Heading several miles slightly southeast of North Fork in Madera County will lead you to a unique destination: the geographic center of California.
If you search it on Google Maps , you’ll see an unfussy marker with says latitude 37 degrees, 9 minutes and 58.23 seconds north and longitude 119 degrees, 26 minutes and 58.29 seconds west. The marker declares these coordinates as the exact center of California. What is less immediately clear is how this was determined and what it means to be a geographic center.
But a decades-old episode of “California’s Gold” with Huell Howser, the long-running series that explored the state’s history and its residents, reveals insights into how this location in Madera County came to be known as the geographic center.
What is a geographic center?
Trying to explain a geographic center to a general audience was exactly what Alan Mikuni was tasked to do when he became involved in the “California’s Gold” episode in 1995. Mikuni was then the assistant chief of the western mapping center with the U.S. Geological Survey…