By MATT WEISER, Sacramento Bee

A lone gray wolf in the prime of his life roams 730 miles to seek a mate and a new home, crossing nearly the entire state of Oregon in two months.

He skirts small towns, crosses numerous highways, surmounts the Cascade mountain range and pauses just 30 miles from California.

It sounds like the stuff of legend.

Yosemite National Park has gotten all the attention for a spike in visitor deaths this year. But fatalities also are up on national forest lands throughout California, such as an expert kayaker who drowned in a remote creek near Sonora.

Spring passed California by, and summer remains in hiding.

Nine tornadoes have torn up the Sacramento Valley from Oroville to Fairfield. A giant Sierra snowpack, still frozen fast, has put innumerable summer adventures on hold.

The weather has gone haywire.

As prodigious winter runoff empties into the ocean, Californians who spent the past few years in a drought might see those rivers gushing by and wonder, thirstily, "Why can't we capture that?"

Fall in northern California brings a rustle of leaves and a welcome chill to the air. Nothing's changed about that. What's been missing the past three years is the pulse of salmon returning from the ocean to their spawning streams.

On a sunny stretch of the Bear River near Colfax, Calif., in the Sierra foothills, the cool water carries a nasty surprise for swimmers and fishermen.

Look closely at the water flowing by. It carries clots of a feathery substance that looks like shredded toilet paper.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - The sight of elk on a California landscape exerts a powerful emotional pull.

The enormous antlers, the furry neck and sheer size of this creature, standing tall in the grass, evoke a time when wildlife outnumbered people.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Weather officials warn Californians to be wary of fast, cold rivers this weekend as the snowbound Sierra Nevada finally begins to melt in earnest.

For most fall-run chinook salmon in Central Valley rivers of California, youth is more akin to a factory assembly line than some aquatic nirvana.

Life begins in the concrete tanks of a hatchery on a four-month diet of manufactured food pellets. Teenage independence comes in the spring, with a tanker truck ride to Vallejo and a trip through a giant hose into San Pablo Bay.

The federal government is pressing forward with a policy that could require trees to be stripped from California levees, eliminating what shade and wildlife habitat remain along the state's rivers.