Sutter Buttes & the Pacific Flyway — The World's Smallest Mountain Range & the Winter Wetlands

Rising abruptly from the dead-flat floor of the Sacramento Valley, the Sutter Buttes are often called the world's smallest mountain range — a compact ring of volcanic peaks that erupted a million and a half years ago and now stand alone above the rice fields, utterly unlike anything around them. Because the entire range is privately owned, the only way in is on a guided hike, which makes day one a rare and memorable ascent into a landscape few Californians ever see. Day two drops to the valley floor and the great wetlands of the Pacific Flyway, where the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge auto-tour and the Gray Lodge marshes host hundreds of thousands of wintering geese, ducks, and swans in one of the continent's most staggering wildlife spectacles. Between them lies a night in Yuba City or Colusa, farm-country towns at the edge of the rice belt. It is a two-day trip about a valley most people only drive past.