Alta California
From San Diego to San Francisco, A Journey on Foot to Rediscover the Golden State
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
National Bestseller: This fascinating account of one man’s 650-mile trek from San Diego to San Francisco captures the many layers of California’s fiendishly complex history.
“[Makes] you fall, or refall, in love with California . . . wildfires and insane housing prices and all . . . What a journey, you think. What a state.” —San Francisco Chronicle
In 1769, an expedition led by Gaspar de Portolá sketched a route that would become, in part, the famous El Camino Real. It laid the foundation for the Golden State we know today, a place that remains as mythical and captivating as any in the world.
Despite having grown up in California, Nick Neely realized how little he knew about its history. So he set off to learn it bodily, with just a backpack and a tent, trekking through stretches of California both lonely and urban. For twelve weeks, following the journal of expedition missionary Father Juan Crespí, Neely kept pace with the ghosts of the Portolá expedition—nearly 250 years later.
Weaving natural and human history, Alta California relives Neely’s adventure, while telling a story of Native cultures and the Spanish missions that soon devastated them, and exploring the evolution of California and its landscape. The result is a collage of historical and contemporary California, of lyricism and pedestrian serendipity, and of the biggest issues facing California today—water, agriculture, oil and gas, immigration, and development—all of it one step at a time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this detailed travel memoir, environmental writer Neely (Coast Range) relates his 650-mile walk in the footsteps of an 18th-century Spanish exploration along the coast of California. In 1769, the Portola expedition went overland from what became the towns of San Diego to San Francisco, setting the stage for the settlements, forts, and Catholic missions that would become California. Neely relies heavily on expedition journals along his walk, especially one by a friar named Juan Crespi, and reimagines the near untouched splendor of the West Coast. Even walking through subdivisions and cities and along highways, he finds poetic images in the most unlikely places ("The holy red palms of an In-N-Out cup. A water bottle of sunflower seed husks like a ravaged birdfeeder from someone's lips") and encounters many of those who rely on the land surfers, farm laborers, winemakers. Along the way, he explores the roots of such famous Californians as Jos Francisco Ortega (founder of the Ortega chili company), writer John Steinbeck, civil engineer William Mulholland, and John Paul Getty. Neely ends in the Bay Area under a redwood tree where the Portola expedition camped, with the hope that the tree "might live another thousand years." Neely's naturalist, erudite work will appeal to readers of Thoreau's Walden and Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire. Correction: An earlier version of this review misspelled Edward Abbey's last name.
