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A Decomposed Granite County Almanac

When I first arrived in California from the Midwest, I discovered a smorgasbord of backpacking destinations. I was determined to do them all. Slipping across banana slugs at Point Reyes, freezing in Death Valley, stranded and lost in the Ventana Wilderness, it was all great fun. Yet I kept hearing of a distant place to the north with alluring names like the Trinity Alps, and the Marble Mountains. And so finally we went, finding a place that surpassed our expectations for remoteness, ruggedness and beauty. In camp one morning I awoke to find that a deer had completely eaten my favorite t-shirt; I knew we would have to come back. While this anecdote might not convince you to visit the Klamath Mountains in northern California, Jim Agee almost certainly will in his new book Steward’s Fork. In an easy-to-read style, Agee captures a sense of the place—a place between the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada that is similar but unlike these more celebrated regions. Much like Aldo Leopold’s writings, Agee uses stories as jumping off points to larger discussions about the Klamath Mountains; a Decomposed Granite County Almanac. One cannot fault Agee for a lack of scope. In this relatively slim book (294 pages) he covers the geology, natural history of the flora and fauna of the region, the ethnography of the pre-European Indians, the history since European settlement and finally a consideration of how these factors influence and constrain land management practices. Agee’s treatment of each of these topics is highly personal, with stories of his experiences and tales of colorful historic characters. For example, his chapter on the diverse flora of the region is set as a plant identification contest between Agee and Alice Underwood, a well-known early botanist in California, as he retraced Underwood’s route from 1900. The description of the wildlife of the region includes the common, the controversial (salmon, the spotted owl) and the cryptic; boasting a half chapter on Bigfoot (complete with a tell-tale photo of a very large footprint, taken by the author!). Although Agee is ultimately skeptical about the existence of Bigfoot, he concludes “...Bigfoot remains a metaphor for wild land and our desire to retain the element of surprise in our encounters with the wilderness.”