Tuleyome Tour

This is the eighth year running that David Robertson and Rob Thayer, founding members of the Putah-Cache Bioregion Project and professors at UC Davis, have taken folks on a 225-mile circumambulation by bus of the Putah and Cache Creek watersheds. Today we finally went on this trip, starting at the headquarters of the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area just east of Davis early in the morning and returning after sunset.

Our route took us in a clockwise direction up the Putah Creek drainage, crossing over the watershed boundary to the north in Lake County, and returning following the Cache Creek drainage (approximately the same route of the Davis Double Century epic cycling event held each May). Water and people were the themes of the trip—we stopped at lakes, dams, creekside preserves, and historic settlements by the wayside. We sang several chants along the way invoking the spirits of the creeks, and carried out a couple of water rituals, one of them being carrying cups full of water across the Solano Diversion Dam (half of Putah Creek’s water flows south at that point to supply Solano County with drinking and irrigation water).

The high point of the trip literally and figuratively was passing by the headwaters of Putah Creek on Cobb Mountain in Lake County. At right is a photo of where we stopped here. The vegetation is much, much different from where we live: it is a montane forest with ponderosa pines, Douglas firs, black oaks, and white alders along the stream. Despite having lived here five years, neither of us had been to Lake County before, a surprisingly isolated place. It is one of the only counties in the United States to have never had a rail line in it, and economically the county has never quite taken off, going through a series of booms and busts. This decade the growth sector is wineries. The last boom centered on geothermal energy. (It’s a volcanic area, the Clear Lake Volcanics perhaps being 600,000 years old. The most impressive volcanic cone in the area is Mt. Konocti, though some believe it is hollow and inhabited inside.)

I did lots of sketching at stops and from the bus, and was able, a bit to my surprise, to add some watercolor to my sketches while travelling in the bus. At top shows my sketch of a hillside dotted with blue oaks in the Cache Creek drainage.

Pica kept a bird list for the day. Highlights were seeing both golden and bald eagles, a peregrine falcon, and white pelicans at Clear Lake.

Tuleyome is the name the Lake Miwok gave to themselves and their homeland. It means “deep home place”, a place not too far from where at the Guenoc Winery we had lunch today.

Postscript by Pica: Since we had this watershed be a significant part of our wedding ceremony last August, it was particularly important to me to see its headwaters, scrambling down the bank with my now-repaired Achilles to put my hands in this very cold water…