Green Valley News

[written January 15, 2007]

This morning I received a call from Steve Hunter of Colfax, an active man with a penetrating and curious mind, who has explored these Placer County canyons as have few if any others, since his childhood in the early 1950s.

I mean, as dimly as I am aware of his exploits, I know they exceed my own. Roping down the middle of thundering waterfalls: for goodness' sake, you wouldn't catch me doing that.

But Steve Hunter has. And not just once, either. He's seen gorges you only can see if you actually *do* rope down waterfalls.

Steve loves Green Valley. Yesterday he and Dan Mathers and several friends dropped down into the great canyon on the good old Green Valley Trail, hewed to the western side of things, and eventually found themselves just across from the Gold Ring Mine, on the sand bar at the head of the pretty pool on the river which reflects Lovers Leap, looming half a mile high to the west.

Here they busied themselves collecting the garbage left there last summer by some miners, and without wasting much in the way of time, they hauled several loads up to the old Incense Cedar tree in the meadow, near the wooden trough.

What, were they calling it quits?

Oh no.

From there they worked east to the Old Hotel Site, below Joe Steiner's Grave, where another mess of garbage lay in frozen masses. This too they gathered unto themselves, but this they carried up and up and up and up and up, and finally, completely out of the canyon.

Steve reports that they had to leave a frozen sleeping bag, weighted with ice, behind, but they certainly made some great strides in keeping the fine old Valley clean.

We made sounds about plans to plan to go back down and haul up the rest of the trash, with as many people as we can muster, and hit a lick on the trail too, and who knows but these fantasies may become real.