March 26, 2025
At a sunset in spring, from an 11-mile ridgeline east of Clear Lake, a hiker today can see the country as did the Patwin, Pomo, Wappo, and Miwok peoples, who walked it for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. A red-orange sky blazes above blue-green serpentinite boulders; Mount Shasta looms to the north. Golden and bald eagles and red-tailed hawks soar overhead where condors once did. Delicate, purple-petaled adobe lilies bloom in wildflower-strewn meadows, alongside hillside chaparral dotted with gray pines and uncommon McNab cypresses. Groundwater springs to the surface in the dry terrain—some hot, sulfurous, and filled with the larvae of an endemic brine fly; elsewhere with enough carbonation to tickle a tongue. This is Molok Luyuk—“Condor Ridge,” in the Patwin language—a new addition to Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument.
Once, it was an important trading and traveling route. “Ridgelines are commonly what we used, because it didn’t make sense to go uphill if you didn’t have to,” says Eddie “E.J.” Crandell, chair of the Lake County Board of Supervisors and vice chair for the Robinson Rancheria of Pomo Indians. But genocidal Gold Rush–era policies, followed by decades of legal discrimination, reduced the Indigenous presence on the landscape.
Now Native Americans are regaining a foothold. In May 2024, when President Joe Biden added these 13,696 acres straddling Lake and Colusa counties to the national monument, he renamed the area Molok Luyuk, from Walker Ridge, at the request of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation. At the same time, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) signed a co-stewardship agreement with the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation and the Kletsel Dehe Wintun Nation—both federally recognized Patwin tribes—that might allow for the return of prescribed cultural burns and other Indigenous ecological management techniques. The Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation Tribal Council says this commitment “will safeguard sacred land of profound meaning to the Patwin people [and] also preserves and restores habitat vital for wildlife and biodiversity that is threatened by climate change.”
Crandell calls the monument’s expansion a step in the right direction. “We’re putting the pieces together of our culture and history,” he says.
Rare flowers amid fault lines
This place is also special for plant enthusiasts. Molok Luyuk hosts nearly 500 types of native plants—about 7 percent of the state’s total plant diversity, on 0.02 percent of it landmass. Of these, more than 40, including the adobe lily and Snow Mountain buckwheat, are listed as rare by the California Native Plant Society. “It’s a hot spot of biodiversity within the hot spot that is California,” says Brendan Wilce, the society’s conservation program coordinator.
The rocks are perhaps even more fascinating. “As you’re going up the ridge you can literally see where the different tectonic plates meet,” says Sandra Schubert, executive director of Tuleyome, a local conservation group that pushed for the national monument expansion. When “you cross back and forth over the fault line,” she says, “millions of years of history [appear] right in front of you.”
From extraction to protection
From the 1850s into the latter half of the 20th century, people mined mercury throughout the area, leaving waterways contaminated to this day. Ranchers grazed livestock, loggers felled trees—and hot springs resorts marketed supposedly healthy (but actually lithium-tainted) mineral water to Bay Area residents. Around the turn of this century, the wind power industry arrived. A series of companies, most recently in 2018, proposed installing dozens of turbines on Molok Luyuk. Each company would secure land rights from the BLM, put up anemometers to measure the wind, gather data, and then disappear, says Andrew Fulks, co-founder of Tuleyome. “Environmental groups did not stop it,” he says. “I just didn’t pan out. The companies walked away.” He adds that Molok Luyuk was “always a marginal wind area.”
In 2015, when President Barack Obama established Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument on 330,780 acres of BLM and U.S. Forest Service lands ranging from Lake Berryessa in the south to Snow Mountain in the north, he left out most of Molok Luyuk—in large part because it was still being considered for wind development. What finally paved the way for its inclusion was that the BLM, in 2022, denied the latest application for a wind energy project, just as California lawmakers were pushing to include more of Molok Luyuk in the monument. “That’s when I was like, ‘I think we have a real chance now,’ ” says Pamela Flick, California program director for the conservation organization Defenders of Wildlife.
Adobe lily, Fritillaria pluriflora (Dee Shea Himes via iNaturalist, CC-BY) Not everyone was into it. The Colusa County Board of Supervisors resisted the expansion of the monument into their county and in 2023 voted 3–2 to oppose the name change to Molok Luyuk. But opposition was thin. At a community meeting in December 2023, around 75 people—many wearing purple shirts adorned with an image of the adobe lily—spoke in favor of monument expansion, and not one person spoke against it. “The people who brought this together were from such diverse backgrounds,” Fulks says. “You had the hunters and target shooters and OHV [off-highway vehicle] users hanging out with the horseback riders, backpackers, and botanists, all because they love the place. And, the thing is, we all became friends.”
As part of the national monument, Molok Luyuk is off-limits to new mining claims and wind power development. U.S. Congressman John Garamendi, a monument supporter, tells Bay Nature that wind turbines “would totally destroy the unique cultural and natural habitat of that area.” But the threat of megafires remains. Much of the flora here thrives on fire—like the McNab cypress, whose cones require a two-minute blast of 500 degrees Fahrenheit to open—but not the giant, super-hot fires that now regularly torch California. Nearly all of Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument has burned in the past decade or so, with some areas burning five times in six years.
What the future holds
The details of tribal co-stewardship still need to be worked out. Meanwhile, the new Trump administration is dismantling environmental justice programs—and considering shrinking or eliminating national monuments, including ones in California. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk’s quasi-federal agency, has proposed closing the BLM’s Ukiah field office, which oversees Molok Luyuk. The BLM has declined to answer any questions.
It is a sea change from the Biden administration, which signed hundreds of tribal co-stewardship agreements nationwide and designated or expanded several national monuments.
Schubert nonetheless remains hopeful that Molok Luyuk will stand. President Donald Trump “did not go after Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument in his first term, and we have widespread Republican support for Molok Luyuk, including the entire state Senate Republican delegation,” she writes in an email.
California condors do not fly over Molok Luyuk today, despite its name. But Rep. Garamendi suggests they could be reintroduced here, as they have been elsewhere in the state. Says the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation Tribal Council: “We look forward to the day when condors fly over Molok Luyuk once again.”
If you go
The draw: Rare plants, including wildflowers in spring; visible geological fault lines; grand vistas.
Getting there: Take Highway 20 to Walker Ridge Road, a dirt lane that is generally passable in dry weather. In wet or snowy weather, it is difficult even with four-wheel drive.
Exploring: You’ll find many spots to pull over and admire plants, wildlife, and geology. Hikers and bikers can use a network of unmarked roads and trails crisscrossing the ridge. Tuleyome recommends a 7-mile loop hike that passes by Signal and Eagle rocks (the red track on the map); park where Walker Ridge Road meets Indian Valley Reservoir Road.
Caution: Hikers should carry a GPS unit and detailed map, available via tuleyome.org. Summers can be very hot. Some of Molok Luyuk is private land, so obey “No Trespassing” signs.