A double-decker bus rolls along Whitehall with the London Eye and "Big Ben" in the background. Photo by Lois A. Lowe
Almost everyone knows that California is as much a state of mind as it is a State. In thinking about the Golden State, we tend to divide it into two parts. One, in the south is filled with Hollywood, Disneyland, military installations and border fences. It's where people "do lunch," and backyard pools are the centers of the household. This part of California is the coastal veneer which extends from the Mexican border and San Diego to somewhere up the coast south of the Big Sur and Monterey.

The second California is in the north near San Francisco. There is an emphasis on Berkeley, Stanford, Silicon Valley and the computer generation. It's the part of the state where people don't eat, they dine, where people who work in restaurants aren't cooks, they're chefs and where wine tasting becomes a science, not an adventure. This part of California, including the giant redwood trees, the wine growing counties of Napa, Sonoma and Mendecino goes north from the Big Sur, Monterey, and the Bay area, all the way to the Oregon border. Residents are addicted to the sea and the coastal vistas.

There is a third California. This is the area of the state that lies 100 miles east of the Golden Gate Bridge and south toward the Mohave Desert and Death Valley. We approached this portion of the state by flying into Sacramento. If this entire region could be defined as a body, Sacramento is both its actual and spiritual head. The heart of it is the beauty of the vast Yosemite National Park and the imposing grandeur of the Valley is its center.

Tourists marvel at Yosemite's spectacular water falls and the less frequently visited Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias at the park's southern tip. The Valley town, with a postal code of its own, sees the majority of Yosemite tourists. With the lodge, the chic Ahwanee resort hotel and hundreds of available campsites, the park is accessible to all degrees of vacationing income levels.

Even though El Capitan, Half Dome and the Falls are a relatively small segment of the park's acreage, they are also the region that has occasionally become overcrowded during the high season. The need to get away and to commune with nature attracts millions of tourists each year. With a fragile eco-system being seriously eroded , the U.S. Department of the Interior finds it necessary to occasionally limit access.

The Valley and the Grove are both on the western edge of the park and easily accessible from both the northern and southern population centers. Though it's not open except during the height of summer, the Tioga Pass, running through the high Sierras, offers an entry to the eastern slopes of the mountain range and the beauties there, especially the unspoiled and underpopulated Tuolumne Meadows. Even as late as the end of May, the pass can still be closed. Snow to depths of six feet remain. But when the melting occurs, the additional water makes the cascades within the park even more spectacular as the water seeks its way to the valley floor and, eventually, to the sea.

You can almost feel the challenge that the earliest explorers and miners encountered as they confronted comparable weather conditions with the crude traveling amenities they possessed. It's said that when President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Valley early in the 20th Century and met naturalist John Muir to discuss the preservation of this natural wonder, he spent four days getting there from the nearest railhead. We traveled the same distance in comfort in about an hour.

The "spine" of this third California is State Route 49. Running along the western edge of the Sierra Nevada, the road captures another element of California history. The numbering system of California's highways is a mystery, but it's not hard to understand that this highway was numbered to honor the adventurous crew of gold miners, prospectors and fortune hunters who began arriving after the gold strikes of 1849 and continued to pan and mine for gold well past the 1880's. They followed the paths along the high western slope of the Sierras northward from Oakhurst, the beginning of Route 49, toward towns named Murphys, Jamestown, Columbia, Sonora, Jackson, Sutter Creek and Placerville. These places are the locales of streams that still carry gold down from the mountains. Opportunities for tourists to pan for, and recover gold from these streams are plentiful. These communities are also centers of sincerely friendly people who drive a lot of pickup trucks and four wheel drive vehicles and who say "Hi" to strangers. Route 49 wanders through some magnificent mountains and curves to the shape of the landscape. There are very few tunnels as the road is not forced through the mountain range, but caresses its perimeter.

We stopped in Jamestown, about three miles south of Sonora. There we encountered the Jimtown mines and the facilities they offer for amateurs from the plains to learn how to pan for gold. For a reasonable hourly charge, you are given a pair of knee high rubber boots and a pie-shaped plastic dish used by contemporary panners prospecting for flakes and nuggets buried in the silt of streams. The crew assisting us in our panning adventure were more than friendly -- they seemed downright anxious for us to find gold as soon as we got the knack of panning. With nametags identifying them as Toothless Jack or Hairy Pete, they showed us where the sandy ore, dug from the stream bottoms, was piled. Then we were on our own. Though they often checked our progress, the effort was ours alone. In the hour we rented the pan and boots, we were able to sift through five or six pans of sandy soil and in each one, found real gold. It was transferred from the pan into a small glass vial filled with the crystal clear stream water. This souvenir of Route 49 is yours to keep.

Then there are the restored villages of Murphys and the Columbia State Park where the oldest buildings have been lovingly renovated and are being tended as historical showpieces of a frontier past. Moving north on Route 49, you drive through Calaveras County, a place made famous by Mark Twain's Celebrated Jumping Frog. Frog jumping contests are annual events there, but locals fear that the frog is becoming an endangered species. Twain's cottage and memories are still maintained as tourist attractions.

There was still one other third California element waiting to be experienced. We drove to Plymouth along our old friend, Route 49, and followed a conveniently available map into the vineyards of Amador County. As filled with wineries as Sonoma County, Amador produces world recognized Zinfandel and Cabernet grapes and small boutique wineries --some producing as few as 700 cases a year -- survive in the County's micro-climates. Most wineries have tasting rooms and wines are available for delivery on the spot. Your favorite vintage can be shipped to your home or used in tree lined picnic groves adjoining the winery.

Vineyard owners, anxious to get consumer reactions, are very much in evidence in the tasting rooms as small samples of their newly released vintages are poured for the public. Many of them are prepared to talk with visitors and explain the intricacies of the wine making process and the special advantages of Amador County as a center for viticulture. Though not yet a serious rival of Sonoma's huge wine industry, Amador County will become one of the household names in wine purchasing in the years to come as production and the quality of their wines become better known throughout the world.

Traveling through the third California offers a variety of experiences not found in many parts of the country. First, of course, there's the unparalleled beauty of Yosemite National Park that surrounds the great cascades at its core. Then, there are the spectacular sequoias not found anywhere else in the world. Next, there's the opportunity to return to a time 150 years ago when anyone with a small pan, a strong back and a will to succeed could strain wealth out of the flowing rivers of the area. With that gold mining past comes the myriad legends that are a part of this period in U.S. history. Finally, there are the vineyards which represent the economic future of the region. The Third California offers a chance to experience all these things with a relatively short drive along California's Route 49.