Trip to Mariposa and the Merced

Driving from Monterey to Mariposa across the Central Valley is simple:  Go east.

First, you traverse the coastal agribusiness fields including rolling strawberry and artichoke fields, saying farewell to the coast.  You must travel along the perpetually congested Hwy 101 then, one of the busiest corridors of trucking in the entire northern part of the Golden State.  Take another connector road past San Juan Batista and Hollister before traveling over the formerly infamous Pacheco Pass (until it was re-engineered fatalities were common) which today boasts some of the most iconic California coastal valley land visible from any roadway.  Today, it offered a tableau of green on green with the earliest spring blooms spread across fields and shallow slopes.

Once you've crested that pass, you see the San Luis Reservoir and beyond that the immense Central Valley that is the bountiful lap of the state.  It's a long flat drive through Los Banos and then Merced, both farming towns where large communities of farm workers live and commute to various fields and jobs throughout the valley.  As you head further east out of Merced the lumpy terrain of the foothills begin to show up with crags of schist and granite poking up like headstones in an insane graveyard.  Today, the boulders and crags were splashed with brilliantly colored lichens and mosses, an artist's palette run amok.

A steady winding climb through oak-studded hills brings you at last to Mariposa County and its seat Mariposa.  Total county population is 17,000.  

We ate at the burger joint with the bright yellow gigantic sign that screams Happy Burger Diner and then headed further east to see a wild and scenic river, the Merced River.  The air was warm and clear.  Black-Eyed Susans, poppies, clouds of tiny white flowers that dusted steep green slopes like powdered sugar evidenced the onrush of spring.

We stopped for a rest at Indian Flats Day Area and simply sat on a big granite boulder at the river's edge.  I listened to the river and its millions of little voices that blended to one rushing note while I lay on my belly on the rock.  Beautiful, simple, pleasant and refreshing.