All About California
California is a constituent state of the United States of America. It has an area of 158,706 square miles (411,049 square kilometres), exceeded only by Alaska and Texas. The state is bounded on the north by Oregon, on the east by Nevada and Arizona, on the south by the Mexican state of Baja (Lower) California, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. The capital is Sacramento. No version of the origin of California's name has been fully accepted, but there is wide support for the contention that it derived from a Spanish novel that described a paradisiacal island called California.
Admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state, California is a land of stunning physical contrasts: from the rainy northern coast to the parched Colorado Desert of the south. The Sierra Nevada exceed the Rocky Mountains in height. Within 85 miles (137 kilometres) of each other lie Mount Whitney and Death Valley, respectively, 14,494 and 282 feet (4,418 and 86 metres) above and below sea level, the highest and lowest points in the 48 coterminous states. Despite its urbanization, California is also the principal agricultural state of the nation, though only about 15 percent of its area is cultivated. Almost half of its land is federally owned, with national parks and monuments in every part of the state devoted to irreplaceable forest, desert, mountain, and other natural resources.
California is the most populous state in the Union, and its personal income per capita is one of the highest in the world. The fluid nature of the state's social, economic, and political life, shaped so largely by the influx of people from other states, gives California the aura of a laboratory for testing new modes of living. Californians make up the most urban population in the nation, centred mainly along the coast, with more than three-fourths of its people living in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego metropolitan areas.
The long coastline of California is mountainous, most dramatically in the Santa Lucia Range south of San Francisco, where the homes of Big Sur perch on cliffs 800 feet above the sea. Hills of lesser height flank entrances to the coast's three major natural harbours, at San Diego, San Francisco, and Eureka. Coastal mountains, made up of many indistinct chains, are from 20 to 40 miles in width and from 2,000 to 8,000 feet in height. The largest lake of the Sierra Nevada is Lake Tahoe, astride the California–Nevada border at 6,229 feet (1,899 metres). A mountain-ringed alpine lake about 193 square miles in area, it ranks 11th in the world in average depth: the 1,200-foot line runs near shore, and the maximum depth exceeds 1,600 feet (488 metres). Elsewhere in the Sierra lie hundreds of smaller lakes, some above the timberline in regions of tumbled granite and smooth-walled canyons. There are three national parks in these highlands: Kings Canyon, Sequoia, and Yosemite - the latter rising from the purplish foothills of the Mother Lode gold country through ice-carved valleys of the Merced and Tuolumne rivers, with their waterfalls and granite domes.
In economic terms California is more aptly compared with nations than with states. Its total personal income is surpassed only by that of the United States as a whole and of a few other industrialized nations. Industry has triumphed over remoteness; lacking iron and coal deposits, California has developed light industry. Financiers have been imaginative in seeking and employing capital, and many of the nation's largest banks and corporations are California-based, the latter principally involved in aerospace, electronics, computers, and oil and gas. California supplanted New York in 1965 as the leading state in the export of manufactured goods. The state is dominant in aerospace (although the industry was declining in the 1990s), agriculture, wine making, and the film and television industries. Despite soaring taxes, California continues to attract high-income immigration and technologically oriented industry.
Tourism is a consistent source of income in California. Inherent to this industry are such theme parks as Disneyland and Sea World; these sizable employers are part of the state's large service industry, which ranks second only to manufacturing among the state's industry payrolls. No state offers more diverse recreation. There is good skiing along the Sierra Nevada as far south as Big Bear Mountain near San Bernardino. Squaw Valley near Lake Tahoe was the site of the Winter Olympic Games in 1960. The beaches of southern California, especially those from Santa Barbara to San Diego, are legendary; they are excellent for water sports, of which surfboarding is prominent. Hikers pursue the trails of the High Sierra, including the 212-mile John Muir Trail through the heart of the Sierra Nevada, and the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs the length of the state. Fishing enthusiasts and hunters choose from extraordinary range and diversity in their sports. More than one-fourth of the state's land area is set aside in recreation areas or in national seashores or wildlife refuges. Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia are national parks in the Sierra Nevada.
Transportation, primarily by automobile and airplane, is in part both the cause and the product of the restless mobility of Californians, who move their residences more often than the average American and travel considerably more both for business and pleasure. California has the greatest concentration of motor vehicles on Earth and the most extensive system of multilane divided freeways. As in most American cities, light rail transit systems were largely discontinued in California cities after World War II. In the face of increasing traffic congestion, however, they have begun to return. The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, in San Francisco, was completed in the early 1970s. A San Diego trolley system, first built in the late 1970s as a link to the Mexican border, was expanded in the late 1980s. The freeway system is so extensive that one can drive on arterials from San Diego almost 500 miles northward through Los Angeles and the Central Valley without encountering any traffic signals or stop signs. Air commuting has increased phenomenally. The air corridor connecting San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego has a greater volume than that linking Washington, D.C., New York City, and Boston. Air traffic congestion has become critical, but not so dire as that of the ground traffic around airports.
