The missing link

摘要

AN HOUR'S DRIVE NORTH FROM LOS Angeles, just east of the vast agricultural fields and sprawling subdivisions of the Central Valley, lies a still-wild sliver of old California. On the edge of one of the nation's most populous places, the slopes of theTehachapi Mountains descend in a cascade of grass-covered flanks from almost 8,000 feet.Rugged and remote, this geological jumble of a mountain range forms a slender neck that links the public lands surrounding Los Angeles with the national forests of the Sierra Nevada to the north, and it joins the remaining grasslands of California's Central Valley with the Mojave Desert to the southeast. For millennia it has nurtured the seasonal migrations and territorial shifts of wildlife moving up and down canyons in one of the most vital corridors in North America.