The lone volcano in California’s Central Valley
It’s Thursday. What is that little mountain range in the Central Valley? And how to visit the Monterey Peninsula on a budget.
On a recent drive north of Sacramento, I saw a row of knobby peaks that looked more like a children’s book illustration than actual mountains.
There were crooked domes and sharp rocks, surrounded by carpets of bright green grass. And it was so compact that I could see the entire range from start to finish.
These are the Sutter Buttes, a cluster of volcanic domes about 60 miles northwest of Sacramento and the remains of the Central Valley’s lone, and now dormant, volcano. The American Geological Survey calls the Buttes “a remarkable geographical and geological feature” emerging from what are otherwise plains stretching for miles.
The Buttes have also been a beloved landmark for locals for generations.
“When they come home from Southern California or Oregon, or Tahoe or San Francisco, there they are, the Sutter Buttes mysteriously rising from the Sacramento Valley,” one reader, Martha Bunce, who lives in Yuba County, told me . “Around here we say, ‘When you see the Buttes, you know you’re home.’”
The Sutter Buttes, which over the centuries have also been called the Marysville Buttes, the Middle Mountains, and Los Tres Picos, are informally referred to as the smallest mountain range in the world, although that is true. more marketing than scientific fact.
The Buttes were formed more than a million years ago by seeping lava that pushed up steep outcroppings from the valley floor. The Buttes are over 2,000 feet high and are arranged in a rough circle 10 miles in diameter, covering an area of about 75 square miles.
The Buttes have long been a sacred place for native tribes. The Maidu people, who lived in the Sacramento Valley, believed that the spirits of the dead rested in the Buttes before ascending. “In other words, the portals to the afterlife would have been directly above the Sutter Buttes,” a California park ranger once told The New York Times.
The Maidu and other tribes would also move to the Buttes in the winter if the Sacramento Valley were to flood, as frequently happened before our modern system of levees and dams. Colonists who arrived in the 19th century had to do the same.
When explorer Jedediah Smith passed through California in the winter of 1826, “the water rose so high in the Sacramento Valley that he was driven to the Marysville Buttes for a campsite, where he found it teeming with elk, antelope and bears that were also searching their refuge there,” said an early history of California.
Now the Buttes are mostly on private land, but you can pay for them planned group walk in the mountains between October and May. Or you can drive around the towering hills in about an hour, as I did recently, following quiet country lanes through farms and groves dotted with pink flowers. (I stopped at Gray Lodge Nature Reserve on the way to spot some birds.)
You can bike around it, as one reader, Gerald Adams, who lives in Sacramento, did on the morning of the Super Bowl. “The fields of mustard flowers and the orchards that were beginning to bloom were grand,” Adams told me in an email. “The roads were empty and we only saw one other cyclist.”
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And before you go: good news
O’Brien’s Pub, a San Diego mainstay and one of the city’s oldest craft beer bars, was recently named the Best Beer Bar in America in USA Today’s Readers’ Choice rankings, The San Diego Union Tribune reports this.
The bar won the title of first place in the outlet’s election for the best beer bar in the country in 2024. It was nominated along with twenty other bars by a panel of beer critics and voted number one by the pub’s readers. The rankings are part of USA Today’s “10Best” series, which includes competitions for the best food, activities and local attractions across the country.
Founded in 1994 in the Kearny Mesa area of San Diego, O’Brien’s has made a name for itself by serving rare beers from Belgium and Northern California’s Russian River Valley, and by spotlighting local breweries. The bar is also a favorite watering hole among locals, many of whom helped keep the bar afloat during the pandemic.
“It’s very humbling that our little pub in our small town was able to pull it off,” Tom Nickel, co-owner of the bar, told The Union Tribune.
Thank you for reading. I’ll come back tomorrow. — Soumya
Due to an editing error, yesterday’s newsletter incorrectly stated that both Vince Fong and Mike Boudreaux had advanced to a runoff to fill Representative Kevin McCarthy’s seat in the 20th Congressional District until 2025. Fong, a Republican state lawmaker, had advanced: but the race had not yet been called for the second candidate when the newsletter was published. You can track the results here.