CACalifornia Fun Facts

The highest and lowest ground in the contiguous United States sit about 85 miles apart in California. Mount Whitney tops out at 14,505 feet. Badwater Basin in Death Valley bottoms out 282 feet below sea level. On a clear day from the right ridge you can take in both, which no other state can offer, and it explains why California's weather, farming and geology all behave like several countries stacked together.

Facts most people get wrong

• California is not going to fall into the ocean. The San Andreas is a strike-slip fault, meaning the two sides grind past each other sideways. Los Angeles is creeping northwest toward San Francisco at roughly two inches a year. Nothing is sinking.
• Redwoods and sequoias are different trees. Coast redwoods are the tallest trees on Earth and grow in the fog belt north of San Francisco. Giant sequoias are the most massive by volume and grow on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. They do not share a range.
• The Gold Rush made merchants rich, not miners. Gold turned up at Sutter's Mill in January 1848 and John Sutter died broke. Levi Strauss, Domingo Ghirardelli and Wells Fargo built lasting fortunes selling to the people doing the digging.
• The 1906 San Francisco disaster was mostly fire. The shaking started it, but three days of fire destroyed the bulk of the city, helped along by broken water mains and dynamite used badly in the attempt to build firebreaks.
• Sacramento has been the capital since 1854. Neither Los Angeles nor San Francisco has ever held the job. California ran through San Jose, Vallejo and Benicia first.
• The famous 134 degree Death Valley record is disputed. The July 1913 reading is doubted by climatologists who have reviewed the observer's records. The 130 degree readings logged in 2020 and 2021 are treated by many as the reliable modern high.

Records and firsts

• Hyperion, a coast redwood in Redwood National Park, stands about 380 feet, the tallest known tree on Earth. Its exact location is kept off the maps.
• General Sherman in Sequoia National Park is the largest single tree by volume at roughly 52,500 cubic feet.
• Methuselah, a Great Basin bristlecone pine in the White Mountains, is more than 4,800 years old.
• California produces essentially all of the almonds grown in the United States, plus about a third of the country's vegetables and roughly three quarters of its fruits and nuts.
• The Yosemite Grant of 1864, signed by Abraham Lincoln, was the first time the federal government set land aside purely for preservation, eight years before Yellowstone.
• California entered the Union on September 9, 1850 as the 31st state and skipped the territorial stage entirely, a shortcut driven by the Gold Rush population surge.

Geography that surprises

• Reno, Nevada sits west of Los Angeles. The state's eastern border tilts hard, so the Sierra bends California's shape more than most maps register.
• The northern border with Oregon is a ruler straight line at 42 degrees north, while the southeastern border wanders with the Colorado River.
• The Farallon Islands, 27 miles out in the Pacific, are legally part of the City and County of San Francisco.
• Lake Tahoe reaches 1,645 feet deep, second only to Crater Lake in the United States, and the state line runs down the middle of it.
• Death Valley holds the lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level, and it is in view of the Panamint Range rising more than 11,000 feet above it.

Where the name comes from

California was a fictional place before it was a real one. A Spanish chivalric romance published around 1510, Las Sergas de Esplandian by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, described an island called California ruled by Queen Calafia, populated entirely by Black women warriors, stocked with gold and lying near the Terrestrial Paradise. The book was popular with the same generation of Spaniards who sailed for the Americas.

When explorers reached the Baja peninsula in the 1530s and took it for an island, they applied the name from the novel. The island error outlived the naming by two centuries, showing up on European maps well into the 1700s until King Ferdinand VI issued a decree in 1747 stating plainly that California is not an island. Golden State became the official nickname much later, in 1968, carrying both the gold and the poppies.

Bordering states

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