‘You’re going to Fresno?’ was the common response to this travel decision. Climate change, however, is going to be bad for the central valley, and so I decided to bike east.

    I left Monterey in the afternoon on Tuesday, and rode 30 miles to the Salinas Valley by nightfall. Sneaking behind a strawberry field, I cleared some ground space, pitched my tent, and cooked dinner. I had planned to ride early the next morning, but I heard rainfall on the tent as my alarm rang, and I rolled back to sleep for a few hours.
    The flat and heavily farmed Salinas valley has steep mountain walls on either side, and I exited the valley by a rarely traveled dirt road over a 2000+ ft pass. Beyond the top of the pass, rolling hills with sparse oaks and grazing cattle lined the road (horses also, as shown in the picture). Cold, intermittent rain persisted, and I found myself frequently stopping to put on or take off rain gear.

    As night fell, I noticed that I could continue to bike because the once-a-half-hour car was infrequent enough for me to get off the road each time. By moonlight, I road to the Panoche Valley, stopped at the one store (a bar, where I talked with a Chilean rancher in Spanish and ate a sandwich), and then pitched my tent just out of view of the road. At the bar, the owner told me that in the 70’s, the Panoche valley had been farmed, but that they ran out of water and now the tree-less valley is covered with only dry grass.

   Today I rode 90 miles across the central valley and Fresno county. Fresno county is the most economically productive agricultural region in the world, and I passed almond orchards, grape vines, tomato fields, cotton fields, and others. A tail wind pushed me east, and a few heavy rains added to the journey. In Fresno, I stopped by a local high school and got a teacher enthused about my project, only to learn school is closed tomorrow because of veterans day. Nonetheless, I found a bed to sleep in at the house of a friend of a friend, where a well cooked dinner awaited.

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