After Grandma Offer died in 1959, Grandpa left Detroit for California and had a whirlwind romance and got married. It all sounded very romantic to me (at age eleven), but my parents were appalled. Grandpa sent back the most beautiful pictures of California wildflowers.

After I moved to California in 1973, I wondered where to find those carpets of wildflowers I saw in Grandpa's pictures. It took me all this time, but I finally found them in the canyon of the North Fork of the American River, half a mile south of my home. At the peak of the season, the steep, 45-degree walls of the canyon are covered with vast carpets of golden poppies and blue lupine. If you look closer, you may find as many as twenty other varieties of flowers in blossom at any given time. The season lasts from February to mid-May. Oh, and there are lots of unmapped waterfalls flowing into the canyon in spring. Here and there, you come across old gold mines and other remnants of the Gold Rush.

The North Fork of the American River starts not far from Lake Tahoe, and flows through the Mother Lode, close to the route of the Donner Party and the Transcontinental Railroad. It joins the Middle and South Forks at Auburn, and flows through Sacramento to the Sacramento River. You won't catch me in a canoe on the North Fork, but the kayaks and rafters love it. Canoeing through Sacramento is wonderful for those of us who like our rapids on the calm side.

Grandpa got an annullment and moved back to the Midwest, but he kept his adventuring spirit until the day he died.

-Joe Offer-