rest of California.”

It’s safe to say that we may be the only two skiers in California (and certainly Jefferson) on this July day. Just below the summit, we step into our bindings—Chris in telemark, me in randonnée—and push eastward into snow the consistency of grandma’s mashed taters. Ten years ago, in the era of skinny skis, I would have complained, but my new ultra-fat Volkl boards surf the top layer like twin gravy boats, and the sound of slush is nearly as sweet as the hiss of fresh powder. Chris leads the way between the Hotlum and Wintun glaciers, genuflecting deeply into each tele turn, while I swoop in broad arcs to spare my quads. A few hundred feet before the snowpack peters out to dirt, the snow is colored brown from windblown dust, and each turn leaves behind a strangely beautiful parenthesis of white. It seems a fittingly mortal way to sign our day’s work.

JUST GIVE ME THE GALLERY OF PHOTOS.

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The next morning I have to see a man about a raft. A crew of guides from Ashland, Oregon’s Adventure Center is on a busman’s holiday and together we head out to the Upper Klamath River, which starts in California, oxbows into the Beaver State, and finishes its run to the Pacific back in California. Although most of the Adventure Center’s business is on the mellower Rogue River, the Upper K is subject to daily dam release, and, with predictable class IV grins even in late summer, it gets far more repeat customers.

The drive from Ashland takes about an hour and by then the dam has released its load. The flow is building toward 1,700 cubic feet per second. We launch in two boats and the wave trains come fast. Just after the put-in, we hit Caldera, a IV-plus; then Bermuda Triangle, a III; Upper and Lower Gunsmoke, III-plus; Stageline and Branding Iron, both IV; and Satan’s Gate and Hell’s Corner, IV-plus. Satan’s Gate has the biggest drop, about five or six feet. We stay left, paddle through a trio of waves and hold on for another three. Typhoons of water, tinted brown from algae, soak us through and through. In eight miles, the Upper K churns up 42 rapids, 17 of which are class IV or better. Dragon, Jackass, Ambush, Roughshod…by the time we get to the pullout at the California-Oregon line, my fingers are pruney and I’m ready for class V.

Alas, in this corner of the world there are just too many things to do, and the Sportsmobile and I move on. My days are so full in this farthest outpost of the golden empire that each one feels like three. I spend a morning lingering at a hole on the Smith River, where some teenage girls steel their courage and cliff jump, whooping, into the chilly emerald water. A group of little kids runs across the cobbled beach in delight. Couples float idly in black inner tubes, connected by interlocked fingers. Lunch is a peanut butter and honey sandwich eaten while driving on dirt through massive redwoods. Afternoon is spent hiking along bluffs high above the Oregon coast, evening meandering down a desolate low-tide beach, and night searching for a place to nestle the van among the tallest trees on the planet.

The Sportsmobile has given me the liberty to trace a question mark across the map of this alternative California—a long straight line north followed by an arc to the northeast and then a big gentle curve west and south—but now I’m going to turn that mark into a loop and head for home on the Jefferson Scenic Byway. Shadowing the broad Klamath River, I see a deer running across the water, followed by a slow-moving black bear. A few curves later, I dodge a doe and two spring fawns.

In a hundred miles, I see perhaps a dozen vehicles, most of which are Ford pickups. Jim’s Bigfoot Deli. A no-name, no-attendant gas station where it’s just you and your credit card. Trees of Mystery, where a forty-nine-foot Paul Bunyan statue jabbers at tourists from a hidden speaker and you can buy knotted, lacquered panels of redwood airbrushed with flying eagles or magnificently antlered elk. I see only a few mountain bikes, the occasional kayak, and a single Subaru station wagon plastered with rock climbing stickers. The outdoor/industrial complex hasn’t yet infiltrated Jefferson, hasn’t gentrified its pursuits, hasn’t turned it into the circus that is Tahoe. Espressos, when you can find them, taste like mud—and that’s a kind of relief.

The sky purples, the stars reveal themselves, and I roll to a stop in front of Quigley’s country store, closed for the night but asparkle with strings of lights around its windows. A four-foot high “Great Seal” of Jefferson adorns the porch wall. While the Allman Brothers jam inside the van, I peer through the window and spy groceries, fishing tackle, Styrofoam coolers, postcards, sodas, and there, across the aisles, the Jefferson State flag. It’s nothing fancy, just the state seal again—two Xs in a yellow circle representing a gold pan—on a background, fittingly enough, of forest green.

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Want to climb or ski Mt. Shasta? Contact Shasta Mountain Guides here.

Want to go whitewater rafting? Contact Adventure Center here.

Want to know more about Sportsmobile? Go here.

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A version of this story appeared in National Geographic Adventure.

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© 2009 the adventure life.