North Fork of the American River

The Last Post

2008-08-12T11:23:00.000-07:00

We have to share some difficult news...

On Thursday evening, August 7, 2008, Russell Towle, author of this blog, died after a tragic car accident on Interstate 80 near Sacramento.

Russell Towle Tribute Weekend
Dutch Flat, California, October 11-12, 2008.
More information, and some photos of Russell are here.

For those who didn't know Russ personally, or who only knew him in one context of his life, his family would like to share a little more about him with readers of this blog.

You already know he was an avid hiker in the Sierra river canyons near our home, and a tireless advocate for the preservation and development of public access to historic trails in the Sierras. Russell was also a brilliant and innovative mathematician, entranced by higher-dimensional forms. He was a computer animator. He was an extremely doting father who enjoyed every single moment of life with his kids. He was a lover of classical Latin literature and Shakespeare, of Tintin comics and Terry Pratchett novels. He was a historian and a writer; a geologist; a linguist; an artist; a builder; a musician with a special love of Brazilian music; a nature lover and photographer. He was a tireless trailblazer, who habitually carried loppers on his hikes, to trim the way and ease the passage of others who would follow.

Russ was self-taught; formal education processes were far too slow for his quick, deep, wide mind.

Follow the links at right to his Geometry blog, and to his YouTube videos. In the "Quintessence" video you can see and hear him talk about a favorite geometrical form in the setting of the small hexagonal cabin he built in 1975 and lived in ever after.

We are all SO blessed to have shared life with him, but no single one of us was really able to appreciate all of his gifts. However, all of us can appreciate the gift that he was able to give to the whole public, the gift that the readers of this blog are already familiar with. Below is a letter we received recently that explains just what we mean.

In love and tremendous grief, Gay, Janet, Greg, and all his family.

In the last two days I have reflected many hours on Russell and our friendship.

I have been hiking the North Fork of the American River canyon for over 55 years. Early on it never occurred to me to do any sort of trail maintenance, I just wanted to access remote fishing locations. Over twenty years ago I started to notice trail undergrowth cut back. First on the Green Valley traail, then the China trail, and the more remote locations like the canal trail between Euchre Bar and the Rawhide Mine. There was a unique trait associated to this work. The small trees and other undergrowth were not cut at ground level, but rather about knee height. One day I came upon a man sitting on a rock smoking a rolled cigarette. Propped against the tree next to him was a short handled compound lopper. He looked a bit rough, so I approached carefully. It was, of course, Russell, and we spent some time talking about the trail system that accesses the North Fork drainage. I was able to share some of my experiences and he seemed very interested. I do not remember telling him my last name or where I lived, however in a couple of days he called me at home.

We began to hike together and he very much impressed me with his absolute passion to protect and make available to future generations the historic trail system of the North Fork. He was literally a walking talking book on many subjects including local history, math, geology, plants, and wildlife. He shared this knowledge in person, in print and on the Internet for all to enjoy. I would learn more from him on one hike than all the books I could read in a year. I began to show him my special secret places like the railroad track in the sky mine. Watching Russell's excitement on discovering something new and unique in "his" canyon was one of my great pleasures.

Russell was determined about clearing trails like nobody I have ever seen. His energy was contagious and many like Ron, Catherine, and myself followed his lead. Sometimes the group was small and the job simple. Other times the group was large and logistics much more complex. I remember such a group clearing the trail from the Dorer Ranch to Sawtooth Ridge one late October day. This trail had not been in use for 75 years and was totally impassable. The operation included a raft to ferry people and supplies across the North Fork, multiple chainsaws, loppers, and one heck of a lot of effort over many hours. Russell was as always out in front directing the operation and the first one to reach the bear bed mine up on the ridge about dusk. He was delighted as only Russell can be about the day's success. It is interesting to note that the Hot Shots fighting the big July fire made use of this cleared trail. Russell also organized trash details to haul garbage left by miners out of the canyon. This was not a fun detail, but once again, following Russell's passionate lead, we filled our backpacks and hiked out. He was truly the custodian of our canyon.

Bodily, Russell is gone, however his spirit will forever remain in those he touched. When I hike the canyons and see the knee-high trademark of Russell's clearing, I will reflect on our long time friendship and his positive effect on the canyon complex and myself. It is said that you only come this way once, so make it count. Russell, our canyon custodian, made it count.

Steve Hunter
August 10, 2008

After the Inferno: The Iowa Hill Canal

2008-08-02T12:42:00.000-07:00

Above: Iowa Hill Canal Trail in grey, Foresthill Road, blue, parking, red.

Above: the Chinese Road

Early Friday morning I drove to Jerry Rein's remarkable solar home,
and we made the long odyssey across the American River Canyon to the Foresthill Divide, crossing the North Fork at Auburn, and then driving many miles to the northeast, past Foresthill, past Baker Ranch, past the sites of Forks House, and Westville, and Secret House, to the head of the Beacroft Trail.

We would visit the uppermost Iowa Hill Canal.

We parked amid more or less dense second-growth coniferous forest,
which had burned hot, let us say, here, and yet over there, a few
yards away, had not burned at all. I had seen, looking south from the
summit of Big Valley Bluff, that the fires had flared violently from
the river itself all the way to the top of the Beacroft Trail. I had
seen that the fire had, at least slightly, crossed the Divide to the
south. And I really thought I had seen that that huge, fire-spawned
brushfield along the Canal, east of Tadpole Canyon, had been erased in an inferno.

Well, appearances oft deceive. "Erased," as it developed, was far too
strong a term. One should not too-quickly pronounce the doom of those sturdy old shrubs of Green Manzanita, Bush Chinquapin, and Huckleberry Oak, those gnarled shrubs which had baffled many a bear for decades on end.

The Foresthill-Soda Springs Road goes back to 1852, when Placer County set out to provide a good route across the Sierra for the immigrants flooding into California from The States, i.e., Back East. "If We Build It, They Will Come," seemed to be the guiding premise of this project, called the Placer County Emigrant Road.

And "they" will spend their money here in Placer County!

The road crossed the Sierra crest at Squaw Valley, although I have
read that it forked above French Meadows, the northern branch entering the upper North Fork American near the Old Soda Springs, also crossing into Squaw Valley. The Placer Emigrant Road never came into use by the emigrants, other much easier routes, such as the road via South Lake Tahoe and Placerville, garnering all the traffic.

A mile or two beyond the head of the Mumford Bar Trail we began to see back-fires set by the firefighters along the north side of the road. Once again I was impressed, even astounded, by how expertly these fires had been managed. Not only were all the larger trees left unharmed, often even young conifers had survived these back-fires. Amazing, I think, that this could be achieved in July! Perhaps it was all done at night.

However, as we neared the low pass east of Whisky Hill where the
Beacroft Trail drops away into the great canyon, directly across from
Big Valley Bluff, we began to see more severely-burned areas. Never,
however, had the fire crossed the Foresthill Road, it seemed. That too was amazing.

The pass at the head of the Beacroft is full of archeology. There is
the trail itself; there is the massive Secret Canyon Ditch, which drew
water from the Middle Fork American side of the Divide, and delivered it, via a tunnel beneath the pass, to the Iowa Hill Canal itself: both ends of the tunnel are now collapsed; and there is a little road crossing the Divide and nearing east, to the beginning of the long flume section of the Canal, leading in and out of Tadpole Canyon, rife with cliffs and precipices.

I call this little road the Chinese Road, on the assumption that
Chinese labor was heavily involved in the construction of the Canal,
in the 1870s. I would guess that these Chinese workers had a camp in
the pass. There are two small basins which hold spring water, possibly intended for the teams of mules hauling the wagon-loads of sawed lumber to the giant flume under construction.

If one parks back to the south and walks in to where the Beacroft
Trail begins, but ignore it and follow a faint road bearing northeast,
one will pass the collapsed tunnel of the Secret Canyon Ditch, and
briefly the Chinese Road disappears. Blundering northeast into dense
forest, one will pick it up again easily enough.

It is this Chinese Road which forms the first part of the Iowa Hill
Canal Trail, as depicted on Tahoe National Forest maps of 1947 and
1962. It is now a long time since this trail has been maintained. Some
sections have been erased in rockslides and avalanches. With various
friends I have been working to restore the trail to a minimal
passability, over recent years. It is really one of the most scenic
and dramatic trails in our entire area. The bench cuts in the sheer
cliffs flanking Tadpole Canyon are quite incredible in and of
themselves. Beyond Tadpole is the Big Brush, and from that ancient
chaparral one gains an exceptional view of the canyon, Big Valley
Bluff, Sugar Pine Point, Cherry Point, and even Snow Mountain.

Jerry and I found that the dense forest along the Chinese Road had
been incinerated, only a few of the oldest Sugar Pines, three feet in
diameter, appearing to have survived with some foliage intact.
Everything smaller had become stark and blackened poles without any
needles or even smaller branches. The road was easier to follow. We
paused at a rock outcrop on the canyon rim for a good view north to
Big Valley Bluff, and observed the broad swaths of burned forest
leading from the river up to the cliffs of the Bluff.

Jerry spotted smoke rising from a blackened Douglas Fir trunk nearby; a rotten area within the trunk was still burning, the smoke escaping lazily from a hole in the trunk, fifty feet above the ground.

Continuing, we followed the Chinese Road as it crossed the Divide and struck more to the east, descending on a gentle grade towards the Canal, which began to appear below us, a truly gargantuan mining ditch.

Every step puffed up a cloud of dust and ashes. Many a rock had rolled
down onto the old road during and since the fire, and occasionally a
blackened trunk had leaned down across it. I lifted a few rocks to the
side and quickly my hands were blackened. My shoes and pants were
blackened. My arms and face were blackened. No human had walked in to the Canal before us, the ashy dust was pristine.

The bedrock here is the early-Paleozoic Shoo Fly Complex of metasedimentary rocks, but it is not often exposed, glacial till
covering much of the area, in a kind of "till shadow" extending down-ice from the higher ridges to the east, between Tadpole Canyon and New York Canyon.

Reaching the Canal, we followed it east towards Tadpole, almost immediately passing some stone walls which facilitated, in some way, the off-loading of the lumber. They were loading docks, as it were. These stone walls, made of carefully-stacked large boulders retrieved from blasting operations along the bench cuts ahead, had suffered some damage in the fire, many boulders showing fresh cracks from the intense heat, and one section having collapsed altogether.

Although the leaves had been scalded off the brush along the Canal,
the skeletons remained. I would say it was easier going than before,
except that very many boulders and rocks of all sizes had rolled down
onto the old Canal Trail. A few of these I moved aside, usually
placing them on the uphill side, so as to dam up the soil already
moving down the slope from above, and soon to descend by the ton, when the fall rains arrive.

Once we reached the precipices close to Tadpole Canyon, the intensity of the fire lessened, as there was much more rock, much less fuel, and whole stretches of the Canal were untouched. At the crossing of Tadpole Canyon tall patches of purple Fireweed were in full bloom. The stream is at a low flow, clear and sparkling through a succession of pools and waterfalls.

Crossing, we entered that little patch of tall conifers immediately to
the east, very badly burned, and then crossed unburned cliffy areas
for couple hundred yards before reaching the first outliers of the Big
Brush.

The Canal bears north before breaking out of Tadpole Canyon proper
into the main North Fork Canyon and the Big Brush. Here it changes
back from flume to ditch. It became apparent before we even reached that area that the Big Brush had by no means been burnt to the ground. Perhaps the only slight increase in passability is that the "outside-the-berm" path, a concession long long ago forced upon animals and humans alike by thick brush and trees growing from the crest of the ditch's high berm (for the most natural path would be on the berm crest)--the "outside-the-berm" path could now be walked rather easily. The bed of the Canal itself was also much more open than it had been, except it was so deep in soft fluffy ashes that to walk it was to nearly choke to death in clouds of ash-dust.

Soon we reached the edge of that ocean of heavy brush I call The Big
Brush. At exactly this point a faint trail forks away north, directly
down the canyon wall, with some very old blazes on trees just below
the Canal. These trees had been incinerated and only vestiges of their
foliage remained, near the tops, and even these had been cooked in the violent upslope winds of the fire, and left frozen, as it were, permanently bent as though that wind were an eternal and unvarying gale of great force.

I wished to explore down the old trail, always too choked with brush
to follow in years past, while Jerry wished to continue along the
Canal. I told him I would catch him up soon, expecting to take ten
minutes or so to scout the slopes below for this Mystery Trail,
depicted on the 1947 Tahoe National Forest map. It must have once led all the way down to the river, although the map showed it ending half-way down.

So I wound down the slope, picking my way through the skeletons of shrubs, seeing any number of possible trail segments, but no one continuous line presented itself. I scouted back and forth, to the west and to the east, as I dropped hundreds of feet in elevation. Seeing a nice promontory jutting into Tadpole Canyon below and to the west, I dropped down to it, and saw for the first time a waterfall I had often heard, easily a hundred feet high, in its upper, more visible part, and in full flow perhaps merging into a single two-hundred footer.

From the Promontory I broke back east on a contour and reached the faint ridge crest upon which I supposed the trail would most likely be found.

It was interesting to see, scant weeks since the area had burned, that
many of the bushes and small Black Oaks were stump-sprouting, fresh
green foliage pushing up through the grey ashes from the roots and
burls below. The Bush Chinquapin seemed the most eager to sprout,
while the burled Green Manzanita more rarely showed new growth. All in all, maybe one bush in one hundred is already showing new growth sprouting from the roots.

It was also interesting to see an occasional ant. And I saw some few
footprints from deer. As I scouted back and forth on the blackened
brushy slope, I began to see that the inimitable California Ground
Squirrel had at least sometimes survived the inferno, and fresh dirt
was piled outside their burrows, every two hundred yards or so.

Other than that it was a dreadful Desert of Death.

On my putative trail ridge I saw a faint and broad depression which
might have been an old prospect, although in the till blanketing the
area it was not clear what would motivate such a prospect. There were some small outcrops of bedrock nearby, at any rate. I saw no sign of any trail. Continuing on an eastward course, I soon saw some old cans scattered amid the burnt brush.

There were a few rusty condensed-milk cans, and a dozen or more larger cans of a curious construction. They were "double" cans, one can within another, a space of a quarter of an inch or so separating the inner from the outer, and on their bases were embossed these words:

TO HEAT CONTENTS
<--PUNCH HOLES-->
AT LEAST ONE INCH DEEP

Four dimples on the base marked where the holes were to be punched. Most all the cans had no such holes. Later, back at home, I Googled these double cans, and determined that in the space between inner and outer there would have been some quicklime, and a reservoir of water, which, when combined (by punching the holes to break the internal membrane separating the two), would react to heat the contents of the inner can.

This technology dates back at least to 1900, and quite a few patents
were issued over a period of decades. It was used by the U.S. Army in
WWII and in the Korean War for various types of field rations. Beyond
that, I could learn nothing.

That the cans showed up so close to the possible prospect made me
return west for another look at the latter. The second time around I
descried a faint trail leading right down the ridge. I followed it
down for a dozen yards or so until the blackened brush closed up too
tightly, and was left wondering whether it was or was not the Mystery
Trail.

Already four hundred feet below the Canal, I hesitated to drop any
lower. The sun was intense and there was no shelter at all. The few
trees were merely black poles casting thin stripes of shade. I
returned to the cans and cast around more widely, without finding
anything, and then struck east through a bad section of brush which
forced me into an intricate series of ups and downs and twists and
turns. A grove of conifers, all burned badly, lay ahead, and in
scanning these very slopes with binoculars from Big Valley Bluff, the
other day, it seemed an area which could have carried the Mystery
Trail.

However, although the burned grove contained any number of faint
terraces which a good imagination could conjure into a trail, there
was no tell-tale continuity which could settle the issue. Regretfully,
having exceeded my ten minutes by at least thirty more minutes, I
began a hot and dusty climb up through the Big Brush. Even in death
the Big Brush is formidable, and I found myself almost insensibly
pushed back to the faint ridge where I most-expected the Mystery Trail to be. This insensible pushing actually argues well for that ridge being the very line of the Mystery Trail. Sometimes one's feet are better arbiters, of such things as the courses of long-abandoned ancient trails, than one's brain or one's eyes.

Eventually I reached the Canal again, and followed it east. The sun
glared down and I didn't really want to push on through the glare and
the dust to the end of the Canal, almost a mile ahead, but fortunately I had delayed so long in searching for the Mystery Trail, that Jerry was already on the way back, and we met in the middle of that infinity of burned skeletons, and then turned back west and followed the good old Canal back to the Chinese Road, the pass, and the car.

Such was a very interesting day spent high on the walls of the
American River Canyon, within the area most-badly burned by the
"American River Complex" fire of June and July, 2008.

The North Fork Fire

2008-07-28T00:16:00.000-07:00

Above: Looking south from Big Valley Bluff to Tadpole Canyon
Photo by Ron Gould

After weeks and weeks of smoke, the fires in and around the American River Canyon are mostly out. Today I joined Ron Gould for a visit to Big Valley Bluff, a grand eminence, the El Capitan of the North Fork, rising 3500 feet from the river, and near the eastern margins of the burned area.

We drove to Emigrant Gap, hung a right, and followed Forest Road 19 south, past the North Fork of the North Fork, past the East Fork of the North Fork of the North Fork, past Texas Hill, where we lost the pavement. Soon thereafter we began seeing evidence of the fire, which had encompassed an area of 20,000 acres.

Apparently Forest Road 19 had been used as a firebreak, and "backfires" had been set on the canyon side of the road. From
bulldozer scars I had seen miles away on Sawtooth Ridge and Humbug Ridge, I feared what I would find along the road to Big Valley Bluff. However, for the most part I was pleasantly surprised. The backfires, in particular, had mostly burned nice and cool, leaving all larger trees alive, and even most smaller trees.

The issue of bulldozer use on the fire has been complicated somewhat by what seems to be something in the way of what Tahoe National Forest terms a "hazard tree removal project," and various bulldozed paths radiated away from the road, and various piles of sawlogs were stacked along the road. There also seemed to be "staging areas" which had been bulldozed clear, here and there. Nothing seemed too extreme or heavy-handed, although I confess to a slow burn of hatred for bulldozers which has been building in my heart for many years. I begin to lament every square foot of forestland which is torn and trampled by the loud and stinking beasts.

Reaching the summit of the Bluff, we finally saw areas which had burned wildly, and it was impressive. In particular, the upper reaches of the Iowa Hill Canal, around Tadpole Canyon and the Beacroft Trail, had been hit hard. The Big Brush, an artifact of a fire decades ago, is gone. Erased. And large areas of forest nearby had been killed.

Also, a good two or three miles of forested canyon flanking the American River Trail had burned, and not in a cool, ground-creeping fire, but in an all-consuming crown fire.

It will be interesting to watch these parts of the canyon regenerate. I have little doubt but that much of the brush will stump-sprout, and by this time next summer there may be a froth of green over some of the burned area.

We hiked down to a certain slaty cliff-top, where I told Ron about the Fluttering Rocks.

It happens that if one is on a high-enough cliff with flat-enough rocks (a thin shard of slate is ideal), and if one throws the flat shard flat and spinning sharply like a Frisbee, far away from the cliff, so it will fall a long way ...

Then it will certainly happen that at first the shard will retain its horizontal orientation; and it will certainly happen that it will
gradually tilt to one side, and begin knifing steeply down in a vertical orientation, ever faster; and once in ten throws, I told Ron, it will happen that, as it knifes down, it will begin to flutter rapidly, a chaotic tumbling motion which beats the air in an audible, rhythmic, whipping susurration, and *it slows down.*

After a time I cast around for a shard of slate and found a perfect piece, three inches in diameter, nearly round in outline, and less than half an inch thick. I gave it a strong toss into the vastness of the canyon, where it could fall free for a thousand feet.

Sure enough, about six hundred feet down, it began fluttering, and slowed down. It is a marvelous thing to see.

While out at the Bluff we saw smoke from the big fire in Mariposa drifting north and seemingly crossing the Sierra crest right at the head of the North Fork. We also saw smoke from the fires farther north in a long white mass along the Coast Range up in Mendocino County. In fact, it was remarkably clear for a summer day, with fires still burning in many places; we could see Mt. Diablo, Mt. St. Helena, and Cobb Mountain, rising above the general line of the Coast Range, the Sutter Buttes, and even parts of the Sacramento Valley floor.

It was quite an interesting visit to Big Valley Bluff, one of the great scenic overlooks in California.

Birthday at Smarts Crossing

2008-07-21T20:58:00.000-07:00

My son, Greg, turned seventeen over the weekend, and had a birthday party swim at Smarts Crossing. A merry group of nine young people and one old fogey made the mad drive down the rocky rutted road to a point well above the Bear River. We walked the last few hundred yards. Who can understand the antics of the Younger Generation; who can interpret their slang; who can fathom their music, if it can even be called "music." They vigorously debated an apparently age-old and perpetually captivating question, viz., whether ninjas or pirates would win in a flat-out fight, and made a series of sick jokes about zombie babies.

A monsoonal air mass had spread over the Sierra, and on the one day in the year when one could absolutely count on sun and blazing heat, it was cloudy and sometimes cool, with occasional showers dotting the dust. However, we were all inspired to swim the icy pool. A few of us made the jump from the Twenty-One-Foot Rock. The girls were sweet and lissome, the boys were, well, boisterous. At a certain point the boys thought it worthwhile to carry boulders to the Twenty-One, and topple them into the depths of the pool.

It was a good thing an old fuddy-duddy was present, inasmuch as hundred-pound boulders were deemed inadequate, and the young men were soon collaborating on two-hundred pound boulders, aiming to carry them up a slippery and sloping rock surface to reach the exalted Twenty-One. I had to intercede. One slip and it would be a broken leg, or arm, or foot, or hand. Later I just had to call a halt to the boulder-dropping altogether.

All in all it was a lot of fun to visit the great old swimming hole, enjoyed by generations of folk from Dutch Flat, and probably a favorite swimming and salmon-fishing spot for the native Californians of centuries and millenia past.

There are quite a few obnoxious metal signs nailed up by PG&E, warning of sudden releases of water into the river from Drum Powerhouse, and concluding with the order to "KEEP AWAY."

It is strange that PG&E ignored our beautiful Smarts Crossing for nearly a century, and that only now, in the 21st century, do they assert that the Bear River is no more than their own corporate canal, to be used exactly as they please, the rest of the world be damned.

We ignored the ugly signs. We need to find a way to put the private parcels along the old road into public ownership; Tahoe National Forest would be a good fit, inasmuch as the Crossing is already flanked by Forest parcels.

Of Snakes and Squirrels

2008-07-10T17:13:00.000-07:00

I live in an ecotone, a kind of blend between the coniferous forest of the Transition Zone, and the oak woodlands and savannahs of the Upper Sonoran Zone. The "life zones" of Merriam have fallen out of favor in recent decades, but I still find them very apt. Merriam recognized that, as elevation increases, in a mountain range, vegetation changes in very much the same way as if elevation remained constant, but latitude increased. To ascend the Sierra Nevada to the 5,000-foot contour and the realm of the White Fir is much the same as to go north into southern Canada. Merriam did his seminal research near Fort Valley, Arizona, where my grandfather Leland Towle worked as a forest ranger, at the time.

That was almost a century ago. Here, on Moody Ridge, in this ecotone between two different assemblages of vegetation, one sees two different assemblages of animals, also. For instance, both the Scrub Jay of lower elevations, and the Steller Jay of higher elevations, are here.

Today a young squirrel is slowly dying in my yard. It is a California
Ground Squirrel, Citellus beecheyi, and is more closely identified
with the Upper Sonoran life zone of the Scrub Jay, than with the
Transition life zone of the Steller Jay. And, since my yard is on the
cusp between the two zones, there are many Gray Squirrels in the area, as well. And Flying Squirrels, for that matter, although these are rarely seen.

The Ground Squirrel lives up to its name, only rarely venturing into
trees, and when it does, never climbing more than, oh, fifteen or
twenty feet. It will clamber into Ceanothus bushes and harvest the
seeds, storing them in cheek pouches, and then find some conspicuous
perch and slowly work through the seeds it has saved. It is strange
that they like these highly exposed perches, on a large boulder,
perhaps, for they are preyed upon by Golden Eagles.

It may be that another predator worries them much more than mere
eagles. The Western Rattlesnake, Crotalus viridus, is an avid hunter
of the Ground Squirrel. One might almost say, given ground squirrels,
rattlesnakes are sure to follow.

In this little clearing in the woods, in this ecotone, there has
always been a colony of ground squirrels, at least, for the
thirty-three years I have been here, there have been ground squirrels.
They fall victim to foxes, to bobcats, and, although one is extremely
unlikely to actually see it happen, to rattlesnakes.

This summer brought many a baby squirrel into the colony. The colony burrows are scattered over a broad area, and have multiple entrances, and may also be shared between individual squirrel families. It seems there are more squirrels now than ever before. One develops a sense of their lives and habits. I can recognize their metallic "alarm squeak," and sometimes, hearing the squeak, and taking a look around, I will see the fox, or the bobcat, which inspired that squeak.

The squeak is repeated, every second or so, for minutes, sometimes tens of minutes, at a time. It is painful to listen to this squeak. With a roar, and a hurled rock, I will sometimes try to quiet that squeak.

So. There are many squirrels, hence, as night must follow day, there must also be many rattlesnakes.

And there are. Four or five different snakes have visited the yard this summer. The hotter days seem to somehow inspire them to visit. Years ago, when my children were small, I killed rattlesnakes in the yard. In recent years I do not bother them. Live and let live. And yet ... and yet, they are so very hard to see if not moving, and they do not always rattle, and they coil up in places one can't really see well, anyway. It is a bit nerve-wracking. To have four or five different snakes visit, in one summer month, is a first in my several decades here.

I recently learned, on the Internet, that adult ground squirrels are immune to rattlesnake venom, and also, that they will wave their tails back and forth while facing a rattlesnake, and that the temperature of those waving tails increases by some five degrees at the time.

Yesterday I heard a doubled alarm squeak, in the sultry smoky heat of the afternoon, and walked slowly towards the sound, expecting to find a rattlesnake.

Sure enough.

An adult and a juvenile squirrel were atop one of their favorite Ceanothus-seed-eating perches, just above their burrow, both facing a spot a foot and a half away, and every two or three seconds, at exactly the same time, they would rapidly wave their tails, and squeak. It was as if they were telepathically connected. I could not see anything for them to squeak at, and slowly ventured closer.

The young squirrels are much more fearful of humans, than their parents, and they (there turned out to be a second juvenile, perched a few inches below) scampered away once I was within six or eight feet. The adult remained, steadfastly squeaking and waving its tail. Finally I saw the snake. It was occupying a crevice between two boulders, directly above one of the burrow entrances. The head and upper part of the snake's body were already coiled and still, the tail was extended away a foot or so, and was slowly being drawn into the coil.

I kept an eye on that snake as the afternoon dwindled into darkness. It never moved. I saw the adult squirrel enter the burrow, only a foot from the snake. The snake never moved. It seemed to be waiting for the squirrels to forget its presence.

At dawn I returned. The snake had gone. There seemed a peculiar lack of squirrels in the yard. This is common after a fox or bobcat visits.

An hour later I looked around again; an adult ground squirrel was on a large boulder, seemingly surveying its domain. And a few feet away, a juvenile was stretched out on the ground, its eyes open, alive, but hardly able to move. It had been bit by a rattlesnake in its right hindquarters, paralyzing its right hind leg. Over the next hour it painfully dragged itself twenty or thirty feet, downhill, towards one of its family burrows. The adult surveyed its child's progress. But then the venom's force overcame the young squirrel. It stopped moving. Its eyes closed. An hour later, it was dead.

There was absolutely no sign of the snake. All the squirrels entered their burrows and stayed within for hours, in mourning.

Smarts Crossing

2008-07-06T08:57:00.000-07:00

The number of historic public trails and roads which have been closed
to the public here in Placer County has grown too long to tell, at
least, in the course of such a count, it degenerates into a repetitive
whine: The Sky is Falling, and what's more, Life is Unfair.

Smarts Crossing is one of these historic public roads. A wagon road
led across the Bear River, from near Dutch Flat to the Liberty Hill
Mine, and Mule Springs, and Lowell Hill; once there was a bridge,
where an inner gorge holds a deep pool in its polished embrace ... one can still find the heavy iron pins set in the rock there, which
anchored the bridge, but some time, in the 1940s, the old bridge
washed way and was never replaced. On the Liberty Hill side, the road fell out of use and became overgrown; but on the Dutch Flat side, it was kept open, decade after decade, by local residents who loved to swim and dive in the long deep pool, and wander and explore up and down the river, and shiver while the hot canyon breezes swiftly dried the icy water from their bodies.

The Crossing derives its name from the Smart family of Dutch Flat, who once had a sawmill over on the Liberty Hill side.

As is usual, a complex of various parcels is crossed by the old road.
There are patches of Tahoe National Forest land in the canyon, around there, and also Bureau of Land Management lands: these are public lands. The road also crosses some PG&E land, land which I hope will become public land, as there is a settlement in the works, linked to the PG&E bankruptcy several years ago, a settlement which will transfer ownership of some thousands of acres of PG&E lands, to Tahoe National Forest.

And there is an ordinary private parcel, of some seventy acres,
through which the old road passes, on its way down to the sparkling
river. In the early 1980s, this parcel was sold, and the new owner was
quick to put up his "no trespassing" signs, quick to throw a gate
across the road, quick to turn people away at gunpoint.

Local residents banded together and filed a class action lawsuit in
the Superior Court in Auburn, maintaining that the Smarts Crossing
Road was a public road, and could not be closed. We could not have
done this without very substantial pro bono legal help, most notably
by Ed Stadum. We won our case. The road was re-opened. The seventy acres was sold, again, to a somewhat notorious real estate developer, which bodes no good, so far as continued public access to the glorious old swimming hole.

A few years ago, a second gate appeared on the road. A group of people at Smarts Crossing had been chased away by a sudden release of water from Drum Poerhouse, five miles up the canyon, and had complained to PG&E. Now, PG&E owns no part of Smarts Crossing itself; their lands lie rather high on the road, near its intersection with Drum Powerhouse Road. Nevertheless, PG&E decided that, in the interest of public safety, they would close the road.

Local residents complained about the closure, the gate, the sign, and
copies of the legal decision by the Superior Court were mailed to
PG&E's legal counsel. Eventually, in a show of compliance, PG&E went so far as to remove the lock. The gate remained, and it remained closed, but it was not locked.

This was not a welcome compromise, but at least public access was retained.

Recently I was informed that the PG&E gate boasted a brand new lock. Xanadu, for so I will style him, sent me a photograph of the lock. I am about paralyzed by anger and bitterness by all these closures of the historic trails and roads. I merely replied, to Xanadu, that, yes, it was indeed a lock. A large lock. My thoughts turned to an honored environmentalist of Dutch Flat, who advised me, years ago, to find a large pipe cutter, and trim the gate off at ground level.

Xanadu now informs me that, strangely, unaccountably, not only has the big lock disappeared, but the entire gate is gone!

Someone's heart is in the right place.

So far as the future, I regard it as essential that the PG&E lands near Smarts Crossing be transferred to Tahoe National Forest, and moreover, that the seventy acres which was involved in the original closure be purchased by Tahoe National Forest. The "recreational values" of that area (how I hate the language of the bureaucrats!) are too important to allow those lands to be given over to residential uses.

There are many many private parcels bordering Tahoe National Forest lands which must be purchased and merged with the Forest, IMHO. Some are entire sections, as at Four Horse Flat, on the Big Granite Trail, or at Wildcat Point, in the Royal Gorge. Some are tiny little parcels, once upon a time, who knows, patented mining claims. And some, as at Lost Camp, will likely require an Act of Congress, to adjust Forest boundaries.

And all this should be done without delay. I can't help but think that the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on our war in Iraq might have been put to much better purposes.

But that is just more whining.

Letter to Tahoe National Forest

2008-06-19T16:00:00.000-07:00

Below, a letter to Tahoe National Forest Supervisor Tom Quinn, urging him to take action to re-open the Lost Camp Road, restoring public access to the China Trail. If you wish, you can copy and paste the text below into an email to Supervisor Quinn, at pmahaffey@fs.fed.us, with whatever you might wish to add. The Tahoe needs to take its historic trails much more seriously.

*******
June 19, 2008

Tom Quinn
Forest Supervisor
Tahoe National Forest
631 Coyote Street
Nevada City, CA 95959

re: Lost Camp Road

Dear Supervisor Quinn,

In T16N, R11E the historic road to Lost Camp, giving access to Tahoe National Forest (TNF) lands, and to historic TNF trails, has been gated closed. The gate seems to be in the SE 1/4 of Section 14, the road continuing south into Section 23, which, being an odd-numbered section, one might expect would be one of the old "railroad" sections; but it contains a large patented mining claim (the "Lost Camp Mine"), and apparently was never deeded to the railroad. The Lost Camp Road passes through Section 23 into sections 26, 27, and 34.

Just north of the large patented claim in Section 23, in Section 14, a series of small parcels exist. The owners of these parcels have blocked the historic road with a gate.

The historic trails now blocked include the China Trail, constructed in 1862, leading from Lost Camp to Sawtooth Ridge, crossing the North Fork of the North Fork of the American River, and long maintained by TNF rangers; and the trail leading down the crest of the ridge dividing Blue Canyon from the North Fork of the North Fork of the American River to the Rawhide Mine. Yet other trails are affected by the owners of the small parcels in Section 14, mentioned above, notably, the Bradley & Gardner Ditch, or Placer County Canal, constructed in the 1850s to bring water to the hydraulic mines in Dutch Flat. This old mining ditch, although somewhat damaged by timber harvest activities, makes a wonderful trail, and has been used as such since its construction.

I should say that this is quite a remarkable area. The deep canyon of the North Fork of the North Fork American, and the river itself, are extraordinarily beautiful. If you look at a map, you will notice several tributary streams, all converging: Fulda Creek, Sailor Ravine, the East Fork of the North Fork of the North Fork, Burnett Canyon, and Willmont Ravine. All of these have fine waterfalls. I call this locus of convergence the Gorge of Many Gorges. It is just upstream from the crossing of the North Fork of the North Fork by the China Trail.

Most people, perhaps, who once used the China Trail, were fly fishermen. The tranquil beauty of the deep canyon, the sparkling clarity of the river, the cliffs and tall trees, and the trout, have brought hikers back year after year, decade after decade.

I wish Tahoe National Forest to meet its responsibilities and act quickly to re-open the Lost Camp Road and the China Trail. This road and this trail were among TNF's "system" roads and trails for many decades. This road and this trail are depicted on official TNF maps dating back at least to the 1930s, and are depicted on the General Land Office map of 1872.

The China Trail is a foot trail, despite the recent efforts of loud, lawless, garbage-strewing OHV users to convert it to a motorcycle highway. Since the OHV users have gone so far as to damage the historic China Trail, their use of the area must be curtailed entirely. There should be an OHV closure not only on the China Trail itself, but on the Lost Camp Road south of the railroad tracks.

When Tahoe National Forest was created, over a century ago, it inherited a fine system of trails, many dating back to the Gold Rush. The forest rangers faithfully maintained and blazed these old trails for many decades. For reasons beyond the scope of this letter, those trusty rangers of days gone by were replaced by people who wished to harvest timber, no matter what the cost to trails, to scenery, to recreation, to heritage resources, to wildlife.

That is, we went from a time when TNF actually protected its system of historic trails, to a time when TNF itself ruined many a trail, in the course of timber harvest activities. We went from a time when TNF would promptly intercede to keep one of its historic system trails open to the public, even where it crossed private property, to a time when TNF quietly, secretly, without any public comment, dropped historic roads and trails from its list of "system" roads and trails.

The Lost Camp Road and the China Trail must be re-opened and restored to the public, with an OHV closure on both road and trail.

Sincerely,

Russell Towle
P.O. Box 141
Dutch Flat, CA 95714
*******

Fringed Pinesap

2008-06-18T20:47:00.001-07:00

Hi all,

A rare and ghostly flower haunts the deep woods, called Fringed Pinesap.

On the gentle uplands of Moody Ridge, some four thousand feet above sea level, there once grew an open forest of mighty pines and cedars. Then, around 1870, came Progress: those gigantic trees, centuries old, were laid low. A dense forest of young pines rose in its place, almost impenetrable, as is remarked in the field notes of Berkeley zoologist Joseph Grinnell (see http://mvz.berkeley.edu/Grinnell.html), who visited in 1912, collecting specimens for days on end. He stayed at the Pine Mound Inn, one of several hotels in and near Dutch Flat at that time.

Fires swept across Moody Ridge and thinned that dense forest again and again. More logging took place, notably, around 1960 and 1977-78. This last cut was the unkindest, in that every conifer over fifteen inches in diameter was taken, and then, adding insult to injury, the bulldozer-churned forest land was illegally subdivided.

Thirty years later, the signs of logging have softened, but the skid trails of the 1977-78 timber harvest are still plainly visible, as the bulldozers spun their treads deeply into the rich forest soil, casting it to the side, and exposing the clayey subsoil.

Only recently did I finally realize, after a few decades of walking about, that signs of the earliest phase of logging, dating to around 1875, remain visible, in the form of narrow-gauge railroad grades, very carefully located to allow for the easiest yarding of the huge first-growth sawlogs, which would be rolled directly onto the flatcars, and hauled away to the Canyon Creek Mill.

I have cleared debris and small trees from one of these old logging-railroad grades, which winds in and out of a small valley on a line so level one would imagine it an old mining ditch, and it makes for a nice walk. I call it the Railroad Trail. Yesterday, walking along the Railroad Trail amid Incense Cedar and White Fir, Ponderosa Pine and Sugar Pine, I saw what seemed to be the white ghosts of small pine cones thrusting up through the pine needles which deeply cover the forest floor. They were quite intricate, and clearly, without any chlorophyll, being one of those saprophytic plants often placed in the Heath Family, like Pine Drops and Snow Plant. I took some photographs, but was not pleased with my efforts, when I got home to my computer, so today I returned.

In the meantime, I succeeded in identifying these ghostly flowers as Fringed Pinesap, Pleuricospora fimbriolata. It derives all its energy and nutrients from fungal mycelia in coniferous leaf litter. There are quite a few nice photographs of Fringed Pinesap on the internet.

As I neared the Railroad Trail, a loud and sudden flapping of very large wings, very near by, shocked me, and I hastened forward into an opening, expecting to see a Golden Eagle lifting away.

Instead I saw a large dark bird move awkwardly, from one branch to another, in an Incense Cedar. A turkey? I sidled closer, camera raised, hoping for a shot. Many an intervening branch left my subject indistinct. I lost patience and strode closer.

Immediately that first large bird took wing, and a second followed, in a great commotion of flapping. Two turkey vultures. Just as I recognized what they were, a sour smell spoke of Death. I walked towards the tree in which the vultures had roosted, and found a dead Gray Fox stretched long on the pine needles, long and oddly narrow, since most of it had been eaten, and for a radius of twenty feet around the carcass, vulture feathers littered the ground. A cloud of flies hovered above.

Returning to the trail, I was soon in the gentle uplands of the surface of the andesitic mudflow plateau which was once universal, but the larger part of the plateau is gone, carried away bit by bit during in the canyons of our modern rivers, canyons only a few million years old. It is very likely that the canyons of the North Fork American, the Bear, Steephollow, and the South Yuba, are all alike only four million years old.

I revisited the several locations where my Fringed Pinesap pushed up from the forest floor, in clusters of five to ten individual plants, and took a number of photos. These plants never grow very tall, a few inches at best. In years past I have often mistaken them for young Pine Drops, somehow, due to their youth no doubt, not colored red. It is gratifying to recognize at last they are a distinct species.

Above: Pine Drops

Fringed Pinesap and Pine Drops alike are classic residents of the deep pine woods, along with a number of native orchids, such as Rattlesnake Orchid, and other plants either in the Heath Family or closely allied to it, such as Little Prince's Pine, and Wintergreen.

I left the Railroad Trail and struck out through the densely overgrown forest, gathering spider webs in great swaths across face and chest as I pushed through thickets of young cedars and firs, but only found one new cluster of Fringed Pinesap.

A dead fox, ghostly flowers which mimic pine cones, uneasy vultures; it was, all in all, a nice walk. I will post a picture or two on my blog (http://northforktrails.blogspot.com/).

Cheers,

Russell Towle

Return to Hayden Hill and the Terrace Trail

2008-06-01T12:52:00.000-07:00

Apparently spurred in the very midst of a moment, Ron Gould sent me an email at 11:29 P.M. Wednesday, suggesting a visit to far-flung Hayden Hill on Thursday. I did not see his message until 7:30 Thursday morning. The strange and severe tasks, which shall always attend upon writing an article about zonotopal tilings, those tasks drifted, in serried ranks, before my mind's eye. Then I thought of the Terrace Trail. It was essential that Ron see the Terrace Trail. For goodness' sake, it was imperative that I follow that almost-level, bear-stomped track, through the ancient forest west of Hayden Hill. And then ... and then, there was the mysterious Hayden Hill Trail itself, which would seem to descend 2,400' to the North Fork, from a promontory on the canyon rim, off Elliott Ranch Road. That mysterious trail which was depicted on more than one old Tahoe National Forest map, and which I had stumbled upon, unbelieving, full of skepticism, last fall. It was a trail ... no, a lumber slide ... a lumber slide, which had also been used as a trail?

So I gave Ron a call, and managed to meet him in Colfax around nine in the morning, the uncluttered blue of the early morning sky giving some way to an isolated shield of altocumulus clouds, with a few fair-weather cumulus popping up below, showing surprisingly strong vertical development for that early in the day. We set off on the road to Mineral Bar and Iowa Hill, with all its intricate curves, and fantastic views of the North Fork canyon. A nice mix of wildflowers adorned the road's margins, including some Clarkia biloba and Bleeding Hearts. It takes quite a while to snake through Iowa Hill and Monona Flat and at last reach the very head of Indian Canyon, at Giant Gap Ridge, where we hung a left onto essentially unmarked Elliott Ranch Road, bearing right in half a mile, where Giant Gap Road stays left, and soon we were skimming across the head of Giant Gap Ravine, with views north across Green Valley to Moody Ridge. We passed the southern terminus of the Green Valley Trail; once it continued south to Sugar Pine Guard Station, as can been seen on some old maps, and is also evidenced by a photograph in my possession, of the Tahoe National Forest sign which marked the opposite, northern terminus of the Green Valley Trail. The photograph dates to around 1940.

It was quite a nice sign, in the shape of an arrow, and it read, as I recall, "North Fork American River. Little Switzerland. Green Valley 3. Sugar Pine G.S. 7."

It is funny and nice that Green Valley was named "Little Switzerland." Is it only a coincidence that Joe Steiner, who lived for decades in Green Valley, as caretaker of the Dunckhorst mining properties before dying there, in 1948 ... is it only coincidence that he was once described (scrawled on a slip of paper within a Mason jar, atop his grave) as loving Green Valley, because it reminded him of his native Switzerland?

The recent rains had laid the dust well on Elliott Ranch Road, and we soon reached the unmarked road left to the Hayden Hill Trail; I grabbed my loppers and started cutting back some of the many branches which hung into the road, and heaved a few small downed trees aside, as Ron's truck is a delicate, delicate thing, really too pretty, and it would not do to mar that beauty with a scratch. Ah, one could wish for the good old days, when the previous truck was still alive and well; now, there was a real man's truck, a truck which shrugged off the deadly and many-fingered hands of dead manzanita without the slightest whimper, a truck which just kept forging ahead, an almost inexorable truck, as such things go.

Ah, Toyota.

The roadside vegetation opened slightly and I climbed back in. We slowly advanced to the road's terminus, on the promontory, where a hunters' camp reminded me that, so far as I am concerned, hunting could come to a complete end on public lands. Or, do some hunters have a conscience? Do some hunters not leave mountains of garbage behind? Do some hunters not stand around like idiots, firing round after round from their shotguns, for the sake of making noise, and emptying whole boxes of bullets right in their camping area? I began picking up plastic bottles here, beer cans there, but then I saw quite a quantity of garbage fifty yards down the hill, and realized it was beyond me to even consolidate what the deer season of 2007 had inflicted upon this tiny little patch of public land. The garbage from the deer season of 2006 had been bad enough; I had informed Tahoe National Forest of the hunters' mess, but nothing had been done. So, a little job has grown into a big job.

Like very much of the Foresthill Divide, this area is blanketed by thick, quasi-horizontal strata of Mio-Pliocene andesitic mudflows. It might be better to assign all these mudflows to the Miocene. Beneath these ridge-capping andesitic debris flows are older Miocene rhyolite ash flows. Some of these latter were pyroclastic flows, and became welded tuffs, but this far west, more commonly they were reworked and redistributed by water. We can still call them tuff. Rhyolite tuff. While the source of the younger andesitic flows was along the Sierra crest, the source of the older rhyolite ash seems to have been in central Nevada. This fairly recent discovery supports the classic model of Sierran geomorphology, in which the entire range has been recently tilted up, like a trap-door, with the "hinge" buried beneath the young sediments of the Central Valley, and the Sierra crest forming the long high edge of the tilted block. For, those volcanoes in central Nevada could not have delivered such vast volumes of rhyolite ash to the west slope of the Sierra, if the crest had stood as high as it does today. In particular, those pyroclastic flows which gave us the welded tuffs of higher and middle elevations had to be flowing downhill. It appears the crest has been uplifted around 5,000 feet over the past few million years. There, near the sources of the andesitic lahars, the whole volcanic section thickens, and we see mudflows stacked up, 1500' thick and more. Rarely, basalt flows are preserved in valleys within the vast and often chaotic section of mudflows. For, multiple episodes of erosion punctuated the eruptions; the eruptive phases likely have been far outstripped by the erosive phases, in absolute time, in duration. Time enough for canyons or valleys to form in the mudflow land surface. Whatever came next, eruptively, be it more mudflow, or basalt, or volcanic ash, whatever, would tend to fill those nascent valleys. A new mudflow surface is created, and now it endures a prolonged phase of erosion. New valleys are cut, which are in turn filled by the next eruptive sequence ... .

This area was, it seems, burned over in the 1960 "Volcano" fire, which started over in the Middle Fork American side of things, in Volcano Canyon, and then swept north and east on the Foresthill Divide, reaching Humbug Canyon, and Westville, and even crossing the North Fork American to burn parts of Sawtooth Ridge.

Quite a lot of bulldozer activity took place during and just after the Volcano Fire, and the fire breaks and mounds of dirt can be seen to this day. So far as the Promontory goes, it seems the bulldozers made several swaths, perhaps pushing fuels from the top of the promontory down and over the sides. As a result the old trail leading down to Hayden Hill had first been obliterated around 1960. Ron and I just started wandering down the nose of the ridge, bearing north and east, and soon reached an almost level reach of the Promontory Ridge from which we could see down and west to the heavily forested Terrace. The old trail followed this ridge crest north, until it reached the Terrace, and broke west towards Hayden Hill.

However, a ~1980s Tahoe National Forest clearcut, directly along the line of the trail, served to obliterate it just above the Terrace, and the brush-infested plantation of small Ponderosa Pines was too dense to permit trying to stay on the original course, so we peeled away west, dropping into the Terrace Forest, and soon reached the nearly level road which extends far to the east into the Sugarloaf Basin, and west into the headwaters of the east fork of McIntyre Ravine.

Soon we reached a road bulldozed upon the line of the old trail, perhaps during the Volcano Fire and its aftermath, or perhaps during the 1980s clearcut activity. There we found the section corner common to sections 5, 6, 7, and 8 of T15N, R11E. All the townships in T15N in this area reflect the difficulties faced by early surveyors. A township is supposed to be a six-by-six square array of thirty-six one-mile-square sections. However, the townships in T15N all seem to show a northern tier of six sections which are about one mile east and west, but run about two miles north and south. Hence all these townships verge towards forty-two square miles in extent, instead of thirty-six.

At the section corner a modern monument, consisting of a two-inch diameter galvanized pipe with a marked cap, was accompanied by an older monument, a length of ore-cart track driven into the ground, with its own inscrutable markings. Large trees nearby also contained little signs. Below, to the north and west, is an old cabin site, a mining ditch, and some collapsed tunnels. Presumably a bit of Eocene-age river channel is buried beneath the roughly 400-foot-thick section of "young volcanics" in this area. Possibly the ore-cart track marked one corner of a mining claim.

From here the old trail, now an overgrown road, bears west. We followed along, passing the almost invisible fork right to Hayden Hill itself, coinciding with the trail as depicted on the USGS 7.5-minute "Dutch Flat quadrangle, and soon a mining ditch was crossed, the road dropping below the ditch, then rising to coincide with the ditch, thus obliterating it. This ditch drew water from springs to the west, delivering it to the mine site near the section corner. It is near the 3800' contour.

The bulldozed road, thankfully, came to an end. The trail continued, roughly following the line of the ditch, which was not always evident. The deep impressions of bear feet dotted the ground; they like to step in the same spot each time they walk a favorite trail. It is, in its way, a historic trail, one which likely was never drawn on any official map, but which saw use for centuries, for millenia, being after a fashion the "most-natural" and easiest way to traverse these slopes, for all sorts of animals, including humans. If one were walking from Iowa Hill to the Hayden Hill mines, either those up high, by the section corner, or those below, in Green Valley, one might well peel off the canyon rim at the head of McIntyre Ravine, and follow this old Terrace Trail east to Hayden Hill. One would then avoid an unnecessary climb of two hundred feet, to the now garbage-strewn Promontory, where the "official" Hayden Hill Trail begins.

Continuing west, we entered an area of old-growth forest containing some very large trees. There were Douglas Fir in the six- and seven-foot diameter range, and many large pines and cedars. The whole area screamed of abundant ground water, which in turn suggests that the heavily forested Terrace coincides with the rhyolite ash strata. Almost always, these rhyolite ash strata are associated with springs and seeps. Almost always, the strata themselves are not exposed at all, buried beneath deep soils, developed over many millenia. Almost always, a belt of enhanced forest marks these wet slopes.

Here, on the Terrace, about half a mile west of Hayden Hill, the ground water breaks out in big springs, surrounded by heavy timber, with an understory of robust Bigleaf Maples and Pacific Dogwood, but also, notably, quite a few Pacific Yew and sharp-needled California Nutmeg. So it is a rather fascinating area, botanically, and biogeographically. One rarely sees these Pacific Yews, and more rarely yet, yews as large as here on the Terrace. These springs are at the head of the East Fork of McIntyre Ravine, which joins the North Fork American in Green Valley.

Beyond the big springs, with their yews, and masses of delicate Lady Ferns, and bear-churned black mud, the trail continues, but much less distinctly. It is almost a case of too much of a good thing: the Terrace is broad enough, the forest, open enough, that no one particular route much commends itself over another. The game follows many paths. We strolled along, rarely seeing what could convincingly count as the line of a single, distinct, historic human trail. Here as so often elsewhere, modern use by game is enough to blur and disguise historic use by humans.

Finally, the Terrace seemed to pinch out, and we we reached an area where a bulldozed fire break, dating from the Volcano Fire, had been cut from the rim of the canyon on a steeply-descending course, bearing roughly north, right at the base of the rhyolite-enhanced forest, and just above the serpentine-stunted vegetation below us, in McIntyre Ravine. We found a pleasant little outcrop of serpentine which offered a fine view of the Ravine, with Green Valley and Giant Gap shown to good effect, to the north and to the west. The serpentine here is associated with the Melones Fault Zone. It is in faulted contact with the much-older Shoo Fly Complex metasediments to the east, the fault plane being almost vertical, and striking north and south; and it happens that between the serpentine and the Shoo Fly is a thin screen of Mesozoic metasediments and metavolcanics. If we interpret the serpentine as an ophiolite, as a section of ocean-floor basalt added to North American by continental accretion, and tilted up nearly ninety degrees in the process, this screen of Mesozoic rocks dividing the serpentine (metamorphosed basalt) from the Shoo Fly Complex could represent whatever sediments, possibly intercalated with lava flows, which lay on top of that section of ocean floor. These Mesozoic rocks can be seen to good effect along the river, from the east end of Green Valley, where they include some masses of limestone, upstream nearly to Euchre Bar. They are also evident near the head of the Euchre Bar Trail, on the road to Iron Point, and at Iron Point itself.

I would like to learn more about this Mesozoic screen between the Melones serpentine and the Shoo Fly. It is rarely more than a quarter-mile thick. Sometimes it is invaded by masses of serpentine. Were these masses squished into the Mesozoic screen during accretion, during the Nevadan Orogeny, or do they represent flows of basalt intercalated with the sediments cloaking the ocean floor?

Ron and I struck back east along the Terrace, and found a huge and ancient and recently-deceased Ponderosa Pine, over seven feet in diameter at chest height, and swelling larger still as it rose to split into three massive trunks. We paused to take photographs.

Reaching the almost-invisible fork leading north to Hayden Hill itself, we put our loppers to work opening up the old trail, which follows a nearly level ridge-crest for a quarter-mile before reaching the summit. Another old cabin site is marked by a cellar and odds and ends of sheet metal and glass. Perhaps it burned in the Volcano Fire.

Here the USGS map and TNF map both show the end of the trail. But I had found it continuing down the ridge to the north, last fall, and Ron had found old Forest Service maps which showed it dropping all the way to the river. In fact, a TNF map dating to 1909 showed "Hayden Hill" as a mining camp or settlement of some kind, with a little black square, just as it depicted Damascus, Red Point, and Westville. TNF maps from 1924 and 1930 seemed to show the Hayden Hill Trail dropping all the way to the North Fork. It was our job to settle the issue. Did it really exist? Was there yet another old trail into Green Valley, abandoned for many decades?

The trail is completely buried within manzanita near the cabin site, but it was easy to drop into the open forest to the east and, a hundred yards or so north, rejoin the ridge and the trail. Here a fallen pine, much rotted, has a number of two-by-four steps nailed to its side. When it still stood, whoever lived at the cabin might have climbed the tree, for the amazing view of Giant Gap. But it is a little hard to reconcile the fact that these wooden steps, nailed to the tree, show no signs of burning or scorching, whereas all the vegetation nearby seems to reflect, pretty clearly, having endured the Volcano Fire. Many trees lived through the fire, so it burned cool, and thousands of young conifers sprouted up after it. It is not impossible that here, anyway, it was a fire set purposely to limit the spread of the Volcano Fire.

We continued down the ridge. The trail exists, but it does not always make itself obvious. As we descended, in places we could see that there was a lumber slide, where sawed lumber for the sluice boxes at the Hayden Hill Mine had been dragged down, in bundles, from the canyon rim. One sees these lumber slides all over the place. They take the form of a trench running directly down the slope. Usually they are not at all suitable for a trail, being too steep.

At times there were very-well-defined, too-well-defined, game trails, switching back and forth on the slopes near the lumber slide. As we descended the forest changed from Canyon Live Oak on the steeper ground, with its poorer soils, to Kellogg's Black Oaks, on somewhat gentler slopes, with deeper and better soils.

From a discovering-old-trails standpoint, it was frustrating. A lumber slide cannot count as a bona fide trail. The game trails which switched back and forth could count as human trails, but if so, they were suspiciously narrow, suspiciously poorly-defined. And yet, the overall appearance of the slopes suggested a very active movement of soil and rock and debris of all kinds, downslope; if a trail were not used for, say, eighty years, it could be buried outright on such an actively-eroding slope. If only used by game it would shrink to a narrow track.

We reached the top of one of the huge red mining scars above the mine. These were much more visible thirty years ago; small pines and other trees have gradually populated the scars. The scars derive from hydraulic mining over a century ago. I had never been to the top of the scars before. I scanned the red surface closely; already the auriferous gravels at the Hayden Hill Mine counted as the oldest of the glacial outwash deposits left in Green Valley, as the mine is associated with an abandoned channel of the North Fork, the base of which channel is fully four hundred feet above the river, and the tops of the principal outwash terraces flanking this abandoned channel, six hundred feet above the river. I myself guess these terraces to be roughly 750,000 years old, dating from the Sherwin Glaciation. But the Red Scars rise higher yet. Could one find an absolute highest elevation where glacial outwash is preserved, in these scars?

At the top of the scars, the reddish material had the character of being a very weakly stratified deposit of angular chunks of rock, of an entirely local origin, in a matrix of silt and clay. Were it not for the weak stratification, almost invisible, one would be tempted to name it a colluvial deposit, *not* alluvial at all. As it is, it is about as frustrating as the trail-which-is-not-a-trail we had been following: the deposit has rocks deriving only from the slopes immediately above, and all angular: hence colluvium, hence not glacial outwash. But the deposit is weakly stratified! And it is, whatever its origin and significance, lying on top of true glacial outwash deposits, some distance below.

Well. Interesting, anyway. We followed a game trail right through the Western Red Scar basin, and entered another patch of oak forest, with more game trails, of the kind which with enough imagination might be human trails.

So it was with some frustration that we continued down, zigging and zagging widely in hopes of picking up the line of the "true" trail. Whenever we hit a suspiciously-well-defined game trail, we followed it, in hope that it would become even more well-defined, and settle the issue. On just such a trail we found ourselves approaching a terrace, upon which we could see some relics of mining.

This was just the kind of confirmation we had hoped for.

The terrace was formed by glacial outwash cemented into a tough conflomerate, much as one sees elsewhere in Green Valley, but this must count as the very highest patch of cemented outwash I have ever seen. We were roughly at the same elevation as the top of the Hayden Hill Knoll, a remnant of an outwash terrace flanking the mined-out area. Its summit is just above the 2400-foot contour, six hundred feet above the river. We could see the oak-forested Knoll through the trees, to the north. Between us and the Knoll was a deep ravine.

I told Ron of a buried anvil I had once found near the mine, where a series of terraces and trails flanked the diggings, and we dropped lower yet in search of it. We never found my terraces, never found my anvil, but we did reach one of the huge boulder piles. The Hayden Hill Mine had to get these big boulders out of the way, so they built ore-cart runs to dumps, and, my goodness, left piles of big boulders two hundred feet high. Amazing.

It was fairly overgrown down there, and we had done quite a lot of lopping earlier in the day, upon the Terrace Trail, and on the trail out to Hayden Hill. We didn't have it in us to range widely in search of the Lost Anvil of Hayden Hill, a massive thing, by the way, it must be over two hundred pounds. Well. We did range, but we only ranged up. Unfortunately, we entered a steep wet area choked with maple, dogwood, willow, and all of this very intricately intertwined with poison oak. We climbed directly up through this mad tangle for quite a long time, sweating and huffing and puffing, before breaking out into more open oak forest above. Soon we were back up in the Red Scar, and even struck the very same game trail we had used to enter and traverse the scar. I noticed a very few rounded cobbles of chert, of the sort one sees in Eocene-age relict channels, mixed into the angular rocks of the quasi-colluvium. This confirmed my earlier assessment, that the quasi-colluvium was, to some degree, alluvium; it had been, however briefly, transported by water, and had weakly stratified, as a result. We were fifty to a hundred feet below the tip top of this Red Scar, and there were rounded cobbles of chert. Robbed, no doubt, from an Eocene channel to the east, such as Lost Camp. Or, perhaps, upper Humbug Canyon. Or, perhaps, these chert cobbles came from the putative channel high above us, near the section corner. If this last was the case, then perhaps we should say that the sediments near the top of the red scars are not glacial outwash at all, but very slightly reworked colluvium which rested on top of a glacial outwash floodplain.

Whatever the case, the glacio-fluvial sediments around the Hayden Hill Mine will someday be closely investigated, and will provide evidence of rather old glaciations, in this part of the Sierra.

Ron and I made very slow work of climbing up and out of the great canyon. We were thrashed. Our shirts were wet with sweat. As we climbed, we ranged back and forth, hoping for more definitive signs of a discrete Hayden Hill Trail. We followed the lumber slide, and we ranged back and forth near it, and when we finally did reach the top, we were left with the impression that, yes, a trail did exist, and parts of it can still be followed, but it is often indistinct or even missing.

It occurs to me that the Red Scars might have greatly increased in size since the time the trail was in use. They are in part the direct result of hydraulic mining, and also the result of mining away the gold-bearing glacial outwash deposits below, over-steepening the slopes, which have been sliding and failing ever since.

We reached Ron's truck around six in the evening and it felt very good to just sit down.

Such was a nice day exploring parts of the great canyon of the North Fork of the American River.

The view east from the Promontory, with Quartz Mountain (left), Big Valley Bluff (center), and Snow Mountain (right) in the background.

Helicopters in Giant Gap

2008-05-24T06:41:00.000-07:00

A year or so ago I found that it was impossible to convince the Placer County Sherif's department that it should avoid Giant Gap with its helicopters, inasmuch as both Peregrine Falcons and Golden Eagles were actively nesting. The Sheriff's department seemed to think I was from Outer Space; what I asked was absurd.

Several times this spring the Sheriff helicopter has flown through Giant Gap.

Yesterday I received an email from Jan Cutts, District Ranger of the American River Ranger District, Tahoe National Forest (TNF), at Foresthill. Jan wrote:

"I want to let you know that in the next day or so there will be a helicopter operating in the North Fork American River drainage east of Giant Gap to remove trash from the Green Valley area. We have worked with our biologist regarding concerns with impacts to the Peregrine falcon in the Giant Gap area, and will be working with the helicopter to keep it as far away from the area as possible."

This was good news. I called Jan immediately and asked, which mess of garbage would they clean up? Were they going after all the garbage sites, or one, or what?

For years I have urged TNF to bring a helicopter in to the Euchre Bar and Green Valley areas, where huge and horrible accumulations of garbage exist, beyond, really, the capacity of hikers to simply carry up and out. I sent maps showing all these locations. My friends and I would volunteer to help pack it up for the helicopter cargo nets. However, there was never enough money in the TNF budget.

Well. Jan replied she did not know just what garbage site was being cleaned up, but that surely, any garbage taken out, whatsoever, was a good thing. I agreed, but wondered whether we could not expand the cleanup to include that especially horrid site, above Euchre Bar, on the North Fork of the North Fork of the American.

She advised me to contact Tom Madrigal of TNF, at the Foresthill office, and I immediately called, and left a message, but did not hear back.

Today, as advertised, a helicopter arrived in Green Valley. They appeared to be working on what I call Mexican Marijuana Growers' Camp #1, along the High Ditch, towards the east end of Green Valley. I could hear the thunder of the helicopter in the distance, grabbed my binoculars, and ran out to a cliff-top from which I can see much of Green Valley.

To my amazement, after spending quite a time in the east end of Green Valley, out of my view, the helicopter rose slowly westward, without any cargo net, and flew right through Giant Gap, perhaps 500 feet above the river, which is about as bad as it can get, so far as the nests of the falcons and eagles.

Needless to say, I was not pleased. I believe it was a National Guard helicopter. I would not be at all surprised if this garbage cleanup occurred under the auspices of the Drug Enforcement Agency, replete with special grants from the Bureau of Homeland Security, or whatever the blasted thing is called. For nothing happens nowadays without grants. Employees of one agency Coordinate Their Efforts with employees of some other agency, and this wonderful "coordination" could only happen thanks to a grant. It is the debacle of Hurricane Katrina, dragged out to an impossible degree, under an infinite recursion.

The Dialectic of Dialogue

2008-05-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

I have been working on geometry projects lately, and haven't been hiking much at all, except here on Moody Ridge, where spring has sprung early, and the rare Phantom Orchids are already in bloom, three weeks ahead of normal, and hungry rattlesnakes roam.

I occasionally receive emails from people seeking information about the North Fork. I am always glad to oblige. At times these exchanges develop a life of their own. A man named Fraser wrote some months ago; he wanted to visit the North Fork, "near Snow Mountain," at the end of April. He asked which trail would be best, and explained he would have his 12-year-old son with him.

I replied that all the trails near Snow Mountain would be blocked with snow, likely until June, but that he could drive up past Foresthill and use the Mumford Bar Trail, possibly hiking over a little snow at first, and once down on the river, follow the North Fork trail up to Sailor Canyon, and even beyond, with all due vigor, prudence, and so on.

Fraser responded to this, quite quickly: he had looked at a map, and thought the Big Granite Trail would work well for him. I was a little taken aback. Hadn't I just told him that it, and all the others up there, would be blocked with snow? I replied at some length, warning him that even if he managed to hike over the snow, or ski, or snowshoe, to get to the trail, it crossed Big Granite Creek along the way, and he would be taking his life in his hands to ford that creek, at the end of April.

Being surprised by his apparent willingness to cross miles of snow to reach one of the toughest trails in the big canyon, I Googled him.

I found he is quite an adventurer, with a lot of wilderness and whitewater experience. So. He was certainly capable. But his son? His son worried me. I suggested that what he envisioned might be a little much, for the son.

He did not deign to respond to my worries. A new idea had possessed him: he would hike over the miles of snow to the Beacroft Trail, or to the Sailor Flat Trail, drop into the canyon, swim across the North Fork, visit Big Granite Creek, and then hike up and out to the north, over more miles of snow, to Big Bend, on the South Yuba.

I was pretty thoroughly shocked. I wrote back, hesitantly, that for my part I would never ever, ever, swim that river at the end of April, and that what he envisioned was a truly major hike, and that I did not think it at all suitable for a twelve-year-old, but that, if he was determined to do it, good camping spots could be found at Bluff Camp, and then, across the river, at the base of Big Granite Creek. Three days would be about the minimum, I suggested.

To my complete astonishment, Fraser replied that he and his son would do it in one day!

By then, I was about six emails, and two thousand words, and one custom map, deep into our dialogue. Whatever wisdom I had to offer seemed to count for nothing. I finally knew when to stop "helping" Fraser.

A few weeks ago I heard from Fraser again. What with the warm dry spring, he had been able to drive almost up to the Beacroft, cross a few patches of snow, and follow the trail down into the canyon. He and his son camped at Bluff Camp, and made a day hike to look at Big Granite Creek the next day. They did not swim the river. The following day they hiked up and out on the Beacroft.

So the bottom line was that, while appearing to ignore my advice, Fraser actually took my advice. I wrote back, congratulating him on a good trip, and asked if he had seen the big waterfall across the North Fork from Bluff Camp.

No reply. Goodness, people are busy, nowadays.

Odds; Ends; A New Old Trail

2008-03-11T11:02:00.000-07:00

I am giving up on my ISP, recently purchased by some sleazy outfit in Virginia, and soon my only email address will be russelltowle@gmail.com.

Over recent weeks I have been clearing a beautiful little patch of forest up on Moody Ridge, and burning tons of dead wood in the snow. I walk half a mile or so to the job site, and while walking, I have seen many a mountain lion track, likely all from one and the same lion. I have had a chance to see what tracks look like in soft snow, in hard snow, what they look like after one day, or after four days, and so on.

Yesterday afternoon I was walking home and thought to take a shortcut to avoid some deep snow. I got myself into a real tangle of young conifers and brush and broke through into a small opening. Lion tracks dotted the snow, extremely fresh, retaining every detail. Hours old at best. I quickly scanned the trees above me: no lion. Then I looked down at the snow again and was puzzled to see that the lion had walked in circles. All the tracks looked very fresh. I looked again, up, and all around; nothing, but the forest is so overgrown I couldn't see far in any case. So I blundered along my supposed shortcut. In another few yards a disgusting smell wafted my way, and at first I thought of the gamy smell a bear can have, which I have only smelled a few times in my life. I walked another few paces, the smell ever stronger, and suddenly realized it was the smell of Death. The lion had left its kill somewhere very near, possibly up in a tree. I hastened away.

Recently I was contacted by a nice young man who had tried and failed to find the Green Valley Trail. He had no idea that a public parking area exists, and, while walking in along "Aquila Lane" (the Green Valley Trail road), saw enough in the way of "No Trespassing" and "No Parking" signs to deter him. I reassured him that it was indeed a public trail, and told him about the parking area. Strangely, the parking area, recently constructed by Placer County for the public's use, itself has a "No Trespassing" sign, facing its entrance from Moody Ridge Road.

Last fall I explored the area around Hayden Hill, a high knoll jutting into Green Valley from the south canyon wall (see http://northforktrails.blogspot.com/2007/10/hayden-hill.html). The USGS 7.5 minute "Dutch Flat" quadrangle topographic map shows a trail leading down to Hayden Hill from Elliot Ranch Road, on the canyon rim; but as with so many Tahoe National Forest trails, this trail has been abandoned by the Forest Service, in favor of clearcutting, it seems. The trail is almost impossible to follow in its uppermost section, and impossible to follow, having been utterly erased, within the clearcut. However, one can leave the line of where the trail used to be, and strike out cross-country.

By the way, it is an entirely unacceptable violation of the public's trust for Tahoe National Forest to abandon any historic foot trails; but the Forest has made a regular business out of abandoning historic trails and historic roads. Not only that, these momentous derelictions of duty have been executed without public input or comment of any kind. It has all been done slyly, secretly, and under the table.

My own grandfather, who joined the Forest Service at a time when Teddy Roosevelt had inspired many a young man to join, in order to protect the public trust, in order to protect the public trails, in order to protect the wildlife--my own grandfather would be so shocked and ashamed.

Back to Hayden Hill.There is some really beautiful forest down there, with springs, and some old mine tunnels, and old mining ditches and cabin sites, and to my surprise, at the very summit of Hayden Hill itself, I found traces of an old trail plunging down the ridge-crest into Green Valley. Far below, far far below, is the historic Hayden Hill Mine, a hydraulic mine which worked the very highest and oldest of the glacial outwash sediments in Green Valley. At this mine, according to local legend, a few, or perhaps "twenty" Chinese miners were buried in a horrific landslide, way back when. I have never found any verification of this legend in the old newspapers of Placer County; but I may have missed it.

Today Ron Gould called my attention to a 1930 Tahoe National Forest map which actually shows this "Hayden Hill Trail." It will be interesting to explore it, someday, although it showed every sign of being badly overgrown.

Thrusting Shoo Fly

2008-02-10T14:17:00.000-08:00

On YouTube, at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3KryrAGkBo

is an animation of a flight up the American River Canyon, using the USGS Digital Elevation Model 30-meter data set, and merging a couple dozen DEM quadrangles to build a landscape spanning Colfax on the west, the Sierra Crest on the east, the San Juan Ridge and Grouse Ridge to the north, and the Middle Fork of the American on the south. The virtual camera follows an almost due east heading from west of Rollins Lake, crossing over Lovers Leap and Green Valley, and flying on up the canyon into the Royal Gorge. The animation finishes with the virtual camera making an orbit of 360 degrees around Snow Mountain.

Thrusting Shoo Fly: on my iMac I can set the screensaver to loop through any folder of images in my iPhoto library. It so happens that right now it loops through a folder of some of my favorite photographs in the North Fork. Here is Giant Gap, from the west, and now from the east; or the 500-foot waterfall in New York Canyon, or Big Valley Bluff at dawn, as seen from the North Fork, a couple miles up the canyon.

And so on. It's not hard to take beautiful photographs in such a beautiful place.

It happens that one of these special photographs shows what I call Bluff Camp, an old mining camp immediately adjacent to the river, set on a cliff-bounded strath terrace bearing a fine grove of Canyon Live Oaks. From the North Fork American River Trail, connecting Sailor Canyon to Mumford Bar, a side trail leads one down a hundred yards, or so, to Bluff Camp. I have camped there many a time. It is half a mile or so east of Tadpole Canyon, and directly below Big Valley Bluff, rising in ragged cliffs all of 3500', across the river to the north.

And the photograph was taken from a point upstream from Bluff Camp; so one sees a part of the encircling cliffs, and a flat area--the strath terrace--perhaps thirty feet above river level. (A "strath terrace" is a glacio-fluvial landform associated with glacial outwash sediments which once occupied the terrace itself; and it was these very sediments which planed down the bedrock, to make the terrace).

It caught my eye, the other day, the Bluff Camp photo, as it filled the screen; I could see an abrupt change in the bedrock, right at the upstream end of the strath terrace. Slowly, dimly, I realized I was seeing a thrust fault. Two disparate bodies of rock had been juxtaposed by faulting.

The bedrock for miles up and down the canyon is composed of metasediments of the early-Paleozoic "Shoo Fly Complex," the oldest rocks in all the Sierra. I have a wonderfully precise geologic map of this part of the North Fork canyon, made by David S. Harwood et. al. of the USGS, in the early 1990s. Harwood shows many thrust faults in the Shoo Fly Complex near Big Valley Bluff, Sugar Pine Point, and New York Canyon. The faults sometimes bring big blocks of chert, hundreds of yards in extent, or more, into contact with slates and other types of rock in the Shoo Fly Complex.

By the way, it is called a "Complex" because it is composed of many distinct formations, spanning many millions of years in time, but all very old. Harwood describes and names four such formations in this particular area. His map does not show the Bluff Camp Thrust, which is probably a sensible choice, for it is likely not very long or large as thrust faults go, and if he were to put every such minor thrust fault on his map, well, there would be room for precious little else.

It has long been considered that the great mashing-together, the epochal juxtaposition of the disparate Sierran metamorphic rocks alongside one another, took place around 145 million years ago, in what was named the "Nevadan Orogeny" (an "orogeny" is a mountain-building). It was this Nevadan Orogeny which acted to rotate all these disparate bodies of metamorphic rock almost 90 degrees to the east, so that what were once flat-lying beds are now almost vertical, or even slightly overturned. And it is considered that the "penetrative fabric" of these disparate metamorphic rocks is mainly due to the Nevadan Orogeny. The compressive and shearing forces which imparted the fabric were fairly well parallel with the current, almost-vertical orientation of the beds. Very likely it all had to do with continental accretion, at a time when Pacific ocean floor was being actively subducted beneath the continental margin, moving from west to east, but also plunging steeply down.

However, in many of these different metamorphic rock formations, whether they be down by Auburn or up at Big Valley Bluff, an experienced eye can detect at least two different episodes of deformation, each leaving its footprint, or imposing its fabric, upon the rocks. There is the later Nevadan Orogeny; and at Bluff Camp, there is a thrust fault vastly older than the Nevadan Orogeny. That is to say, the Shoo Fly was already well-deformed, well-sliced and diced by thrust faults, long before the Nevadan Orogeny.

And Harwood discusses all this in the twelve-page essay which accompanies his map. There are a couple of typographical errors in this essay which play the very devil in understanding the thing.

It is not at all easy to learn to recognize these different rock types. That this is chert, and that is quartzite, may not be discernible except under a microscope. To develop a simple portrait of the bedrock geology, one can read what was written about it a century and more ago. At that time the focus was upon the broad outlines, not the higgley-piggley details. And for a time, the following usage had currency, for instance, in the articles by C.J. Brown of Dutch Flat, published in the Mining & Scientific Press, in 1875.

Brown divides the metamorphic rocks as follows: the Western Slate, the Middle Slate, and the Eastern Slate. Between the Middle Slate and the Eastern Slate, he identifies the long narrow serpentine belt we now name for its associated Melones Fault Zone.

Hence his Eastern Slate corresponds to the Shoo Fly Complex, and those other Paleozoic and Mesozoic rocks which lie on top of the Shoo Fly, and therefore, to the east (the whole shebang, be it remembered, rotating 90 degrees to the east during the Nevadan Orogeny).

Brown's Middle Slate corresponds to the Calaveras Complex, another complex of formations, but late-Paleozoic in age, and he correctly identifies the rock of Giant Gap as metavolcanic--in fact, Brown declares it to be metabasalt; and his Western Slate corresponds to all those metamorphic rocks west of Cape Horn, in which there are several distinct formations, often dominated by metavolcanic rock, but containing some metasediments, too.

So, if we wish to blur our focus and appreciate the broader outlines of local bedrock geology, we might give C.J. Brown's Western/Middle/Serpentine/Eastern model a try.

The Secret Trails of Green Valley

2008-01-22T13:08:00.000-08:00

I was surprised to hear from someone, in response to my "Visit to Green Valley," that she wishes the trails of Green Valley kept a secret. She objects to my mention of hiking on old mining ditches or on this or that old trail; there are, it seems, Nefarious People on this North Fork Trails email list, who, though my malfeasance, now know about the mining ditches and old trails in Green Valley.

Never mind that I have often written about precisely these ditches and trails before.

The Nefarious People, she writes, will tie plastic flagging all along the ditches, all along the trails, spray-painting a boulder now and then for good measure, with artful messages like "Green Valley Blue Gravel Mine Ditch, .25."

Perhaps one spray-painted boulder would warn of rattlesnakes. Another might read, "Euchre Bar, 1 mile, If You Like Jumping on Cliffs and Fording Raging Rivers."

Well, I'm sorry, but it is my philosophy that the old trails of the North Fork need to be known, not unknown. The North Fork of the American River--its wildness, its beautiful scenery, its historic trails and mining ditches and prehistoric sites--deserves every kind of protection and preservation. But this protection and preservation is hardly possible if no one knows the great canyon, and its great old trails.

This email list is all about making this wildness, this beauty, these old trails and ditches, known. In Green Valley, a number of private parcels exist, old patented mining claims, any one of which could on any given day sprout "No Trespassing" signs, or even a cabin. The purchase of these private parcels, and the transfer of the titles to Tahoe National Forest, or to the Bureau of Land Management, depending upon the location of the parcel-- the purchase of these parcels is critical to the future of Green Valley.

So, don't forget, the High Ditch is quite near the 2080' contour, in Green Valley, north of the river. Hike it, and let me know if you like it; it makes for a nearly level walk of a mile or so, from one end of Green Valley to the other. It crosses the East Trail about three hundred yards above Joe Steiner's grave, with another ditch, at that point, closely paralleling it, just above. The Still-Higher Ditch, as it were. But the High Ditch itself is the ticket.

Below, a map of Green Valley, showing some of its trails and ditches--which are also trails.

A Visit to Green Valley

2008-01-17T14:19:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I joined Ron Gould and Catherine O'Riley for a visit to Green Valley. The snow at the head of the trail had diminished to small patches, the sun was bright, and a stiff north wind aloft brought chill, turbulent breezes on and near the north rim of the canyon, where small vortices easily form, for the sunwarmed slopes below give rise to updrafts, and the updrafts collide with the north wind aloft, which skims directly across the summit of Moody Ridge ... and winds result which blow any which way. There was a singing of the wind in the groves of tall pines.

On the Green Valley Trail, we found very little in the way of storm damage from the recent cycle of storms. A branch here, a boulder there. The trail was in decent shape, sometimes tunneling through stands of manzanita, sometimes crossing open ridge crests with broad views. One watches, for instance, as Snow Mountain drops out of view behind Sawtooth Ridge. In fact, one can also see away up the Foresthill Divide to Tadpole Canyon and the (snow-covered) brushfields at the head of the Iowa Hill Canal, and a hair beyond, to the somewhat unremarkable spur ridge dividing the North Fork from New York Canyon. Yes, some fairly high country is in view at first. Then one drops too low, and the world shrinks to Green Valley itself, guarded on the west by the cliffs of Giant Gap.

We were on a mission to visit several old mining ditches. There are many old ditches in Green Valley, which is about a mile long, east to west, and a half-mile broad. The place lies directly in the Melones Fault Zone, which is marked by a narrow belt of peridotite and serpentine extending around a hundred miles from north to south. The bedrock in Green Valley is mostly serpentine. Faults place the serpentine in direct contact with completely different rocks to the west, in Giant Gap (late-Paleozoic "Calaveras Complex" metavolcanics), and to the east (a very narrow Mesozoic belt of mixed metasediments and metavolcanics, including marble, followed immediately by the miles-broad exposures of the "Shoo Fly Complex," early-Paleozoic metasediments).

So merely upon the basis of the bedrock we find some interesting geology in Green Valley. The faults bounding the Melones Fault Zone strike north and south and dip almost ninety degrees, that is, the fault zones are nearly vertical planes.

Of course they're not *really* planes. The fault zones curve back and forth, they shrink back and swell forward--but they are roughly planar.

And then, covering a lot of this interesting bedrock geology, are the Pleistocene sediments of Green Valley, rich in gold, rife in tunnels, with many many a mining ditch, to serve the many claims. They are glacial outwash sediments from several to many different periods of glaciation; but they are varied, and include a fascinating cemented conglomerate which cannot be a hundred thousand years old, one feels, but on the other hand, it is so incredibly cohesive--this mass of rounded pebbles and boulders and sand which, somehow, became so glued together it can stand firmly against the crushing floods of the river, so firmly it is worn into broad smooth surfaces like bedrock, not ripped apart pebble-by-pebble.

What is the cementing agent? This is not known. The "cemented outwash" is always, always, always found in direct contact with serpentine bedrock. So it is natural to deduce that some mineral leaching from the serpentine is the cementing agent.

Then there are much larger volumes of entirely uncemented, unconsolidated gravels, out-and-out river gravels, all Pleistocene in age, and including "exotic" boulders of many types of rock which not only washed directly down the canyon for many a mile (and what must have been the flood stages of the river which moved *those* big boulders!), but also including boulders of granite which very possibly originated in the upper basin of the South Yuba River, and were delivered into the North Fork by a glacier; since the North Fork robbed vast volumes of ice from the South Yuba basin during every major glaciation. The Yuba ice flowed right across the dividing ridge, from north to south, from the crest down to Blue Canyon.

Hmm. I should say that the rounded granite boulder is the quintessential glacial "erratic" left by stolen South Yuba ice. Although there is some granite in the upper North Fork, the basin is dominated by metamorphic rocks; whereas, the upper South Yuba is dominated by granite. So one can be somewhere in the North Fork, in Shoo Fly Complex bedrock, say, and walk through a forest growing on a body of glacial till of mostly South Yuba origins: and one sign of that provenance is that the boulders in the till are, mostly, granite.

There were many major glaciations. In fact, if a glaciation comes along, more major than many before, as may well be, it will tend to erase the moraines of all weaker predecessors. So many parts of the geologic record are missing. But who knows what might be deduced from the entire spectrum of Pleistocene gravels in Green Valley? A careful radiogenic dating, and a careful petrological analysis, of these sediments might reveal traces of a dozen different glaciations. The glacial sediments can be found as much as 600 feet, perhaps 700 feet, above the present river. This betokens age. Paleontology might even enter the picture, in the study of these interesting gravels.

Our first ditch took its water from Pyramid Ravine, at the west end of Green Valley, heading on Moody Ridge, and flowing from north to south. It led the water into the Vale of the Pyramid, or whatever you call that lovely little swale along the High West Trail, as you descend towards Cedar Meadow, at the foot of the Vale. Directly above Cedar Meadow to the west stands the summit of The Pyramid, a serpentine knoll of elevation 2277', thus 477' above the river, which flows another quarter-mile or so south. We took a brief look at the brush-infested ditch, of fairly large proportions, for such a small stream, and then dropped back into the Vale and traversed along south until we could climb to the crest of the Pyramid Spur, a ridge dropping from the summit of Moody Ridge, over two thousand feet, to the river. We followed the ridge crest south to The Pyramid, where a gnarled Canyon Live Oak has an old horseshoe draped around one branch, and now deeply embedded in the wood.

We dropped down the ridge to the south, thrashing through some brush before entering the more open coniferous forest, below, exactly where the Pleistocene gravels pick up, and the serpentine ends. Here we found another old ditch of modest proportions, and followed it east to Pyramid Camp, where a depressing amount of garbage still hasn't been carried up and out. A few steps further brought us back to the West Trail. We followed this north, away from the river, reaching Cedar Meadow, with its piped spring, which needs work, and turning east onto the Low West Trail. This led us onto the High Ditch Trail, quite a remarkably nice trail, which follows along near the 2080' contour from near Cedar Meadow on the west, all the way to the Iron Point Trail, on the east, the sinuous and even angular curve of its length measuring over a mile.

From the eastern terminus of the High Ditch we dropped back towards the North Fork, south, on the Iron Point Trail, which itself branches from the Euchre Bar Trail, until we reached the Green Valley Blue Gravel Mine (GVBGM) ditch. We followed this large mining ditch to the south and east until we broke out upon the cliffs at the east end of Green Valley, near cliffs of pure marble rising steeply from the river. Here we had our lunch, sitting in warm sun, while enjoying a fine view down the river.

Next we followed the GVBGM canal the other way, back to the Iron Point Trail, and then continuing to the terminus, where the ditch widens into a small reservoir. Here one can continue west, crossing Moonshine Ravine and finding yet another ditch, leading west, which brings one immediately to the High East Trail. There are actual several ways to get back and forth from east to west in Green Valley. The mining ditches make wonderful trails. Both the High Ditch and the GVBGM, slightly below the High Ditch--oh, a hundred yards at least are between them--both pass through the mysterious patch of Valley Springs rhyolite ash boulders, lying mainly on the east of Moonshine Ravine. There must be several acres of ground covered with this deposit. Some of the boulders are eight feet through, maybe more. They have been weathering and eroding for a long time, and show deeply pitted and hollowed surfaces, sometimes ribbed, along multiple layers of rhyolite ash, which differ in hardness or integrity, slightly, somehow. So. This is a sedimentary deposit, I am willing to hazard, which is not derived from the North Fork, and is not really glacial outwash, or, at least, not the usual sort of glacial outwash.

The "area of rhyolite boulders" masks the serpentine indefinitely far beneath, but certainly less than one hundred feet down, I would say. The rhyolite "sweetens" the soil, as it were, and there is an unusual meadowy aspect there.

So, we followed various mining ditches, and obscure trails, back and forth and up and down in Green Valley. As the shadows lengthened we started back up on the East Trail. We had gained the shelter of the canyon, coming down the trail: for the sharp breezes had been stilled, and the January sun was comfortably warm. But, as we climbed back up the trail we left the shelter of the canyon depths. At first, I noticed a singing from the pines atop Moody Ridge, a thousand feet above me. Th North Fork could also be heard roaring along quietly a thousand below, to the south. "Odd, to hear that steady river of wind in the trees, from such a distance," thought I. But the mystery was soon solved, for I climbed right up into the wind. It steadily strengthened as I steadily climbed.

However it was nice to be wind-cooled while climbing the old trail. And it was a very nice day in Green Valley.

Land Acquisition, Green Valley

2007-12-11T22:19:00.000-08:00

I hear tell that an important land acquisition has taken place, in Green Valley, just upstream from Giant Gap. The Siller Brothers Timber Company has owned these lands since at least as early as 1976. The land lies about in the center of Green Valley and carries a fine stand of pine timber, which the Sillers wished to helicopter log, back in 1976.

The Sierra Sun reports:

Two conservation groups have purchased 94 acres of land along the upper reaches of the American River’s north fork.
The Placer Land Trust and the American River Conservancy acquired two parcels totaling 94 acres of land within the North Fork’s wild and scenic river corridor for $100,000 from the Siller Brothers Timber Company.
The land is located southeast of the Gold Run area on Interstate 80. All the funding was provided by matching grants from private sources, including the United Auburn Indian Community in Rocklin.
Placer Land Trust Executive Director Jeff Darlington accepted $50,000 from the United Auburn Indian Community for the Giant Gap project.
“The North Fork American River Canyon, and particularly the area around Giant Gap, has been a focus area of Placer Land Trust since our inception in 1991,” said Darlington
The North Fork American River was added to the national system of Wild and Scenic Rivers in 1979.
“This acquisition brings one of the most spectacular river canyons in the western United States one step closer to full Wild & Scenic protection,” said Alan Ehrgott, ARC Executive Director. “We are very thankful for the cooperation and assistance that Siller Brothers has provided to us and the public for their support in this purchase.”
Ownership to the recently acquired 94 acres will be held by ARC until title can be transferred to the Tahoe National Forest for management as Wild & Scenic River lands.

This is great news. There remain a number of other private parcels in Green Valley which should also be acquired. Also, the Sillers own, or owned until very recently, the critically important 590 acres in and around Lost Camp, which contain the head of the China Trail. I hope that the Placer Land Trust and the American River Conservancy will become involved there, as well.

Lost Camp, etc.

2007-11-29T22:21:00.000-08:00

Ron Gould has put up a web page about the road/trail closure at Lost Camp, see

http://www.northforktrails.com/lostcamproad/

There is all kinds of interesting stuff there. Thanks, Ron!

Also re Lost Camp, Ed Stadum, the lead attorney, pro bono, on our successful legal battle to re-open the historic road down to Smart's Crossing (on the Bear River above Dutch Flat), back in 1984, took interest in our Lost Camp problem, and drove out there with Jim Johnson, an Alta resident, to see for himself. Ed lives in Germany now and is not in a position to assume legal command with Lost Camp, but he has offered important advice. Ron Gould and Jim Johnson will meet soon with the man who (illegally) gated the Lost Camp road, and try to reason with him.

The closure of the Lost Camp road, and thus, public access to the China Trail, is an absurdity and a crime. It is lamentable that Tahoe National Forest has not intervened directly, but the Forest has changed a lot, in its philosophy, since the days when rangers actually patrolled and maintained the good old trails. In those days, which ended, let us say, around 1960, the forest rangers would not tolerate the closure of any Forest trail. I know, for instance, the family which once owned the land at the head of the Green Valley Trail, from 1931 to 1975, and in the 1950s, they put a gate on the road to the trailhead. Tahoe National Forest rangers visited them and told them they had to immediately remove the gate. They complied.

Nor has Placer County intervened. Were either entity, TNF or the County, to simply do their jobs, i.e., protect the public interest, that gate would have come down many moons ago.

At any rate, for more information check out Ron's Lost Camp web page.

The Horror, and, Green Valley News

2007-10-22T09:16:00.000-07:00

What an unusual fall, so stormy, so cool and cloudy! So often, October is bright and warm. Today it begins to find its old self.

Our Black Bears, which are often not black, have been much in the news over the summer, breaking into homes in the Tahoe area. Here, it is not uncommon for a bear or three to wander through. Various adventures and misadventures have occurred; why, once a whole family of bears broke into our car, peed in it, and jumped on the roof, denting it. Another time, a bear found its way into our bathroom, entered the shower, and left a strangely indelible paw print on the white shower wall. It also scratched the bathroom door, which had swung shut behind it.

More typically, a bear will get its paws on a bag of garbage, and strew it across acres of hillside. Some years ago I built a sturdy garbage-bin, which has not yet been successfully broken open, although it bears the scars of their efforts. They have literally rolled this cumbersome and heavy plywood bin down the hill.

The other day, a most sad and horrible bear came by. It was almost coal black, and strangely leggy, which as I later realized, meant it was thin. Why thin? Because someone had shot it, and its lower jaw dangled low from a generous thread of flesh and ligament, flopping to this side and that, useless teeth jutting forward. It would not be chased away, which is quite unusual, for it had found no food here, and for a bear to stand its ground against a man wielding a shovel, a man throwing firewood at it, a man shouting at it, a man advancing against it, when said bear has found no food, well, in my experience, that means it is sick. This was my second such sick bear. The other, a few years back, a dusty golden color, bore no visible injuries.

I tried calling the CA Department of Fish and Game, but their line was busy for half an hour, and I gave up. The poor poor thing should be euthanized.

On a happier note, I was contacted by descendants of the Dunckhorst family, who own land down in Green Valley, on the North Fork American River, south of Dutch Flat. The land is the old Opel & Williams claim, patented in the 1870s, and includes Joe Steiner's Grave, and the Hotel Site. The East Branch of the Green Valley Trail passes through their property. Joe Steiner lived down there for many years, working their claim, and acting as their caretaker.

They called the place "Pine Shadows," and drew their water, bucket by bucket, from nearby "Crystal Springs." These springs are on a lost little patch of trail leading down to the Hotel Site from near the Dunckhorst cabin.

On the 7.5-minute USGS "Dutch Flat" quadrangle, a small black square immediately south of the "r" in the words "Green Valley" seems to mark the Dunckhorst cabin, now gone. A wildfire in the middle 1950s erased the cabin. The descendants have several old family photo albums, and sent me some pictures. The cabin was a small affair with a gable roof. Of most interest is a picture of their summer sleeping platform, raised about ten feet above the ground, labeled "The Roost." My other Green Valley friends, the Dentons, who spent summers there in the 1930s and 1940s, also had a raised sleeping platform, and also called it "The Roost." The Denton Roost was built by Joe Steiner himself.

The way the Dentons tell it, the summers were so hot one simply had to sleep outside, but the rattlesnakes were so fierce, and so pesky, and so determined to somehow, some way, enter one's very bed, one could not sleep on the ground, or even near the ground. Hence, The Roost.

The Dentons had mentioned the Dunckhorsts to me, specifically, I recall their story about a young Dunckhorst man who set the record for the fastest descent of the Green Valley Trail, back around 1940. He made the descent to the river in eighteen minutes!

Such is some news.

Down and Up and Down and Up

2007-10-09T17:50:00.000-07:00

[written October 9, 2007]

The day after visiting Hayden Hill, and that lovely little patch of old-growth forest growing on the broad terrace formed upon the rhyolite ash stratum, a few hundred feet below the canyon rim, I was busy writing about Chinese ghosts, and Mesozoic screens, and thinking about the two old trails I had discovered.

I had found a "lumber slide" dropping away north from the summit of Hayden Hill itself, and also a nearly level trail leading west into the Magic Forest. With Ron Gould I had explored similar trails, and we had often found ourselves confronted with major game trails, whereupon I might say, "this must be an old human trail," which Ron would always doubt. He would scoff. Usually, Ron was in the right.

So, writing about ghosts, and thinking about human trails disguised as game trails, I wanted to drag Ron out there to Hayden Hill immediately, if not sooner. The hour of eight in the morning arrived and I picked up my telephone; but a family member had left her internet connection up, and I had to disconnect to get a dial tone. Before I could even dial, the phone rang; it was Ron. It was a fine sparkling clear fall day, and he suggested a hike. I broke in: "We must go to Hayden Hill!"

But Ron replied that he had been imagining doing the Blackhawk-Sawbug loop, up by Humbug Canyon, and Sawtooth Ridge. I was persuaded, and yet for one reason and another, it was ten in the morning before we parked at the head of the Euchre Bar Trail.

"It will be pitch dark before we return," I remarked. This was likely enough, as we had twelve miles and some thousands of feet of elevation gain ahead of us. Thus it was that when we did finally reach his truck, at the end of the day, the stars were bright. GPS revealed, when it was all over, that we had climbed 5,700 feet over the course of the hike.

Most people who hike the Euchre Bar Trail go only so far as the river, which is spanned by a footbridge. The trail continues up the canyon, after crossing the bridge, and technically it not only reaches Humbug Canyon, but follows the Humbug Canyon Road up to the canyon rim, to the gate on Eliot Ranch Road.

We made quick work of the descent to the North Fork, the river flowing slowly, calm and clear, with morning shadows still clinging to large parts of the far canyon wall; in fact, the bridge was still wrapped in frigid shade, and damp with dew. The bridge is scarcely a mile and a half from the trailhead at Iron Point.

Crossing, we made good time up the main trail, passing the confluence of the North Fork of the North Fork, which is divided from the main stem of the North Fork by Sawtooth Ridge. Another mile brought us to the Southern Cross Mine, with its collapsed and dismembered stamp mill, where we stripped off shoes and pants and forded the ice-cold river. A sunny patch of bedrock, metasediments of the Shoo Fly Complex, allowed us to relax in comfort on the far side of the river, while we dried, and soon we were scrambling up a steep bank beside another dismembered stamp mill, and reached the level ore-cart-run of the Blackhawk Mine. The little railroad tracks are still in place.

The USGS 7.5-minute Westville Quadrangle shows a trail descending to the Blackhawk Mine from the crest of Sawtooth Ridge. This trail was likely widened to accommodate wagons as early as the 1890s, and in subsequent decades, bulldozers widened it further. In 1978 it became subject to a motorized vehicle closure, following designation of the North Fork American as a Wild & Scenic River, but the closure sign, up on the crest of the Sawtooth, was soon ripped out and thrown far down into the manzanita; for such is the lawlessness of OHV (off-highway vehicle) users, who also make quite a point of leaving garbage, wherever they go. They can do this with complete impunity, for there is essentially no Tahoe National Forest law enforcement; the TNF budget will not allow it, just as TNF cannot afford to maintain its own trail system.

Ron and I picked up the odds and ends of OHV garbage and started towards the top of the ridge. We were somewhat shocked at the clear signs of heavy OHV use of the trail.

Incidentally, this heavy OHV use only began two or three years ago. One of the first consequences was the vandalizing of the ancient dry-laid stone walls along a mining-ditch-trail, leading upstream from the Blackhawk Mine; apparently, the lawless motorcyclists thought it would be great fun to topple the huge slabs of slate, so carefully set into the arc of a circle a century and more ago, down the cliff into the river, from where the ditch-trail rounded a rocky point above a deep pool. This ditch-trail shows on a number of old maps, but has disappeared from modern maps. It leads all the way up to Humbug Bar, and continues farther yet as the Cavern Mine Trail.

A climb of a little less than two thousand feet brought us to the summit, where the OHV closure sign used to stand. One official TNF sign remains, almost hidden in the manzanita; it reflects an error in mapping, as it reads "North Fork American, 2" (arrow left), "Blackhawk Mine, 3" (arrow left), and "Rawhide Mine, 2" (arrow right). The error lies in supposing that the Blackhawk Mine is at Humbug Bar, rather than right at the base of the trail, where it reaches the North Fork.

As it happens, this trail junction is at the very end of the Sawtooth Ridge trail. Essentially, at the end of the Sawtooth Trail, one drops away left to reach the North Fork, and the Blackhawk Mine, and one drops away right to reach the North Fork of the North Fork, and the Rawhide Mine.

However, in the same year the neat wooden sign was installed, the Rawhide Mine was sold, and the new owner (Harry Mayo) immediately closed the trail to the public, posting all kinds of threatening "no trespassing" signs, with pictures of revolvers and so on.

Did Tahoe National Forest intervene? Did TNF make Harry Mayo remove the signs, and stop harassing hikers? Oh no, TNF did no such thing. Here was a trail likely open to the public for over a century, instantly closed. It is exactly what we are seeing at Lost Camp right now: a new property-owner decides to close a historic public road, open since 1858, and a historic trail, open since 1862. The road and trail were once maintained by Tahoe National Forest.

Does TNF intervene? Does TNF make a telephone call, do they write a letter, do they lift their left little finger to protect the General Public's right to historic roads and trails?

No, they do not. As surely as they did nothing to keep the Rawhide Mine Trail open, they now do nothing to keep the Lost Camp Road and the China Trail open.

It's a funny thing: Tahoe National Forest has enough money to hire all kinds of people with degrees, people obviously too talented, too highly trained, to perform physical labor, to actually maintain a trail; and TNF puts these talented, talented people to work engineering more and more and more timber harvests. For that, TNF has money.

I should imagine these degree-adorned employees of Tahoe National Forest make a pretty penny. I should imagine they have benefits, like health care, like retirement, oh my, yes, they make lots of money, they enjoy lots of benefits.

Ah well, these TNF employees are Good People, as near as I can tell. They are not the ones who set the policy, not the ones who plot the course.

Sawtooth Ridge appears to have been scorched in the 1960 "Volcano Fire," which spread from near the Middle Fork of the American, north across the Foresthill Divide to the North Fork, hitting Humbug Canyon hard, and crossing the river to Sawtooth Ridge. A very large number of Knobcone Pines grow along the summit of Sawtooth Ridge, towards its southwestern end. They appear to date from the Volcano Fire.

The climb to the crest of the Sawtooth, from the Blackhawk, winds in switchbacks through a forest dominated by Canyon Live Oak, with scattered Ponderosa and Knobcone pines, and a passing-strange abundance of Kellogg's Black Oak. These are the classic deciduous oaks of the lower-middle elevations, and they seem to much prefer deeper and moister and richer soils than usually exist on south-facing canyon walls. I have only hiked the Blackhawk Trail twice, and during my first visit, I concluded that one of the concentrations of Kellogg's Black Oak was associated with vestiges of glacial till. The till was deeply weathered and altered and almost unrecognizable. It would date from a much earlier glaciation than the Tioga, which ended a scant 12,000 years ago. I would guess this older till is either Tahoe I or Tahoe II in age, roughly, 65,000 or 125,000 years ago.

At last on top of the Sawtooth, in the very last pass before the very last Tooth--this last tooth, at the southwest terminus of the ridge, being a kind of flat-topped molar, capped with a vestige of andesitic mudflow--Ron and I rested. A few feet away, the Rawhide Trail, unmaintained by Tahoe National Forest since at least 1978, led away into dense, post-Volcano manzanita. We had attacked this section with loppers a couple of years ago, and I proposed we execute some maintenance. So we picked our way into the tangled brush, lopping here, ripping dead manzanita from the ground there, and pushing the slender poles of dead Knobcone Pines away down the hillside, a process much like threading a needle, since they were usually thoroughly trapped in the manzanita, and the only hope was to simply push them in the direction they already lay, hoping to get them clear of the trail.

A quarter-mile or so of such work got us clear of the manzanita, onto more north-facing slopes. We could not take time to work any longer. That quarter-mile had already cost us dearly, in terms of exertion, in terms of blood smeared along hands and arms, from a myriad of vicious little manzanita jabs. We are not exactly young men. I mean, in my mind, anyway, I am young, but my drivers' license reveals me to be fifty-eight years old.

At any rate, we retreated to the pass, shouldered our packs, and walked on up the Sawtooth, through dense stands of Knobcone Pine, and brushy groves of Black Oak. We walked up and over the first minor Tooth. A larger Tooth, rising above the 4200-foot contour, rose before us; on the map, it is shown to have an elevation of 4210 feet. Here, on the down-ice, lee side of Tooth 4210, is a body of very old glacial till, probably of the same age as the till along the Blackhawk Trail. Again, it is not easily recognized. One of the things which help separate this patch of deep soil containing rounded boulders from, say, some vestige of Eocene-age river gravels (which also can be found on Sawtooth Ridge), is the presence of rounded granite boulders. The Eocene gravels generally do not preserve granite; granite is too easily dissolved by chemical weathering. These granite boulders might have come all the way from the South Yuba basin, or, perhaps, from Little Granite Creek, or Big Granite Creek, or the upper North Fork of the North Fork. They are visibly different from granite boulders in the recent Tioga-age tills, in that they have lost their smooth surfaces, mainly, I think, from chemical weathering, i.e., from exposure to soil acids over a long period of time. There are only a very few of these rounded granite boulders visible, in the very bed of the Sawtooth Trail.

A much more obvious body of old till, with similarly deeply weathered granite boulders, is on the crest of Sawtooth immediately down-ice (southwest) from Helester Point.

Crossing over Tooth 4210, we descended to a minor pass and turned sharply southwest onto the Sawbug Trail. This is our name for the ancient trail, which likely dates from the 1850s, connecting the summit of SAWtooth Ridge to HumBUG Bar. I much doubt anyone would discover the upper end of this old trail by accident. Near the top, it passes some smallish hard-rock mines in a series of switchbacks, and then makes one long gradual descent to Humbug Bar, with one more minor switchback near the base of the trail.

At Humbug Bar (which, incidentally, was entirely mined away, way back when; there is no "bar" left), we followed the Cavern Mine Trail up the canyon a short distance, to where an easy trail leads away down to the river itself. We were about to strip off shoes and pants when we realized that we could actually hop across the river, boulder to boulder. This was a welcome alternative to wading.

Afternoon shadows were long, most of the river already in shadow, but one broad beam of light still reached the river itself, just upstream, and made for an incredibly beautiful picture, glowing trees reflected in deep dark pools.

It only remained to walk the two or three miles back to the bridge, and then climb the Euchre Bar Trail to the truck. Ha! We were dragging along in painful slowness, in the dark, through interminable switchbacks, as the twilight gave way to full darkness, and the stars came out. For my part, I was reciting a litany of benchmarks, which would be passed in turn: "soon enough, the switchbacks-without-water-bars, where the leaves were scoured from the trail in the last storm; not too terribly far above that, the crest of Trail Spur, and the Iron Point Trail, forking away west into Green Valley; then, that long rocky section, through the errant patch of serpentine, serpentine separate from the main mass in Green Valley, mixed somehow into the Mesozoic screen; and then ... and then ... the last switchback ... and just a tiny little bit of ridge-trail left ... cross the Rawhide Road ... and the final, steepish, blessedly short bit of trail ... and then the Rawhide Road, again, and right there, well, a few yards away, Ron's truck ... ."

I went over these trail-phases again and again and again in my mind. I would carefully imagine what each section in turn was like. Eventually, I actually reached, and passed my benchmarks, albeit slowly, very, very slowly. When the trail entered denser forest, the world went black, but it was easy to feel the trail beneath my feet. We made the climb separately, alone in our agonies, but as I neared the tippy top, Ron caught me up.

Twelve miles, 5,700 feet of elevation gain.

We were absolutely ruined, but it had been, yes, another great day in the great canyon.

Hayden Hill

2007-10-04T11:43:00.000-07:00

Following the narrow ridge-crest north, zig-zagging just exactly as the local bears zig and zag, through masses of Ceanothus and small conifers, my musings, equally erratic, settled into a kind of coherence: "If the Chinese Historical Society did once visit this obscure and sacred precinct; if the Chinese Historical Society did place a commemorative plaque; if the Chinese Historical Society did annually burn offerings, to settle and reassure the ghosts of their ancestors, here on the very verge of the Great American Canyon, here, so near the summit of Hayden Hill, well, they left remarkably little trace of those visits--in fact, they left no trace--in fact, it would be about a miracle if the Chinese Historical Society ever set foot here--and it becomes a certainty that, when I myself reach the summit, there will be no 'commemorative plaque'."

Hayden Hill is a knoll or minor eminence within the North Fork canyon, above Green Valley. It just kisses the 3800' contour, and thus stands 2000' above the river, and four hundred feet below the canyon rim.

For thirty years I had wished to visit this "Hayden Hill." Far below its summit is the Hayden Hill Mine, that geologically significant hydraulic mine, involving Pleistocene glacial outwash sediments, involving a relict channel of the North Fork, the base of that channel four hundred feet above the modern river, the top of the outwash terrace six hundred feet above the modern river. The significance inheres in these numbers: four hundred feet, six hundred feet, connote great age, and I am tempted, very tempted, to correlate the sediments to the Sherwin Glaciation, of 750,000 years ago. The Sherwin is quite cryptic, its tills and moraines almost entirely erased by subsequent erosion, in fact, were it not for the blind luck that one solitary mass of Sherwin Till was buried, and thus preserved, by the Bishop Tuff, and then exposed in cross-section by a roadcut, near Bishop, along Highway 395, we would find this or that deeply-weathered till, and be able only to say, "Here is something glacial, and something old."

Now at least we can guess that such a till is Sherwin in age. The age of the Sherwin is given by dating the Bishop Tuff; and that tremendous outpouring of volcanic ash, of thirty-five cubic miles of rhyolite ash, took place almost exactly 750,000 years ago.

It verges upon the incredible that a glacial outwash terrace of Sherwin age could be preserved within any one of our Sierran canyons, as our canyons are so raw and so fresh, so rapidly incising, so rapidly eroding.

But that is a part of what makes Green Valley special: it does preserve glacial outwash terraces which are old, quite old. Green Valley is just exactly where the serpentine of the Melones Fault Zone crosses the North Fork, or is crossed by the North Fork, at about a right angle. The weakness of the serpentine has allowed the North Fork canyon to widen into a kind of broad amphitheater. The weakness of the serpentine has meant that this particular reach of the North Fork has always had a flat gradient; when one combines a broad amphitheater with a flat gradient, conditions become ideal for not only the deposition of sediments, but the preservation of sediments.

Of course, Green Valley is also one of two places in California where Aliens From Outer Space built pyramids. The other place is that same Owens Valley where we find the Bishop Tuff burying the Sherwin Till. At least, Dr. Wallace Halsey declared it so. Dr. Halsey believed that Aliens From Outer Space taught we humans to build pyramids, way back when. Dr. Halsey said that the Pyramid of Green Valley was at the Hayden Hill Mine, haunted by the ghosts of Chinese miners buried in a landslide.

I began hearing about the Buried Chinese Miners in 1976. According to legend, their sluice box was buried right along with them. Hence, with enough luck, with enough pluck and perseverance and plain hard work, one could dig down, down and down and down, down through the clay, down through the boulders, through, who knows, the very skeletons of the Chinese Miners, and one would at last find the sluice box, and one would become wealthy.

Many a person assured me of the truth of this legend. Crusty old-timers swore by it. But, over the decades, as I pursued research into the history of this area, and always, especially, the history of Green Valley, I could find no corroboration of the legend. I began to dismiss it as a fiction, as a confusion of myths, or a concatenation of true stories. For it is certainly true that many Chinese mined gold in Green Valley, and it is certainly true that many Chinese died in cave-ins and landslides, in the hydraulic mines of Dutch Flat and Gold Run. The old newspapers of this area can make for depressing reading, as one tragedy after another befell the miners.

Yes, I had pored over these depressing old newspapers, and I had gleaned many an interesting article about the mines of Green Valley, including, specifically, the Hayden Hill Mine.

But I found nary a word about a landslide burying, who knows, some said six, others said twenty, Chinese miners. So. It must be fiction.

Then, a few years back, I walked over to the Gold Ring Mine in Green Valley, and found the ancient and grizzled owners at home and receiving visitors. Al Platz nearly talked my ear off with his stories about Green Valley, and, of course he trotted out the Legend of the Buried Chinese. I bluntly expressed my doubts, my extreme doubts. Al added a new twist to the story, and this new twist was as follows: according to Al, a "Chinese Historical Society" came out here, every year, to a point above the canyon, where they had placed a plaque commemorating the buried miners, and every year, Al said, they would visit the spot, gaze out into the great canyon, and make offerings to their ancestors.

I believe I know the north rim of the canyon, above Green Valley, very well. I have seen no "commemorative plaque." Hence, the plaque must be on the south canyon rim. And where better, where more likely, than that spot labeled "Hayden Hill" on the USGS 7.5-minute Dutch Flat quadrangle?

This added some urgency, then, to my long-cherished agenda to visit Hayden Hill. I had often visited the mine, far below, but never the Hill itself. When an urgency of this magnitude breaks upon me, why, it may be as little as three years before I act!

And so it was that at long long last I threaded my way along the bears' zig-zag path to the summit of Hayden Hill. I found the cellar of the cabin depicted, quite near the summit, on that aforementioned Dutch Flat Quadrangle. The cabin had pretty clearly burned in the 1960 "Volcano" fire, which had charred large parts of the Foresthill Divide, and several square miles within the North Fork canyon, even crossing the river to Sawtooth Ridge. All that remains of the cabin is a hole six feet deep, maybe twelve feet long and eight feet wide. The cellar.

Just beyond the cabin site is the summit of Hayden Hill. Thick manzanita blocked further progress along the crest, so I dropped away west and picked my way through gnarled elfin Canyon Live Oak, until I could climb back up to this summit knoll from the far (north) side. I ensconced myself within the sheltering arms of a multi-trunked Canyon Live Oak and ate my lunch.

There was no commemorative plaque.

I noted that Hayden Hill itself was formed from bedrock of the thin "Mesozoic screen" which separates the (late Paleozoic) serpentine of the Melones Fault Zone from the vastness of the (early Paleozoic) metasediments comprising the Shoo Fly Complex, east of the Melones. The rock appeared to be a dark metavolcanic formation, perhaps quite akin to the lenses of dark metavolcanic rock one sees at and near Iron Point. I was probably about a quarter-mile east of the fault zone.

Although the summit of Hayden Hill, from a topographic standpoint, commands a tremendous view, one can never quite get clear of the oaks. Giant Gap was darkening with afternoon shadows to the west, but I could not really see it. I decided to explore down the steeply-plunging north spur of Hayden Hill, in search of a rocky outcrop, or some kind of break in the forest.

Immediately I saw what seemed an old trail, old and broad. Strangely broad, I would say. This old trail was blocked by fallen pines, well-rotted, presumably killed in the Volcano Fire, and I was pleased and interested to see a series of 2X4's, around four feet long, nailed to the side of one such much-rotted pine trunk. It seems that whoever once lived in the little cabin had himself wished for a better view, and nailed a kind of ladder up the trunk of the nearest tall pine. Only the heartwood core of the pine remains, the outer six inches of trunk having rotted, except exactly at those spots where the ladder rungs were nailed. Big old twenty-penny spikes. So, it is pleasant to imagine that as the storm-wrack cleared, of a winter afternoon, and a golden glow intensified away west, in Giant Gap, the man would scramble up his nailed rungs, and enjoy a view which would have made Ansel Adams jealous.

I explored further down the spur, and my putative trail disappeared, then reappeared, disappeared, then reappeared. So, it is real. Later, in thinking about it, I decided that, rather than a trail, it might more likely be an old "lumber slide," which one occasionally finds scoring the canyon wall. In such places loads of sawed lumber, and other mining equipment, would be skidded directly down the side of the canyon. These lumber slides were usually located along the crests of spur ridges. Inasmuch as this particular spur leads right down to the Hayden Hill Mine, I suppose it was their own particular lumber slide.

Climbing back to the summit, I followed the east side of the ridge, and the old trail/lumber slide, back to the cabin, although manzanita forced me to veer off track a few times.

Next on my list of Things to Do at Hayden Hill was to visit the second cabin depicted on the Dutch Flat quadrangle. The map shows it just at the head of a ravine which passes through the mine far below, call it the Hayden Hill Ravine. It is just east of the Hill and its principal spur. And, at the head of this ravine, the map showed a tunnel.

So I wandered through the heavy timber, soon found one collapsed tunnel, climbed above, and found the other cabin site, like the first cabin site making itself known only by its cellar, and some few scraps of metal scattered about.

I decided to make a more complete exploration, dropped back down, found more collapsed tunnels, in some of which the rhyolite ash stratum was exposed to view, that stratum so typically, almost always, completely hidden, covered in the rich soil which heavy forest will develop, given a few millenia. The rhyolite ash stratum is often the source of perennial springs, and this was exactly the case here.

A tunnel in this stratigraphic position (near the unconformity separating the "Superjacent series" from the "Subjacent series") can be safely considered to have been at the least an attempt to reach a hidden Eocene-age river channel. If they had succeeded, one might expect to see the rounded pebbles of white quartz and blueish chert, in the ravine below the tunnel; but I could see no such pebbles. However, such springs can generate astounding quantities of water during and after big rain events, and all such mining debris might have long since been washed away down the ravine. Aside from a few scraps of strap iron, there was little sign of human activity near the tunnels, and I expect many people would not even recognize them as collapsed tunnels.

A small mining ditch contoured across the gentle slopes just above the level of the tunnels, and I set out west to see where it went. There were four possibilities, so far as the grade of the ditch:

1. Sloping down from west to east.
2. Sloping down from east to west.
3. Sloping down from east and west alike, towards the collapsed tunnels.
4. Sloping down to the east and west alike, away from the collapsed tunnels.

I began to favor (3). The grade of the ditch was far too flat to see at a glance which way it had flowed. If it had flowed away from the tunnels (4), then it would have flowed *to* specific mining sites. So I followed it west.

A road dating from salvage harvests after the Volcano Fire paralleled the ditch, and soon coincided with the ditch. Some hundreds of yards west I found the rounded cobbles and boulders of quartz and chert which can only mean an old river channel is near. So. This supported (4), at least a little, but there was no obvious sign of past mining nearby.

Soon thereafter the road ended, but a fine figure of a trail continued along the same almost level, west-bearing line. It was either an old human trail or the King of All Game Trails. Following it, I entered quite a lovely and special forest. Huge trees were common, some Douglas Fir measuring close to six feet in diameter, with large Ponderosa and Sugar pines in the area, too. The terrain was nearly flat. A rather gigantic terrace had formed, at the base of the strata of andesitic mudflow which composed all the ridge above, and near the top of the rhyolite ash strata beneath the mudflows. This is just where perennial springs are wont to form, and even if there are no springs, there is often a generalized "seep," in which water-loving species of trees and other plants are well-established. The evidence of the top-of-the-rhyolite seep may be as subtle as a roughly horizontal zone on the side of a ridge (high on a canyon wall, say), a zone where Kellogg's Black Oak and Ponderosa Pine are larger than they are either above or below the zone.

That is, upon almost every ridge in the middle elevations of this part of the Sierra, there is a "perched aquifer," a water-bearing zone. Above this zone, horizontal strata of andesitic mudflow; and below, the rhyolite ash, so often weathered into a dense clay-like material, forms an "aquaclude," and inhibits the downward migration of water. Hence springs and seeps pop out at the surface. When one considers that, when undisturbed by roads or logging or anything which could impact the soils, the mudflow above has an almost incredible capacity to absorb rainfall and snowmelt without surface runoff, one can do a little arithmetic, as follows: such-and-such a ridge is capped by andesitic mudflow, and the top of the ridge has an areal extent of, say, 1000 acres. The annual precipitation is 60 inches, or five feet. Hence 5*1000 acre-feet of water are absorbed by the mudflow (an enormous quantity of water!). The water sinks lower, hits the rhyolite ash aquaclude, and migrates horizontally to discharge as springs and seeps.

Hence, if looking at a topographic map, one notes that along the sides of a ridge whose crest is at 4000' elevation, there is a series of springs at, say, 3800' elevation, one is entirely justified in assuming that that ridge is capped by andesitic mudflow, and beneath the mudflow, as always, lies the rhyolite ash. You have, in effect, discovered the top of the rhyolite ash layer. You have also discovered that the mudflow strata are 200 feet thick.

Having so discovered the rhyolite ash, one is also safe in assuming that the bedrock is not far below. These perennial springs are usually less than 100 feet above the unconformity separating the ancient bedrock from the "young volcanics."

Here, there were spectacular springs, huge trees, including somewhat unusually large Bigleaf Maples, a significant concentration of the passing-rare Pacific Yew, and even some Torreya, larger than our usual Torreya. There were Giant Chain Ferns, and White Alders, and many Pacific Dogwoods, all water-loving plants.

The old trail led directly to the largest springs, and then appeared to end. The lovely terrace of tall trees continued right along to the west, and I hope to explore further soon. On this day, I turned back when the trail seemed to end, and found a spring with an ancient iron pipe conducting the water.

Hence I propose that it was indeed Possibility Three, "Sloping down from east and west alike, towards the collapsed tunnels." I propose that this ditch led the waters of distant springs to the Hayden Hill Ravine, and that it may have had mostly to do with delivering more water to the Hayden Hill Mine, sixteen hundred feet below, than with whatever mining operations occurred at the Collapsed Tunnels. Actually, it could have served both purposes without a shred of conflict between the one and the other.

Returning to the cabin site, which happens to be beside a section corner, common to sections 5, 6, 7 and 8 of T15N, R11E, I decided to follow the ditch east. I saw from the little map I had packed along that I would immediately enter the broad basin flanked by the minor summit labeled "Sugarloaf" on the Dutch Flat quadrangle. This basin feeds the high waterfall one can see from Iron Point in the winter and spring. The map showed that my top-of-the-rhyolite-, base-of-the-andesitic-mudflow terrace continued right along, if anything more pronounced and larger than ever. The very same road I was on, there at the section corner, held an almost level line into this "Sugarloaf Basin." I thought to use the road to enter the basin, then drop back to the ditch. This worked out about as planned, except, a Reagan-era Tahoe National Forest clearcut had not only grown a host of young Ponderrosa Pine, it had also been infested with brush, from the increase in sunlight reaching the ground, and the disturbance of the soil, and I was soon forced off the road.

I dropped to the ditch, but it too was within, not the clearcut, but a more generalized harvest area, and so much new light had entered the forest that, between logging slash and brush, I was soon forced off the ditch.

Returning to the road, I found it clear, since it had entered a belt of heavy timber on the Rhyolite Terrace. A little exploration led me into a pesky little patch of private property, possibly a patented mining claim, where I found the detritus of a marijuana growing operation dating several years back.

The sun was lowering, and I made the climb up and out, trying without success to trace the line of the historic trail shown on the Dutch Flat quadrangle, through the TNF clearcut.

What would they say? "Oops, we destroyed another trail, another historic trail."?

Actually, for much of the day I was in a fuming funk about Tahoe National Forest and its timber harvests, nowadays conducted under the guise of "thinning the forest." For, my access to Hayden Hill was via Iowa Hill, via the Giant Gap Road, the Eliot Ranch Road, to a certain obscure side-road damaged by a very recent "thinning" timber harvest. I had seen, from Giant Gap Ridge on the west, to the rim of the canyon directly above Hayden Hill, on the east, a series of these thinning-harvest areas.

And, I found them very upsetting. Bulldozers, or similar heavy equipment, had scrambled and rampaged throughout the forest, raising the deep soils into furrows which will persist for centuries. I guarantee that my children's grandchildren will see those ridges and furrows and heaps of soil, if the land is left untouched until then. How can Tahoe National Forest rationalize scarring the land in this way? It is a crime, it is a kind of terrorism inflicted upon a landscape, upon a heritage and upon a wildlife and a scenery which can by no means speak for themselves, as it were, relying entirely upon us, upon the citizens, to stand up for them.

But we do not so stand up.

Tahoe National Forest no doubt let the thinning contract out to Sierra Pacific Industries, SPI, famous for their clearcuts, and the largest owner of private land in all of California, by far. So, SPI not only gets to inflict a totally corporate model, a totally industrial model, upon its own lands, it gets to industrialize our public lands as well!

I cannot tell you how many times I have seen historic trails absolutely erased, as though they had never existed, by SPI bulldozers. Of course, that has to do with how we manage timber harvests on private lands, and falls under the rules and regulations applied by the California Department of Forestry, or CDF.

That is bad enough. But a historic trail, entirely on our public land, erased by bulldozers? It is worse than an absurdity, and yet, put a Reagan or a Bush into office and you pretty much get what you asked for: the sale of public resources to private interests at bargain-basement prices.

So actually, for much of the day, I was fuming, in a kind of rage. I like to think of myself as a reasonable man. I totally support the harvest of timber on a sustainable basis. But how is it harvested? There is this way, and there is that way. And here, along Eliot Ranch Road, was a travesty. To cap it all off, burn piles a hundred feet long, thirty feet wide, and twenty feet high were seen here, there, and everywhere. Near almost every one of these piles was a sign, nailed high on a tree, reading "Timber Harvest Area. No Firewood Cutting Allowed. Tahoe National Forest."

So. Each pile held dozens of cords of wood. They will be burned to ash in one giant conflagration, but heaven help the citizen who dares to cut a pickup-truck load for himself.

Such was a very nice day near the south rim of the Great American Canyon.

A Maze of Gorges

2007-09-17T11:47:00.000-07:00

[written September 17, 2007]

Ron Gould and I headed up to Emigrant Gap, then a few miles south on Forest Road 19, to Sailor Point. We parked and set off walking down a gated logging road. We hoped to find a way down the ridge dividing Sailor Ravine from the North Fork of the North Fork American River (NFNFAR); for this particular ridge (call it Sailor Spur) stands like a knife-edge above the many waterfalls in that area, forming a narrow promontory wrapped tightly by the 4000' contour.

We had admired that narrow promontory from a distance. Wild, remote, cliff-bound, it would offer a most intimate view of what we call the Gorge of Many Gorges. It also looked to be well-guarded by brush. We could not be certain that some monstrous brush-field would stop us altogether. One could only try.

Half a mile brought us to the noble old Bradley & Gardner Ditch, or Placer County Canal, which was huge, glorious, intact, and very walkable on the west side of the road, but disappeared into the oceanic brush of a Tahoe National Forest clearcut, on the east. We continued down the road, which became tightly hemmed and overhung by brush, mostly that species of Ceanothus we call Deerbrush. In another quarter-mile or so the road struck sharply east, and we dropped away south into the forest, following the ridge.

Despite our fears we had easy going, and as the ridge-crest narrowed, if brush occupied its summit, we just dropped over onto the northern (shady) side of things, where often as not we found that the local bears had had the same idea, and their ponderous footprints could be seen dotting the leafy forest floor. Canyon Live Oak was quite common, with occasional old Ponderosa pines, and a scattered understory of young Douglas Fir. A mass of manzanita, then, might briefly run us off the ridge crest, but we always returned, and over a long distance, a very well-defined bear trail led us directly down the oak-clad crest.

The ridge plunged a couple hundred feet, and then Ron led us across a low swale in the oak forest. He forged ahead, into the sunlight on the far side. Soon I heard exclamations, shouts, and was pleased to think we had Arrived.

But we had not quite Arrived. We had reached the summit of a little spur ridge flaring south from Sailor Spur; this little South Spur had its own knife-edge crest, which dropped very steeply to the river below. We could hear the hiss and roar of several waterfalls. Across the canyon of the NFNFAR, to the south, was the sister-ridge to Sailor Spur, a spectacular knife-edge of rock; since this ridge, dividing the NFNFAR from the East Fork of that river, is named Scott Hill a little ways above and to the east, let us call this drastic arc of cliffs, this sister-ridge, Scott Spur.

Between Sailor Spur and Scott Spur the NFNFAR drops steeply, waterfall after waterfall, pool after pool, in a torturous series of abrupt curves. In a way, the NFNFAR presents the strange chance of a river entering its own gorge from the side. That is, there is a deep canyon; it is the canyon of the NFNFAR; and at a certain point, several streams enter the canyon, from the north, the east, and the south. They are like the fingers of a hand, radiating from the palm: Fulda Canyon, Sailor Ravine, the NFNFAR, the East Fork, Burnett Canyon, and Wilmont Ravine. To varying degrees, these are all "hanging" valleys, with respect to the main canyon of the NFNFAR. That is, their streams have not succeeded in incising their canyons down to the same level as the main NFNFAR. Hence these tributaries all have steep gradients as they approach the NFNFAR canyon. The odd thing is, when you are down in that gorge of many gorges, the NFNFAR seems not so much the main stem of the stream, but just another tributary, and if anything, one which "hangs" higher than usual; and what with its twisted course, there is no looking up the canyon of the NFNFAR: it immediately curves out of view.

So. All these words are only to say that the NFNFAR plunges, very steeply, along a very twisted course, into its own canyon. Into the Gorge of Many Gorges.

We were poised above this twisted, cliff-bound, waterfall-infested gorge, and had a great prospect of the broader region around it: Sawtooth Ridge, and the main canyon of the NFNFAR, were in full view; we could look all the way down the canyon, past Green Valley, to Giant Gap. Closer at hand, most of the various gorges were in view: Fulda, the East Fork, Burnett Canyon. We could see the forested slopes traversed by the China Trail, near Lost Camp.

Soon our little South Spur enticed us into a scramble, looking for some rocky viewpoint, but, having found such a point, we then could see one of the pools and some small waterfalls. They looked so close!

Yet the cliffs below were so steep! I decided to scout farther down the knife-edge crest, and found a kind of steeply-pitching rock ramp which made for pretty easy going. Soon we were on the river itself.

The pool which had enticed me down the cliffs was deep, black, and almost perfectly rectangular, its long axis at right angles to the river, about fifty feet in length by fifteen feet in width. A waterfall entered the center of one long side of the rectangle, and another waterfall left the center of the opposite long side. Although the sun was warm I was not at all tempted to swim. Something about the crystal clarity of the water ... the black depths of the pool ... and the way in which, even at midday, shadows clung to the cliffs falling from Scott Spur, why, the river itself entered the warmth-robbing cliff shadows just a few yards downstream ... so there was no swimming.

The bedrock is all Shoo Fly Complex metasediments, here mostly meta-sandstone, the strata mostly tipped up vertical. The rectangular pool is cut directly along strike of the sediment beds. These beds are up to a couple of feet thick. There is considerable deformation, too, of these rocks, small synclines and anticlines, for instance, and signs of possible soft-sediment deformation, in which (say) underwater landslides disrupted the sediments before they'd ever hardened into rock. In such cases the sediment "layers," the strata, may be formed from fragments of other strata, other layers. Very considerable soft-sediment deformation is visible elsewhere in the Shoo Fly Complex. At times huge blocks of slate were carried along in these underwater landslides, 400 million years ago, and left embedded, any which way up, within a matrix of, say, sandy sediments.

By "huge" I mean, blocks of slate which may be fifty feet on a side. But I saw no such huge exotic blocks here, on the NFNFAR.

We explored up and down only a few yards from the Rectangular Pool, for sheer cliffs and waterfalls stopped us almost immediately. Then we climbed back to the summit of South Spur. We could see our Ultimate Goal, that last long-jutting Promontory of Sailor Spur, a couple hundred yards away. Approaching, we had some trouble with fallen trees. Quite a population of fire-adapted Knobcone Pine lives, and dies, along the almost level crest of the Promontory. Fallen pines lie around like jackstraws. It thus became a bit of a fight to follow the ridge, but soon we were rewarded by amazing, amazing and spectacular views of pools and waterfalls, of gorge upon gorge, canyon upon canyon. We followed along to the very tip of the Promontory, and enjoyed a good break out there, admiring the view, taking photographs.

Then it only remained to make the slow slog back up the ridge. It was quite a good thing to see the truck, and so very fine, to just sit in the truck. It had been less than five miles, less than two thousand feet of elevation loss/gain, but I for one felt, uh, very very well-exercised.

It was another great day, in the main tributary of the North Fork, the North Fork of the North Fork.

The China Trail

2007-08-13T11:48:00.000-07:00

[written August 13, 2007]

Walking down the ancient trail, with twelve people scattered along the way, some above, some below, I found myself thinking of my old friend Dave Lawler, geologist and paleontologist extraordinaire. In the early and middle 1990s we had made an extraordinary series of hikes which had greatly expanded and enhanced my knowledge of this entire area. Dave and I went to places I had previously, somehow, only dreamed of exploring.

For instance, once we visited Big Valley Bluff, away south on Forest Road Nineteen from Emigrant Gap. From the summit of the 3500-foot cliff we gazed up the North Fork to Snow Mountain and the Royal Gorge. I remember pointing out Sugar Pine Point, the first major promontory east of the Bluff, and explaining to Dave, that since at least as early as 1975, I had wanted to check out the Point, and now here it was, twenty years later, and I had never been there.

What mystical and soul-stirring views must be had from this Point, named for the King of All Pines!

With Dave, to think is to act, and within an hour we had driven back out to I-80, up to Yuba Gap, back in along The Nineteen, passing Lake Valley Reservoir, and then out FR38 to Huysink Lake and beyond. Nearing Pelham Flat, an enormous Red Fir blocked the road; undaunted, we hiked south towards the Point.

When we finally reached Sugar Pine Point, we found a few large stumps, some brush and small trees, and the sun was sinking low in the west. There was no view whatsoever into the great canyon. It might have been prudent to start walking the two miles back to our car. But I said to Dave, "It's possible that, if we drop right over the edge, into the canyon, we'll find a rock outcrop that stands clear of these small trees, and have our canyon view."

With Dave Lawler, actions speak a lot louder than words, so ...

We crashed through the thin screen of brush and trees and found ourselves in a magic world which had never been touched by logging, with gigantic, centuries-old Sugar Pines and other forest trees of the middle elevations, with springs, with meadows, and with an old, old trail winding through the woods. We did not know it then, but we had discovered Sugar Pine Flat, and the terminus of the historic Sugar Pine Point Trail, almost entirely ruined by logging in the early 1990s, but in these sacred precincts, intact.

We were in even-numbered Section 20, T16N, R13E; even-numbered, hence not part of the great and horrible land give-away signed into law by President Lincoln in 1862 and then, needing to give away even more of the public trust, in 1864. All the odd-numbered sections, for so many miles to either side of the railroad itself, were given to the Central Pacific Railroad.

I would return again and again and again to Sugar Pine Flat.

For many years Dave had studied the history of the hydraulic mines here in the Sierra, had guided field trips to these old mines, had taught volunteers how to collect the Eocene-age fossils, had added to the collection of the Museum of Paleontology at Berkeley. I had slowly developed the idea, over a couple of decades, that no one else had studied these mines, explored these old diggings, dared to enter those old drain tunnels, more than I had. Then I met Dave. As Dave was, to me, was as ten is, to one. The ancillary subject, of the mining ditches which fed these mines, by the miners' inch, by the acre-foot, fascinated us both; and what could be better, for hiking, than one of these old ditches?

Hence it was that we were out on The Nineteen, south of Emigrant Gap, one summer day, and saw a gate standing open, a Forest Service gate, which was ordinarily closed and locked. We decided to explore, and soon found ourselves on the historic Bradley & Gardner Ditch. A logging road followed the B&G out of Fulda Canyon, sometimes paralleling the B&G, sometimes cut directly into the line of the ditch. We reached an anonymous spur ridge, and here at least the road was separate, the ditch, somewhere below. We walked down to the ditch, and indistinctly, through the forest, saw a great canyon to the south. Perhaps some rock outcrop would stand clear of the trees, and allow a view?

We surged down the ridge, which soon narrowed into a knife-edge of upturned slaty outcrops. "The Blue Canyon Formation," I remarked, and was quite surprised when Dave replied, "No, this is the Shoo Fly Complex; a hundred years ago, Waldemar Lindgren called it the Blue Canyon Formation, but nowadays, we call it the Shoo Fly."

The Shoo Fly?

I must admit, it galled me a little, to be so ignorant. Here I had imagined myself acquainted with the local geology, but I was apparently not so very well acquainted. I had imagined myself the master of the old hydraulic mines, and then it had transpired, I was not the master. Dave was. In fact, he was The Master. And now, in an instant, I and my Blue Canyon Formation were down in the dust, pathetic coyotes, and some demented geological roadrunner had beep-beeped "Shoo Fly Complex" before disappearing into the distance.

The same pattern seemed to obtain when we hiked. Here we were, in drastically steep terrain, following a knife-edge of slate down and down and down amid a gnarled elfin forest of Canyon Live Oak, and some kind of foot race had developed, and Dave was winning. He dropped out of sight below me. We had imagined finding an outcrop with a view, but I had myself never envisioned that we would descend all the way to the North Fork of the North Fork of the American River before we gave up.

We knew we were entering the Complex of Canyons, the Gorge of Many Gorges. Who ever heard of having a race down cliffs? I remember feeling a little irritated as I pulled out all the stops, and alternately skied down steep slopes over the slippery oak leaves, when the slate knife narrowed overmuch, or when it made one of its sudden hundred-foot steps, or, sometimes following the ridge-crest itself. How could anyone in this world handle terrain like this, better than I? For it was one thing to know the hydraulic mines better, one thing to know more geology, but to out-scramble Russell Towle in such rough terrain was unthinkable. It was not only impossible, it was, well, unfriendly.

I brooded. What of the camraderie of the hike? Gone, destroyed, in a clatter of slate and a cloud of dust, somewhere below. So I pulled out all the stops and tried to catch up to Dave. Finally I reached the last step in the ridge-crest; a couple hundred feet below, almost straight down, the beautiful river. A gurgling, a murmuring, but also, the hiss and roar of waterfalls. There was no sign of Dave. He must have found a way down to the water, but I could not quite see how. The cliffs were steep to sheer. I shouted down. No response. Dave had either peeled off the ridge to the right, or to the left; there was no going straight down, not without ropes. So I sat there and shouted and brooded for a while. Ten minutes. The sun was lowering, the climb of more than a thousand feet was in my immediate future, but my hiking companion had disappeared.

Then he suddenly appeared, climbing down from above. In the intensity of my effort to catch up, I had passed him by. He had been on the other side of the knife-edge at that critical instant. So we sat and admired the scene for a while. This was quite an amazing canyon, most all of it incised into the Shoo Fly. Consulting our maps, we saw that a trail dropped to the river a little ways downstream, from a spot near Blue Canyon named Lost Camp.

Dave knew all about Lost Camp, and despite its proximity to Blue Canyon, being almost in my back yard, I had, somehow, some way, never visited the place. At any rate, it was clear to both of us what the next phase in our explorations must be. A week later we drove down to Lost Camp, in odd-numbered Section 23, T16N, R11E, and with a little difficulty, located the trailhead.

We had our loppers with us, as usual, and the old trail needed a lot of lopping. I forget whether, on that first-ever hike of the China Trail, or China Bar Trail, as it is variously called, we swam the Pool of Cold Fire, and entered the Gorge of Many Gorges. But we soon did. The canyon, the gorges, the river, the waterfalls, were of incredible beauty.

Twelve or so years later, here I was, following the old trail, built in 1862, passing giant Douglas Fir which had sprouted in, who knows, 1662, passing old Forest Service "small i" blazes. Like most trails in Tahoe National Forest, the China Trail long predated the establishment of the Forest itself, in 1905. For decades the trusty rangers had faithfully maintained the historic trail.

I had met Ron Gould, Catherine O'Riley, Jim Johnson, and Jim Ricker, of the North Fork American River Alliance, or NFARA, at the Blue Canyon exit, for a hike on the China Trail. A number of other people were present, including Bill Templin, of the American River Watershed Group, and Steve Hunter, who has been hiking the China Trail since 1955. It was not just a pleasure hike. There was trouble, right here in River City. The old road to Lost Camp, a public road since at least as early as 1858, had been gated closed, and posted with numerous "no trespassing" signs. Thankfully, NFARA had decided to act. The purpose of the hike was two-fold: to assert the public's right to use the road, by ourselves going through the gate to the trailhead, and to consider what to do about the closure.

In my opinion, NFARA should not have to act. This Lost Camp Road and this China Trail are both parts of the Tahoe National Forest "system" of trails and roads. It is Tahoe National Forest's job to protect the public's right to use these historic roads and trails. But Tahoe National Forest is too busy devising ways for Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) to harvest timber from our public lands, to trouble itself about historic roads and trails. Historic roads and trails are things which get ruined and erased in the ordinary course of doing sweetheart business with the most rapacious lumber company in California; historic roads and trails are curious artifacts from before the Atomic Age, before that great god, the Bulldozer, commanded our National Forests to bow to its every whim.

So, unfortunately, the custodian of our public lands in the middle and upper elevations, Tahoe National Forest, has not acted to protect the public's rights. Very far from it. To wait for the Forest Service to act would be to lose the Lost Camp Road, and the China Trail, forever.

Would Placer County act to protect the public's right? No. What Placer County will do is approve land subdivisions directly on historic roads and trails, as though we didn't have more than enough parcels already, as though we can afford to lose any number of historic public roads and trails. Placer County supports and aids in every way possible the "standard" path to progress: first log, then subdivide.

Look, look, how much the views have improved, now the trees have been cut down! Why, this is now a "view" parcel! Look, look, how the very roads made by the logging bulldozers, can become driveways! Look, look, how the log landings become building sites! Look how easily one can put up a gate, how easily "no trespassing" signs can be added here, there, everywhere!

The gate was not locked, on the Lost Camp Road. We let ourselves through and drove to the trailhead. A hazy summer day, the wildfire up by Chico spreading smoke into our area. The China Trail is short, not much more than a mile, and we were soon on the river. A glorious pool is just downstream. I hurried down ahead of the rest, tore my tattered clothes off, and dove into the crystalline coldness. If there had been a way to dive right back up and out, I would have. The North Fork of the North Fork is usually far too cold for my tastes.

The Shoo Fly Complex metasediments are often slaty in structure, and on the gravel bars one can find any number of excellent skipping stones. Several of us amused ourselves skipping slates down the long pool. Others debated what to do about the gate. Some left and explored up the river. Eventually, most of the group left, and Ron and Peggy and Catherine and I boulder-hopped up to the Pool of Cold Fire. We swam a little, and Peggy became a regular expert at skipping rocks. I had the pleasure of helping her, by telling her that one must throw the rock, so that it spins like a Frisbee. Suddenly she was skipping rocks like a champion.

We were directly below that last cliff-bound step on the very knife-edge ridge Dave Lawler and I had raced down in 1995. Just above the long and narrow Pool of Cold Fire, a waterfall, and then the Gorge of Many Gorges. We might have swum the Pool and entered the Gorge, but we merely relaxed in the shade of some alders, swam a little, skipped rocks, talked, took note of an infinitude of spiders and spider webs, found a chilled cicada in the Pool, rescued it, and visited various sunny boulders, beloved by birds, in the river.

At last our lazy day must end, we must hop back down the river to the trail, and then, up and up and up and up. I took my shirt off just before the climb, and wore nothing but shoes and my cutoffs. It seemed likely I'd be attacked by mosquitos, but nary a one chomped me on the way up and out. Only, those miniature flies I call Face Flies buzzed along beside me half the time, trying to get into my eyes, my ears, my mouth, my nose. Horrible little things.

In and era when the very entities we might reasonably expect to protect the rights of the public, Tahoe National Forest, and Placer County, are far too busy arranging timber sales and subdivisions, to be bothered with historic trails, it is indeed fortunate that we have people like Ron Gould and Catherine O'Riley and the others of NFARA, who are willing to fight the good fight. It may well be that this issue, the Lost Camp Road, the China Trail, will end up in court.

I did not say it, but even if the gate is removed, and the "no trespassing" signs come down, residential development of these little parcels north of Lost Camp will be like the kiss of death, affecting not only public access--one will feel as though one is driving through somebody's yard--but also ending the ambience of wildness and remoteness, which existed there until a very few short years ago.

The Monuments

2007-08-10T11:49:00.000-07:00

[written August 10, 2007]

My family joined our Bay Area friends the Creelmans for a visit to Monumental Creek, once again driving south from Emigrant Gap on Forest Road 19, past the North Fork Campground, past the Onion Valley (lower) Meadow, to Forest Road 45, thence on FR 45-2 to the historic Bradley & Gardner Ditch, or Placer County Canal.

This ditch was made in the 1850s, and delivered water to the hydraulic mines of Dutch Flat and Gold Run, as well as to smaller mining camps such as Lost Camp and Blue Bluffs. Its capacity was around two thousand miners' inches of water, a miners' inch being that amount of water which will pass through a hole one inch square, cut through a two-inch-thick plank, six inches below the water surface, in the course of twenty-four hours. This comes to around sixteen thousand gallons per day.

FR 45-2 forks right from FR 45 a quarter mile above Onion Valley, and soon descends to coincide with the Bradley & Gardner Ditch, just a smidgin above the 4800-foot contour. In about a mile it reaches Monumental Creek, a tributary of the East Fork of the North Fork of the North Fork of the American River. The ditch-road is only a hundred feet above the creek, but the forest is thick enough that one can't really see the creek.

The Monuments form a kind of witches' coven of stone pinnacles, huddled around a series of pools and low waterfalls on Monumental Creek. The principal Monument rises sheer one hundred feet from the water, and has a crown of white, which seems to be a combination of a quartz vein, and down-dripping white stains, which I speculate derive from centuries of nesting eagles.

When the Bradley & Gardner reaches Monumental Creek, one is directly above the Monuments, but they are well hidden behind a screen of trees. We followed the ditch-road on up Monumental Canyon, through a brushy clearcut where not only was the historic mining ditch destroyed for the sake of a few sawlogs, but the road which replaced it was left in poor condition, so one fights Ceanothus and stumbles over boulders to make a passage, and then, the final indignity, the road almost imperceptibly rises above the grade of the ditch, the brush so thick one can't see where the two diverge, so that after a time one must simply leave the road and strike downhill a few yards.

There one finds the rather large ditch blessedly intact, and the berm can be easily followed, through the deep woods, and soon one is much closer to the creek, and soon one can see across the canyon to the very same ditch, so it can make sense, as it did for us, to drop to the creek, hop across on a few boulders, and scramble back up the far side, saving hundreds and hundreds of yards of walking.

For the Bradley & Gardner's almost level grade sends it in and out of Monumental Canyon in a tight hairpin course of almost a mile, on both sides. We followed along the scenic path, often lined with large dry-laid stone walls, until we reached a point directly above the Monuments, again, but from this side of the canyon, one has a fabulous view of the pinnacles and the creek.

We rested and enjoyed the view, and then made a retreat, some of us descending directly to the creek and climbing steeply up the far side of the canyon, others keeping to the ditch. When we formed up into one group again, we had lunch, and then walked out to our cars, and drove to the North Fork Campground, parking along The Ninteteen.

We ambled through the campground and followed the trail leading down the North Fork of the North Fork to the lovely waterfalls and pools that Everybody Knows About. Quite a party of young men and women commanded the area around the falls, swimming, laughing, shouting, clambering up the cliffs to make thirty- and forty-foot leaps into the upper pool, or sunbathing on the polished bedrock between the two deep pools. So we located a little ways downstream, swimming in a lesser pool.

I had hoped we could all go out to Big Valley Bluff, miles past Texas Hill and the last of the pavement on The Nineteen, but our cars were too small and low to the ground, and the road too bouldery and rough. So, we declared the day a success, having visited both Monumental Canyon and the Waterfalls Everybody Knows, and having gone swimming.

From a geological standpoint, the Monuments are a curiosity, the whole area having been repeatedly and heavily glaciated: such thin spires of rock could never withstand the inexorable ice. I envision the inner gorge of Monumental Canyon, around the Monuments themselves, to have been filled with glacial sediments, while the ice flowed by, above; and the thin spires arose in that hidden maelstrom, where a river, roaring in darkness, a powerful river of glacial meltwater comprising a hundred times the current summer flow of the creek, a powerful river, slowly dragged along a one-hundred-feet-deep mass of boulders, cobbles, gravel, sand, even clay.

And above, a thousand feet of ice.

Onion Valley's meadows are all glacial meadows, almost certainly silted-in glacial lakes. They are perched on the tellingly low divide between the North Fork of the North Fork, and its East Fork. In this immediate area the dividing ridge was almost destroyed by the ice. There is scarcely any "ridge" left. During the recessionary stades of the last, "Tioga" glaciation, perhaps 13,000 years ago, the ice paused in its retreat, and left various moraines.

It would appear that the larger North Fork of the North Fork Glacier crossed the dividing ridge, overflowing into the East Fork, again and again, over multiple different glaciations, over hundreds of thousands of years, thus gradually wearing the ridge down. This resembles what we see at the head of Bear Valley, where the South Yuba Glacier overflowed, again and again, into the Bear River Canyon, and gradually lowered the dividing ridge. There is essentially no ridge left at the head of the Bear River.

Here at Onion Valley, however, the overflow was not from one canyon, into the head of another canyon; it was from one canyon, into the middle reaches of another canyon, from the North Fork of the North Fork, into the East Fork. So the dividing ridge, almost erased in one area by the glaciers, reappears a little ways down, rising between the canyons into the eminence named Scott Hill. This eminence seems to be formed from an especially siliceous series of strata, in the Shoo Fly Complex of metasedimentary rocks. Probably these resistant strata are quartzite (metasandstone), with some chert.

Moraines in the East Fork

2007-08-06T11:50:00.000-07:00

[written August 6, 2007]

Early Saturday afternoon Gay Wiseman and I drove up to Emigrant Gap and then south on Forest Road 19 towards the North Fork of the North Fork of the American River (NFNFAR).

There is a Tahoe National Forest campground where The Nineteen crosses the NFNFAR, a popular campground, and yet one often sees cars parked along The Nineteen, near the campground.

They park along the road in order to walk downstream to a beautiful waterfall and swimming hole. A close examination of the USGS 7.5 minute quadrangle reveals several of the 40-foot contour lines crossing the river near the falls; but for quite a ways further downstream, the gradient lessens, ergo, no waterfalls, and a cursory exploration twenty years ago or so had confirmed what the map suggested.

However, around a mile downstream, several more 40-foot contours cross the river in fairly close succession; hence, there ought to be more waterfalls, perhaps bigger and better waterfalls, with deeper and more dramatic swimming holes.

One always wants more drama while swimming--there can never really be enough--so Gay and I set out to find these supposed waterfalls, and their exciting pools.

While staring at the map, with its many contour lines, I noticed two strange spur ridges, one on either side of the river, one farther upstream, closer to the campground, the other farther downstream, close to Sailor Point. The area lies within Township 16N, Range 12E, in sections 7 and 18.

What drew my attention to these two ridges was their geometry. Imagine if you will a generalized canyon following a straight course. Let the typical cross-section be a simple "V" in shape. Now imagine the contour lines in such a canyon; they roughly parallel the river; they have a "global" direction which is nearly parallel to the length of the canyon.

Now further imagine that the walls of the V-shaped canyon are scored by ravines, and ribbed by intervening spur ridges, which are more or less at right angles to the river, to the length of the V-shaped canyon. Hence although the "global" direction of the contour lines parallels the river, locally, the contour lines bend in around the ravines, and bend out around the little spur ridges. We have defined the ridges and ravines as perpendicular to the river, and the "global" direction of the contour lines as parallel to the river. If we place a ruler so that it intersects all the little local outward bends in the contour lines, where a spur ridge is crossed, or so that it intersects all the little local inward bends, where a ravine is crossed, our ruler will itself be at right angles to both river and canyon.

However, these two little ridges which caught my eye do not exhibit this geometry. If one places a ruler so that it crosses all the little outward bends in the contour lines, it is far from being at right angles to the river. In fact, in both cases, the ruler would lie at approximately a 45-degree angle to the line of the river, to the trend of the canyon at large.

They are both moraines, portions of terminal moraines from a recessional stage or "stade" in the most-recent, "Tioga" glaciation. I say, recessional, because it is fairly clear to me that Tioga ice extended well down the canyon, miles down the canyon, during its maximum extent. The Tioga is somewhat poorly-defined in time: it is well known to have ended about 12,000 years ago, which is a geologic and climatologic blink of an eye, but its beginning point is harder to specify. We would not be drastically amiss, I think, to set the beginning of the Tioga to "about" 20,000 years ago.

To illustrate why the beginning of the Tioga becomes problematic, research has been conducted in recent years in which the sediments of Owens Lake, on the east side of the Sierra, were cored to a depth of a couple hundred feet, and the cores carefully analyzed. During periods of intense glaciation, one type of sediment reached the lake and was deposited. During interludes between glaciations, a different type of sediment reached the lake and was deposited. The sediment cores are longitudinally striped with these alternating types. All that remains is to attach a date to each stratum. This was done.

The Owens Lake sediment cores revealed no fewer than sixteen separate glaciations within the past 52,000 years. Sixteen!

And yet, it is a commonplace among Sierran geologists to refer to the Tioga glaciation of 12-20,000 years ago as having been preceded by the Tahoe II glaciation of 65,000 years ago. Clearly the glacial history is much more complicated, in detail. It is exciting to think that the story will continue to unfold as research progresses.

There is an important reason why geologists remain "stuck" in the Tahoe-Tioga model of glacial sequence: one the east side of the Sierra, so much drier than here, many terminal moraines are well-preserved, and in canyon after canyon after canyon one can see two principal terminal moraines: an older, more blurred moraine, farther down the canyon, and a younger, sharp-crested moraine, farther up the canyon. Sometimes only a little distance separates them. The younger, sharp-crested moraine is Tioga; the older, blurred moraine, farther down the canyon, is Tahoe.

Direct observation leads to the Tioga-Tahoe model.

Of course, as a glacier melts away it retreats up its canyon, and leaves a series of terminal moraines. Actually, if its retreat is steady and rapid, it may leave a formless mass of glacial till slathered over everything. On the other hand ...

It may well happen that during this retreat up its canyon, a retreat which may require well over a thousand years, the glacier stops retreating for a century or two. During such a "stade" the glacier will deposit a much more strongly marked moraine along its terminus.

My two ridges-of-odd-geometry, in the canyon of the NFNFAR, represent two such stades, the younger one half-a-mile up the canyon from the other. The upper, younger ridge-of-odd-geometry is in the SE 1/4 of Section 7, T16N R12E, near the word "Fork" as seen on the 7.5 minute quadrangle, and is on the southeast side of the NFNFAR. The other ridge-of-odd-geometry is to the west, in the NW 1/4 of Section 18, T16N R12E, near the surveyed elevation of 5137'. This moraine is northwest of the river, and The Nineteen cuts right through its upper end.

Both are really rather minor ridges. On the topographic map, they are expressed as a series of kinks in the contour lines.

It is not nearly as easy, here on the well-watered west slope of the Sierra Nevada, to see moraines. They do exist, but they are often inconspicuous. I have a rather short list of such moraines, in my mind: there is a fine figure of a moraine north of Lake Spaulding, visible from I-80 at a disiance of several miles. There is a long, brushy moraine complex on Black Mountain, also visible from I-80. Red Mountain has a blurred-into-till portion of a lateral moraine of the Fordyce Glacier, high above Fordyce Creek. And there is quite a distinct moraine at the lower end of Bear Valley. And there are others.

So, having noted the two ridges-of-odd-geometry, I was excited to see whether I was right, or wrong, when I actually got out there on The Nineteen and passed Sailor Point, entering the NFNFAR canyon.

Of course I was right.

And the waterfalls? Oh, well, Gay and I had quite a nice time, following the good old Bradley & Gardner ditch, and then dropping to the river and boulder-hopping along, farther and farther and farther down the canyon. We saw many a one-foot waterfall. We saw many a three-foot waterfall. But we found no big waterfalls. Pools, yes; but no "dramatic" pools. Oh, they were very nice I'm sure, and Gay went swimming. But they lacked drama.

It is a very beautiful reach of river and canyon, with pretty stream-polished exposures of the Shoo Fly Complex metasediments, and the giant-leafed Indian Rhubarb all along the water, and many many many giant granite eggs left there by the ice, 12,000 years ago. During our explorations we discovered several old narrow-gauge logging railroad grades which had been pressed into service by Tahoe National Forest as skid trails, twenty-five or thirty years ago. In fact, I was fuming quietly to myself as Gay and I finally climbed back up to the good, the old, the huge Bradley & Gardner, the Placer County Canal. A bulldozer skid trail angled steeply up the slope, and we followed it for a time. Under what possible pretext did Tahoe National Forest allow the canyon wall to be thus scarred for the next thousand years or more?

I can forgive the glacier, in fact, I rather admire its scars.

I can forgive the loggers of the 1890s, who made a few carefully-thought-out railroad grades and rolled logs right down onto flatcars. The loggers of the 1890s lived in an era of rapacity, in which rapacity was so universal that "everyone" did it. But to come along in the 1980s, and make scars on the canyon walls which will easily last a thousand years? If it was Sierra Pacific Industries, whose only view is the bottom line in a ledger, well, that would at least be intelligible.

But since the scarring was on public land, under the management of Tahoe National Forest, I can't shake the feeling the the public trust was violated. It's not a new feeling. When I stop and wonder how it could be that Tahoe National Forest either itself orchestrated the destruction, or stood by and did nothing to avert the destruction, of so many historic trails, in this same area: the Burnett Canyon Trail, the Monumental Creek Trail, the Mears Meadow Trail, the Big Valley Trail, the Sugar Pine Point Trail, the China Trail, et cetera, well, when I recall all that, I am worse than displeased.

Mumford Bar to Italian Bar

2007-07-27T11:51:00.000-07:00

[written July 27, 2007]

Early one morning I met Ron Gould and Catherine O'Riley for an expedition to Terra Incognita.

Terra Incognita: oh the magic, ah the mystery, of Terra Incognita! Or, as some would have it, the North Fork of the American River, between Mumford Bar on the east, and Italian Bar, on the west.

To reach the Mumford Bar Trail, we must somehow cross the North Fork, hence we traced infinite curves past Iowa Hill to Sugar Pine Reservoir, thence to Foresthill Road, and on up the Divide, to the trail.

Much of the Divide burned in the 1960 Volcano Fire, but here, one pretty little patch of timber escaped alive, and in this island grove nestles the trailhead, and a small campground. Around ten in the morning, we set off down the Mumford Bar Trail, leaving the Divide at 5400', aiming for the river, very near 2600', a descent of nearly 2800'. This is accomplished over the course of four miles and forty switchbacks, for the Mumford holds a gentle grade, and takes its sweet time about ever actually reaching the river itself.

It is really quite a nice trail, the Mumford. It is almost entirely a forest trail, but at one point, high on the trail, a view opens northeast, slanting across the east-west trending North Fork Canyon, to Snow Mountain, Devils Peak, and Big Valley Bluff. More typically, one walks through a classic fire-evolved, fire-adapted, Ponderosa Pine-Kelloggs Black Oak woodland, today being overwhelmed by shade-tolerant Douglas Fir. Ah, the Douglas Fir is on the very point of winning the battle: thousands upon thousands are reaching a height of fifty feet or more, and are shading out the Kelloggs Black Oak. Ghostly white dead oak trunks thread the forest: already half the oaks, in many areas, have been shaded to death.

There are some huge trees, the genuine first-growth timber, along the trail. Often these centuries-old trees show big fire scars on their uphill sides, near the base of the trunk. These betoken the almost steady state of frequent wildfires which governed vegetational patterns here for thousands of years. These "cool" fires left larger trees alive, but killed small conifers and shrubs. Hence the forest was much more open, and relatively clear of brush and small trees.

It is considered likely that the native Californians, the Indians, burned off the land regularly. For thousands of years, wildfires were a commonplace.

Then, in an almost unintended experiment, we said, as it were, "Let's take these forests, swept by fires every twenty years, for lo these last ten thousand years--let us take these forests and suppress all fires, and, in the meantime, let's cut down the biggest trees, so that the increased sunlight reaching the ground helps a million conifers take seed, and sprouts a hundred million shrubs."

And now the fire, when it does occur, will burn all the more intensely, likely killing even the largest oldest trees, trees which survived the cool wildfires of centuries past, but now die in the infernos of the modern forest.

Tahoe National Forest has done some interesting work on the Foresthill Divide, using fire to help thin pine plantations. I think we will have to devise more ways to bring fire back to our mountain landscapes. If we could burn a few tens of thousands of acres per year, we could gradually restore fuel loading to the lower, more natural levels of aeons gone by.

Hmmm. The Mumford Bar Trail. It winds through the woods, passing a few exposures of glacially-polished bedrock, but much more typically, glacial till covers everything, and as one at last nears the river, the trail bears east and drops onto the top of a glacial outwash terrace. This is Mumford Bar. All the "bars" of the 49ers are either glacial outwash terraces outright, or the reworked sediments of such terraces, as in gravel bars low to the river, which are swept regularly by high flows.

The last, Tioga glaciation ended a scant 12,000 years ago. As the North Fork glacier retreated up the canyon, it dropped a huge volume of bouldery sediments into the river, which volume exceeded the carrying capacity of those raging, glacier-melt-fed waters; hence a kind of narrow floodplain developed within the canyon. Once the glacier upstream had melted entirely away, say, 12,000 years ago, the sediment load quickly diminished, and the river, itself diminished, began cutting a channel into this long, sinuous floodplain of glacial outwash sediments.

Fast forward twelve thousand years, and we have only vestiges of the narrow, canyon-bound floodplain left, in the form of outwash terraces. Often these terraces stand sixty or a hundred feet above the river. Rarely, higher, older, even more fragmentary terraces exist, as well. At Mumford Bar, the terrace is well-formed and flanks the river for nearly a mile. Often these terraces support rich forests with large trees, and are full of springs.

So, as one descends the Mumford Bar Trail, one eventually reaches the principal outwash terrace, with its rich forest of larger-than-usual trees, and its many springs, and a sometimes spectacular understory of dogwood and maple. An old cabin of logs hewn square stands in a meadowy opening on the terrace. The North Fork ripples gently through a bouldery bed sixty or a hundred feet below.

Here the American River Trail leads away east, up the canyon, following a long series of such outwash terraces up to Sailor Canyon; although, in point of fact, this being one of the secrets I have divulged to you, my readers, the old trail continues right along past Sailor Canyon, following the good old glacial outwash terraces just as before, sixty or a hundred feet above the North Fork. One can even find and follow this same trail past Wildcat Canyon, where the Sea Of Talus is met: the old trail crosses above the rocky ocean.

Still another trail connects here, the Government Springs Trail, which drops to Mumford Bar from the crest of Sawtooth Ridge.

Ron and Catherine and I took a lunch break at the base of the trail, where we met many mosquitos.

Before I leave the subject of outwash terraces, however, I wish to set forth a certain model I have developed on glaciation in a canyon environment, in a canyon, let us say, much like that of the North Fork American; in fact, I will apply the model to this part of the North Fork canyon.

In the first place, glaciers are powerful agents of erosion, and while scouring away at the mountains, they carry bits and pieces along for the ride. They act as conveyor belts, gradually moving sediments down, including huge boulders, including sand and silt. A valley glacier, like the one which filled the North Fork canyon at Mumford Bar, will often, from above, show long lines of dirty, bouldery sediment on its surface. What is less easily seen is the very large amount of sediment hidden within the ice, or being dragged along below the ice.

So when we think back to the North Fork glacier, whatever boulders may have been up on top of the ice, we should imagine that at the base of the ice there are boulders, too, and many of them, but also, all kinds of fine sediments.

We should also imagine that rivers of meltwater flow both through the ice river, and beneath it, especially, of course, below, or down-ice, from the "firn line," above which ice accumulates, below which, it melts away. Moreover, we should imagine that although the principal river will be the deepest in the ice, along the floor of the valley or canyon the ice inhabits, other rivers may form and disappear, most often, along the margins of the ice; but these will find a way into the depths eventually, and join the main river of meltwater, at the very base.

Typically valley glaciers extend well below the firn line of the their tributary glaciers and ice fields. We might imagine the firn line, during the Tioga, at about the 5500' contour, higher on south-facing slopes, lower on north-facing slopes.

Near Mumford Bar the North Fork canyon is incised into the Shoo Fly Complex of early Paleozoic metasediments. The original horizontal beds of shale and sandstone have been metamorphosed and tipped up on edge, rotated almost ninety degrees, so that now the tops of the beds face east.

The sandstone has often metamorphosed into tough and massive quartzite, the shale, into relatively weak slate. It happens, then, that there is often an alternating sequence of stronger quartzite and weaker slate.

These tipped-up, east-facing beds of quartzite and slate are at right angles, often, to the line of the canyon. If the canyon were never glaciated, it would develop a strongly ribbed form, with side canyons incised into the softer slates, and spur ridges on the stronger quartzite.

But the North Fork has been glaciated, and the great mass of ice flowing down the North Fork tended to plane the quartzite ridges down. That is, we should imagine that, between glaciations, the "ribbed" pattern would begin to take hold, begin to develop, with ravines in the slate, ridges on the quartzite; and then along would come this big brute of a glacier, and it would plane down all those little nascent spur ridges.

OK. What this is all leading up to has to do with the sediments trapped between the ice and the canyon wall, and between the ice and the bedrock floor of the canyon.

Ice flows, and yet it is a solid. It easily breaks. And while ice at the surface is one sort of ice, ice three thousand feet down in the North Fork Glacier is another sort of ice. At any rate, the model I am struggling to propose is a simple one: as the ice, which does flow, which does bend, but which can only bend so much, before it breaks--as the ice flowed down the North Fork canyon, in the global, down-canyon, direction--west, let us say--it *of course* hit the crests of the spur ridges, tending to plane them down. But what happened in the little ravines between those spur ridges? According to my model, the sediment dragged along by the ice was such that it tended to fill those little ravines.

There is a subtlety here. Of course we expect a generalized mass of till to blanket many slopes, after such a monstrous glacier melts away. But what I propose is that linear masses of this till occupied the little ravines on the canyon wall while the ice was still there. So that, when one came right down to it, the North Fork glacier was flowing partly over bedrock, *and partly over its own till*. For the ice was too brittle to bend in and out of these abrupt little fluctuations in topography; the ice just carried majestically along. "Go West, Young Ice," etc. etc.

So the model is that the North Fork glacier skimmed along the crests of the spur ridges, planing them lower as it went, with the intervening ravines chock-full of that bouldery sediment we call glacial till.

Now, turning to the case of the North Fork itself: it raged along beneath three thousand feet of ice, through twisted caverns of Stygian darkness.

Suppose, now, that a previous glaciation was more intense, and suppose that more intense glaciation to comprise either or both of the two "Tahoe" glaciations, of 65,000 and 125,000 years ago. The previous glaciation deposited even more glacial outwash, as the glacier retreated up the canyon from Mumford Bar. This bouldery outwash is a very effective agent of erosion when added to a raging, perpetually-at-flood-stage river, i.e., the North Fork. So, when at last the glacier was gone, and the river etched down through the narrow floodplain of outwash, to the bedrock buried below, with the infinitude of boulders rolling along in the flood, it was a matter of a few thousand years to nick a gorge into the bedrock.

A gorge, say, one hundred feet deep. Picture a vast canyon, three thousand feet deep, and right at the bottom, the river flows through a narrow gorge, with cliffs on both sides. But the gorge is only a hundred feet, two hundred feet, deep.

Now come forward to the Tioga glaciation. We have proposed that the North Fork Glacier flowed both directly over bedrock, and directly over till. At the base of the glacier the North Fork rages along through its caverns. But is it only water which moves? No. There is a huge sediment load, of boulders, cobbles, sand, silt, even clay, being dragged down through those buried abysses in the ice.

And the ice, not bending too well, not being able to conform to every minor fluctuation in topography, flowing in the global direction, west, would, I propose, skim right over the tops of these little inner gorges, inner gorges incised during the *previous* glaciation. I envision that, the instant the North Fork canyon was re-occupied by (Tioga) ice, perhaps 25,000 years ago, these little inner gorges filled with glacial till, with the bouldery sediment load being rushed along by the ice-bound river of meltwater.

So that when one enters such an inner gorge along the North Fork, say, the one a couple hundred yards downstream from the cabin at Mumford Bar, one should *not* imagine that the North Fork Glacier actually occupied the gorge.

Imagine rather that the gorge was buried in glacial outwash, that the hidden, "glacial" North Fork raged along above the buried gorge, and above the river in turn, there were three thousand feet of ice.

It is quite clear, in some locations, as for instance, Green Valley, that inner gorges along the North Fork were created, then buried in glacial outwash, and finally, exhumed, during Post-Tioga erosion.

I believe we see exactly the same thing near Mumford Bar: inner gorges created 65,000 years ago, say, which were filled with till (or better, sub-ice glacial sediments) as soon as the Tioga glacier re-occupied the canyon, remained buried for the entire time the Tioga glacier was there, and then, when the glacier finally melted, 12,000 years ago, and the sediment load dropped to something like modern (low) levels, these little gorges were exhumed.

They do not seem to have been much deepened in post-Tioga time, in the Holocene.

The idea of a major valley glacier flowing, not over bedrock, but over till, is exemplified by Yosemite Valley, where earlier, more intense glaciations hewed the bedrock nearly a thousand feet deeper than the present floor of the Valley. This was revealed by drilling out sediment cores. For a time, there was a Lake Yosemite; but it silted up full with glacial outwash brought down the Merced River and Tenaya Canyon. When the Tioga ice re-occupied Yosemite, it did not bulldoze this thousand feet of outwash sediments out, but skimmed along over the top. Oh, it carved a bit of a broad trench for itself through the Valley, but it never came close to the bedrock floor. And the broad trench has since been filled in.

Returning to the North Fork, that a long narrow floodplain of glacial outwash sediments choked the canyon downstream from the North Fork Glacier, has long seemed obvious; but near Mumford Bar we are presented with evidence that a kind of outwash "floodplain" may have existed beneath the ice itself, as well.

It is by this same model that I explain the Monuments, at Monumental Creek: they were beneath the ice, buried in glacial outwash. They were created by river erosion, in the churning maelstrom, in the roaring abyss below the ice. Such tall spindly towers of rock would fall immediately if exposed to the inexorable flow of a glacier. No, they were protected from the ice by sub-ice glacial sediments.

Since the tallest Monument is about one hundred feet high, we should probably imagine the sub-ice sediments to have been at least one hundred feet deep, there.

Ron and Catherine and I had all three studied the topographic maps, and had noted that the North Fork canyon, below Mumford Bar, suddenly narrowed, the walls steepened, and we expected to find any number of inner gorges in our Terra Incognita. We expected to find cliffs falling into deep pools; we expected to have to swim through these deep pools, as one does in Giant Gap. We had somewhat more than three miles of river to follow down to Italian Bar; those three miles could become an infinity, and we might not reach Italian Bar before dark. Hence our early start.

We dropped down to the bouldery river bottom at Mumford and almost immediately met our first gorge. Spectacular exposures of water-polished metamorphic rock were all around us. I noted an old iron pin set into the bedrock above our first gorge pool, and now, in retrospect, I believe it to be evidence of when the North Fork was turned right out of its bed, into a wooden flume, a common strategy in the early days of gold mining, in the 1850s. We found a gap in the cliffs which allowed us to continue downstream; I believe this gap is where the flume once led. The actual point of diversion would have been a quarter-mile upstream, near the cabin, say.

It strikes some geologists oddly that glacial outwash sediments could be gold-bearing; but it is not widely realized that the "bars" of the 49ers are exactly such glacial outwash terraces. As Ron and Catherine proceeded slowly down the narrow canyon, often within the still-narrower inner gorges, I saw that almost all vestiges of outwash had been eroded away. However, wherever a patch of outwash clung to the canyon wall, there were signs it had been mined.

The sky was blue, the sun was hot, the water was clear and cool. We entered a gorge which showed every sign of forcing us to swim, but found our way on foot almost entirely through, before a long and deep pool barred further progress. We stopped and repacked our packs, and changed into river shoes of various types, before entering the pool. But, it transpired that we didn't really need to swim. We could merely wade, holding our packs up, and we needn't have bothered with all our special dry-bags and plastic bags.

Briefly, we were in an incredibly beautiful gorge, walled by vertical cliffs, and we could more or less just saunter along, hop from boulder to boulder, do some mild wading, ford the river from one side to another, and at the bottom line, it was easy going.

We found two old miners' camps strewn with garbage. Here and there along this gorgeous gorge, it could be that a miniscule flat above the river, with a spring, and a grove of alders, would make for a nice camp-site. But, once a little below Mumford Bar, though we crossed many a gravel bar, many a bed of sand or fine gravel, we saw not one single human footprint, not one sign that anyone had been along the river this summer.

Bizarre! I'm not complaining, I don't visit the North Fork for the crowds.

We chased ouzels slowly downstream, and wondered about the shy, the mysterious, Purple-Pooping Bird of Paradise, which is only to say that, in many places, the rocks were splashed by ... purple bird poop. There were ripening blackberries in the area.

About a mile, a mile and a half, below Mumford Bar, massive quartz veins laced the cliffs, and some rather large boulders had broken away, exactly along the vein itself. While clambering over these jumbled, quartz-encrusted boulders, we found incredible masses of quartz crystals, some inches in diameter, studding the surfaces.

We did not pause very long to examine these crystals. In one place, a wonderful Crystal Cave was formed by two such boulders leaning together; one could actually enter, and be surrounded by quartz crystals. Clearly, many of the larger, nicer crystals had been broken off in years, or maybe centuries, past. We left them untouched, which is only as we should all do. "Leave No Trace" means, among other things, don't drag arrowheads and quartz crystals and old bits of ornamental iron from the Gold Rush home with you. Leave them there for future generations to ponder and puzzle over.

Take photographs, but leave the crystals alone.

Before we knew it we had made two of our three miles down the river. The sun was still high. So we stopped and swam in this pool, stopped and swam in that pool, we found patches of shade and just lazed around. One of the principal spur ridges dropping from Sawtooth Ridge down to Italian Bar was silhouetted against the western sky. We were close. Finally we continued on our wandering, boulder-hopping, river-fording way, turned around the spur ridge, and saw the dark mouth of a tunnel driven into the slate. We had reached Italian Bar.

It only remained to switch back from river shoes to hiking boots, and then to climb up and up and up and up through the woods, 2700' or thereabouts, to Ron's truck. It seemed to take forever. I had my loppers and many a small Douglas Fir fell to my wrath. However, since there are no fewer than a thousand (or is it five thousand? ten thousand?) small Douglas Fir which should be cut from near the trail, and I only accounted for a hundred, it hardly looks as though I did anything at all. Still, the sweat literally poured into my eyes as I combined the trudge up a viciously steep trail, with heavy lopping. Eventually I had to give it up, and save my energy for the climb alone.

We reached the truck just at sunset, after a long day in the great canyon, after discovering the Crystal Cave, after scaring any number of trout and water ouzels, after swimming the clear cool pools, after jumping and diving from the rocks. We were pretty beat up, sunburned, bruised, scratched, soaked with sweat. It was all more than worth it.

Salamandrine Orchids

2007-07-08T11:52:00.000-07:00

[written July 8, 2007]

The orchidaceous and salamandrine Onion Valley area of the North Fork of the North Fork of the American River (the NFNFAR) has been heavily glaciated, several to many times, in the last few millions of years. Paradoxically, bold bedrock outcrops are uncommon; far more likely one will see glacial till, which covers 95% of the bedrock, and which often contains a myriad of granite boulders, dragged south across the Yuba-American Divide from sources in the upper South Yuba basin.

Commonly, the glacial till supports a rich coniferous forest.

Drive south about six miles through such till, from Emigrant Gap, on I-80, to reach Onion Valley, which straddles the divide between the NFNFAR and the East Fork of the NFNFAR. Here began Tahoe National Forest's Monumental Creek Trail, which climbed away north to Mears Meadow. This trail was abandoned, in stages, and is no longer passable. Also at Onion Valley, one finds Bradley & Gardner's Placer County Canal, which can be followed east into Monumental Canyon and the East Fork, or followed west into the NFNFAR, and beyond; once it could be followed right to Dutch Flat and Gold Run.

To the south and east, the Shoo Fly Complex of varied metasedimentary formations forms the bedrock; to the north, the Emigrant Gap Mafic Complex (of igneous intrusive rocks); to the northwest, one of the younger plutons of granodiorite. This pluton underlies a few miles of the uppermost NFNFAR, and at least a few of the infinitude of granite boulders embedded in the till around Onion Valley, must derive from this pluton.

Hiding beneath the glacial till, near Onion Valley, is the contact between rocks of the Emigrant Gap Mafic Complex, and rocks of the Shoo Fly Complex. Now, the Shoo Fly is often strongly layered, being sedimentary, and parts of the Mafic Complex are strongly foliated. Even though both igneous, and intrusive, these mafic rocks can mimic sedimentary rocks, with their many parallel slabs, their folia, their "leaves." Forest Road 45, near Onion Valley, cuts a dike of very light-colored, fine-textured igneous rock, so foliated one could easily mistake it for some kind of sedimentary deposit. This type of dike may be derived from the Mafic Complex, although it itself is not mafic; quite a number of similar dikes cut the country rock to the northeast, along Monumental Ridge, just east of the Mafic Complex.

Directly up-ice from Onion Valley and the related, pater-noster meadows which extend away north, is a resistant mass of the Mafic Complex. This resistant mass forms a cliffy wall, mostly hidden from easy view, in the forest, and associated with this gabbro, say, or peridotite, possibly, is a mass of dunite, another mafic intrusive. Dunite weathers to a light brown, or even orange, and remarkable examples of these rocks are found to the north, above Lake Valley Reservoir, on the slopes of Black Mountain. (Black Mountain gets its name from the dark, heavy, iron- and magnesium-rich rocks of the Mafic Complex.)

The cliffs have shed a rough talus of dunite boulders, then, within the last twelve thousand years. These boulders flank the upper meadow, above Onion Valley to the north.

To me it seems that the "resistant mass of the Mafic Complex," which includes some dunite, caused the ice to ride high, only then to plunge down, gouging out the basins of the wet meadows, and finally damming them with terminal moraines, when the ice at long last melted.

In those wet meadows a wealth of wildflowers is in bloom. Masses of tall Leopard Lilies dangle their large orange flowers, spotted petals curved back upon themselves, the six anthers hanging below: this is a favorite of the Swallowtail butterfly. Bigelow's Sneezeweed is a concoction of almost supreme geometry, the disk flowers arranged in systems of opposed spirals inscribed upon a sphere: a sort of daisy, with a tiny charmed temple set at its center. Blue-eyed Grass dots the thick turf of the glacial meadows. Milkweed breaks into insect-luring bloom. Some species of orchid, maybe Ladies Tresses, haunts the wet meadows, with tiny beaked flowers, mainly white in color, spiraling tightly along a thin, straight stalk, up to eighteen inches tall. One such orchid has easily a hundred flowers. In places, dozens of these delicate orchid-stalks glowed in the shade, little ghost-wands of white rising above the greensward.

Hence the meadows, and the woods which embrace the meadows, are orchidaceous. How much more so, when we recall the many Rattlesnake Orchids which prosper in those very woods. Yes, the area is certainly orchidaceous.

It remains to show that the area is salamandrine, a word I coined, heh heh, which means "bearing salamanders," or "[land] of salamanders." Or possibly, "[partaking] of salamanders."

Salamandrine is better than salamanderiferous. Note: one should never literally "partake of salamanders," for they are poisonous.

Recently my son and I explored some of Sailor Ravine, west of Onion Valley, and below the line of the Bradley & Gardner Canal. We parked along Forest Road 19, south of Emigrant Gap. Sailor Ravine is a tributary of Fulda Creek, Fulda being one of the principal tributaries of the NFNFAR. Each had a glacier flowing down it, thirteen thousand years ago. In fact, the glaciers coalesced into a single ice sheet above the dividing ridges. Howsoever ... scouting for the "Trail to Monumental Camp" depicted on one of my old maps, we descended Sailor Ravine to where it plunges into Fulda in a series of waterfalls and cascades, dropping hundreds of feet.

There was bedrock exposed, along the creek, above the top of these falls, for a distance of a quarter-mile or so north, into the deep woods; Shoo Fly Complex metasediments tilted up on edge, the stream flowing across the main strike of the strata. In the cool shade of the tall trees, my son and I followed this gentle little stream, and counted 180 Sierra Newts in that quarter-mile of bedrock. Then, leaving the great sunny hollow of Fulda Canyon still farther to our south, and striking ever deeper into the deep woods, the bedrock was buried in till, and we saw no more salamanders.

The one hundred and eighty newts we did see were still in the "keeled tail" form, of the mating season, which should have ended by now, but there they were, five in this pool and ten in that, with bedrock, some kind of meta-sandstone, always exposed nearby, if not flooring the pool. Six inches long, dark brown, with orange and yellow bellies, bulbous eyes, an underwater lizard as it were, but as often or more often, terrestrial in its habit. Their scientific name is Taricha torosa spp. sierrae. Roughly translated, this means "the rough-skinned, dried mummy, of the Sierra."

If we had not climbed, but had descended Sailor Ravine, to Fulda, and then followed Fulda down to the NFNFAR, well, it would have been pretty much bedrock the whole way down, and that can only mean, certainly, an abundance of rough-skinned mummies, I mean, salamanders, the whole way down. The count would rise into the thousands.

Any land which contains thousands of salamanders is "salamander-bearing." The Onion Valley area contains thousands of salamanders. Hence, it is "salamandrine," which was to be proved.

The Pileated Goshawk

2007-06-25T11:53:00.000-07:00

[written June 25, 2007]

The "pileus" or liberty cap was the especial badge of emancipation, worn by freed slaves in ancient Rome. It was a floppy affair, somewhat like a broad short sock.

Hence when the cloud-column of a thunderstorm grows high enough, and it is spread out to one side by prevailing winds, this horizontal mass of cloud on top is called the pileus; and the largest of our local woodpeckers, with its distinctive head-crest, is called the Pileated Woodpecker.

The Pileated Woodpecker is a denizen of the deep woods, and chops large and somewhat rectangular holes in the trunks of dead trees, searching out grubs. Their chopping can be heard from a long distance, and if one sees a Pileated in action, well, the chips fly amazingly far and wide. It is a regular brute of a woodpecker.

Renewing our exploration of Elisha L. Bradley's and Melvin S. Gardner's "Placer County Canal," Catherine O'Riley and I paced slowly along the broad berm of the gargantuan mining ditch, through a second-growth forest of Ponderosa Pine, Sugar Pine, Incense Cedar, Douglas Fir, and White Fir, four hundred feet above the waterfalls and cascades of the North Fork of the North Fork of the American River (the NFNFAR). The shadowed forest was full of tall trees; many might mistake such a forest for first-growth. The Canal follows a nearly level course just above 4800 feet in elevation.

We were scratched and bleeding, having just and at long long last escaped the brushy clutches of a Tahoe National Forest clear-cut in Section 18, T16N R12E. For half a mile we had inched through an ocean of sun-scalded Ceanothus. The clearcut looked to be somewhat more than twenty years old; a fine old second-growth forest had been ripped out down to the last twig, and planted to Ponderosa Pine. The young trees were reaching twenty feet in height, but everywhere, from side to side and from stem to stern, there was brush.

The huge gap in the forest did offer views; we could see the canyon of the NFNFAR below us, Scott Hill, on the other side, Sawtooth Ridge, and portions of the Foresthill Divide all the way across the main North Fork of the American, to the south and east. However, since we literally could not see the ground we were walking on, through the densely-woven brush, we had to pay close attention to almost every perilous step, and didn't much enjoy the views.

At last, we regained the shelter of the deep woods, at last we could stride again along the historic Canal, used as a trail for so many decades, until Ronal Reagan became President and the word went down through the Department of Agriculture, to the Forest Service, and finally to Tahoe National Forest, that if you've seen one tree, you've seen them all, so, cut and cut and cut and cut and cut.

During our walk we had talked about the odd fact, that when the General Public drives south on (paved) Forest Road 19, from Highway 80 at Emigrant Gap, they can drive mile after mile, and explore side road after side road, and they will never, ever, see a sign marking a hiking trail.

Well. There is an exception, but this exception proves the rule. If the General Public, driving in this manner, exploring the side roads, happens to reach a certain fork on Sawtooth Ridge, where a sign was shotgunned into oblivion twenty years ago; and if the General Public turns left, and the General Public drives another half-mile, a second shotgunned sign, unreadable, will appear, just where a road left is gated and locked.

This is the historic trail to the North Fork American at Mumford Bar, by way of Government Springs. If one walks down the gated road for another half-mile, one reaches the trail. It was obliterated by logging a decade ago, up there on top, but volunteers have restored its line.

So. That's the exception which proves the rule: the one hiking trail which actually has signs, although they are illegible, and have been illegible, for twenty years.

Well, a reasonable person might wonder, so what? There are no National Forest hiking trails in that area; ergo, no signs.

Wrong!

In the immediate vicinity of Forest Road 19 and its principal fork, Sawtooth Ridge Road, we have these Tahoe National Forest "system" trails, as depicted on old TNF maps:

1. China Trail.
2. Burnett Canyon Trail.
3. Italian Bar Trail.
4. Humbug Canyon Trail.
5. Sawtooth Ridge Trail.
6. Rawhide Mine Trail.
7. Blackhawk Mine Trail.
8. Monumental Creek Trail.
10. Mears Meadow Trail.
11. Big Valley Trail.
12. Government Springs Trail.

Except for #12, all of these trails have either been abandoned outright, or ruined by logging (the more severe method of abandonment).

The Bradley & Gardner does not show as a System Trail on the old maps, but was much used as a trail, from before 1859, down to about 1980.

Then Reagan took office.

So. Catherine and I think it is beyond strange that this lovely area, so accessible from Highway 80, in a part of the Sierra where one might well think that Tahoe National Forest would favor recreation over timber harvests, with the historic trails carefully and lovingly maintained--in this lovely area, instead, the good old trails are abandoned, ruined, and TNF employees are, even as I write this, working hard to plan extensive new harvest activities.

Well, we walked in the cool shade to the giant trees, and we spoke about how the World is Going to Hell in a Handbasket, and suddenly a rhythmic high-pitched squawking rang out, and I saw a ghostly shape flit through the branches, a hundred feet above the ground, in the forest below.

"A Pileated Woodpecker, Catherine," I called out, as the bird continued its complaint, and moved a little down the slope toward the river.

She caught me up and we gazed into the woods below. To my surprise, the Pileated began working back up the hill towards us, and continued its high-pitched yipping. I got my camera ready, and made a little fun, calling it to me, as though calling a dog, "Here, boy, here pilly-pilly-pilly-pilly, here boy," etc. etc.

"It's a large bird," Catherine observed, and I explained, for only an instant The Professor, that the Pileated was the King of Woodpeckers.

The big and kingly bird continued its yipping, and moved higher yet, closer yet. Apparently, it had responded positively to my calling; apparently, it liked us; it clearly wanted to be near us, for it was almost all the way up to the berm, only a few yards away.

Then I realized to my instant horror that that yipping bird was not the King of Woodpeckers, it was not my friend, it did not like me, and that it emphatically did not respond positively to my dog-calling antics.

It was a Goshawk, and we were in a bit of danger so long as we stayed around. We had strayed into its nesting territory, and it was patiently and persistently warning us away. But a Goshawk only has so much patience. Then it attacks. It slashes, it rips, it tears, it claws and it bites. Usually, humans survive that attack. They may have to wear dark veils, over their disfigured faces, for the rest of their lives, but they survive.

So, we hurried away, along the berm, and after a time and over a distance, the angry yipping subsided.

We had begun the day's exploration at high noon, dropping off FR 19 where it crosses the ridge dividing Fulda Creek to the west, from Sailor Ravine to the east. A logging road led down the crest on a gentle grade, and we had some trouble finding the Canal, as the abundance of sunlight along the road had led to a continuous thicket of brush and small trees to either side. We eventually spotted it above us, making the turn into Fulda Canyon, and we look forward to another exploration of that segment of the Canal.

Breaking through the road-thicket, we started walking up the Canal, towards its crossing of Sailor Ravine, and were immediately within shady deep woods of tall trees. Misadventure struck at once, Catherine taking a tumble over a fallen tree, and scratching herself rather royally, so that it looked as though she had been attacked by a bear. There followed some stomach-turning minor surgery, to remove a half-inch splinter buried in her thigh. Then we ambled along the Canal, crossing Sailor Ravine, and passing various short and collapsed wooden flume sections, where nailed timbers and planks have somehow survived intact to this day, from a century ago. Then the Canal turned around Sailor Spur, dividing the Sailor-Fulda basin from the NFNFAR, and we entered Section 18, and the grasping, scratching, sunny ocean of Ceanothus.

Slowly slowly we fought through it. Then again the deep woods, the afternoon light slanting down in gilded shafts, following the very pronounced bear trails along the Canal, with their distinctive permanent footprints (since bears are wont to step again and again and again and again in same exact spot), and then of course we battled the dread Pileated Goshawk, and then, after nearly another mile of deep woods, Forest Road 19 appeared, which we followed back to the car.

The Placer County Canal is a fine old trail. Scarcely twenty years ago, Tahoe National Forest went hog wild and ruined the Canal in at least two areas near Forest Road 19: Area One, a clearcut on the steeps above Monumental Creek, had turned the Canal into a logging road for at least a mile; Area Two, a clearcut in Section 18, had left the Canal mainly intact, but so buried in brush that a hiker has to be more than half-crazy to even try to follow it. To actually succeed in following the wonderful old mining ditch through that clearcut ocean of brush is an exercise in pain and suffering which does not merely border upon dementia, but enters fully into dementia with verve and enthusiasm, steeped and dyed in every shade of irrationality, possessed by every nuance of cross-grained refusal to face Reality.

Catherine and I succeeded--permanently scarred, yes--but we succeeded. The Section 18 clearcut is by far the worst impediment to restoring this notable emblem of Placer County history to what it always was: a level path through the deep woods. Were a path opened through that interwoven tangle of brush in Section 18, one could walk from the East Fork to the Sailor-Fulda Divide, something like five miles, on what I can only describe as one of the finest trails we have in Tahoe National Forest, Bradley & Gardner's Placer County Canal. Along the way, one would see many huge old stone walls, and enjoy some really great forest, and cross several rivers and streams, including the East Fork of the NFNFAR (Azalea Canyon), Monumental Canyon, Onion Valley Creek, the NFNFAR, and Sailor Ravine.

And from there, why not to Fulda? A level trail from Fulda to Azalea Canyon would be quite a nice thing.

Cyclopean Walls

2007-06-21T11:53:00.000-07:00

[written June 21, 2007]

With the discovery of a second boiler in the East Fork of the North Fork of the North Fork of the American River, or Azalea Canyon, and this second boiler near, if not next to, lengths of narrow-gauge rail and one lone train wheel, it seemed that the Mystery of the Missing Machine--no, that's not it--The Legend of the Lost Locomotive, might finally be confirmed. Or solved.

But no.

Nothing is confirmed. Nothing is solved. I sent Kyle Wyatt, curator of technology at the California Railroad Museum, photos of each boiler, and awaited his remarks.

He kindly remarked that the boilers did not look like locomotive boilers. So I am left wondering about the Lost Locomotive. There are so many versions of the Legend. One version has scrap metal men cutting a locomotive to pieces back by Onion Valley, in 1941, and hauling the pieces down to the scrap yard in Sacramento. Another version tells that a logging helicopter was seen flying away toward Blue Canyon from the Texas Hill area, a locomotive dangling below.

So far all that can be said with certainty is that there are several boilers left in that general area. Perhaps they were used as stationary engines, powering sawmills, or hoisting logs up inclines.

Today I visited the area with Catherine O'Riley and we walked down Bradley & Gardner's Placer County Canal from a point above the North Fork Campground, to its crossing of the North Fork of the North Fork American, where there are some truly epic stone walls, and some cute little swimming holes which last would appear to be a popular secret, as a beaten path leads rather directly to the deep pools in their bowls of stone. The path follows the Bradley & Gardner itself, from a camping area north of the river.

Continuing along the Canal, we found an old house site, a stone-walled cellar with the remains of a cast iron wood stove scattered nearby, which site could well be "Bradley's Ranch," as depicted on the oldest General Land Office map of that area (ca. 1870). A meadowy flat is just above the Ranch, where stock might have grazed. Bradley's Ranch might, or might not, be synonymous with the "Upper Ditch Camp" mentioned by I.T. Coffin in his Diary (1863; 1870-1903).

Eventually, we reached paved Forest Road 19, and followed it back across the river to our point of beginning. A nice loop, of a mile or so. The stone walls at the river are Cyclopean. Amazing. And we found a chunk of old concrete at the dam site, quite similar to the concrete we found from the similar dam on Monumental Creek, a couple of weeks ago.

Earlier in the day I had located the historic Monumental Canyon Trail again, where it intersects Forest Road 45-2, and I found an old Forest Service "small i" blaze on a tree beside the trail. The trail shows every sign of being a circa-1890 narrow-gauge logging railroad grade, which was later pressed into use as a trail.

It looked as though this Monumental Canyon Trail first intersected, and then coincided with FR 45-2, but there were faint indications that it split away immediately. I myself dropped down from that point on FR 45-2 to the Bradley & Gardner, and followed it down to FR 45, thence around Onion Valley to a point above the North Fork Campground. Along the way, as I neared the meadow at Onion Valley, there approached alongside what could only be the very same old railroad grade which had become the Monumental Canyon Trail, and this Monumental Grade actually crossed the Bradley & Gardner, aiming for the Meadow! Although I found no blazes, in a cursory inspection of trees nearby, I am convinced that the true "beginning" of the historic Monumental Canyon Trail is at Onion Valley Meadow itself.

So, the long-abandoned and much-ruined Monumental Canyon Trail is coming into focus, very gradually. Don't ask me how Tahoe National Forest could just abandon this historic trail; I don't know.

It could be restored for foot use. The Bradley & Gardner also served as a foot trail, for many decades, but the destructive logging of recent times has deterred hikers, and it now becomes overgrown. But it, too, could be restored for foot use. It would make quite a wonderful trail, from its source on the East Fork, in Azalea Canyon, to its westernmost feasible point, which might be Sailor Ravine, or it might be beyond Fulda. It would be especially nice to open it up all the way down to Blue Canyon, and beyond. Near China Ranch, west of Blue Canyon, the Bradley & Gardner was, in later years, led through a tunnel and across Canyon Creek, thence down the ridge to Alta, Dutch Flat, and Gold Run. That is, there was an earlier and a later alignment, between China Ranch and Alta.

I much of a mind that Tahoe National Forest needs to treat this over-logged area with kid gloves, needs to define at the least "recreation corridors" along the rivers and streams, and along all the old ditches and railroad grades, etc. I want to restore the wild and scenic and recreational fabric of that area, not injure it further. The TNF "thinning" projects can cause a lot of ground disturbance and leave hundreds of stumps, giving one the idea one is on some kind of tree farm, and there is a lot of value back in those woods and in those canyons, besides timber.

Below, please find the 1859 newspaper article from Auburn's "Placer Herald" newspaper, quoting from a Sacramento Union article, which last describes the Canal Celebration in Dutch Flat when the long-awaited water of the Canal finally arrived. Enjoy.

*******
[October 15, 1859]
Placer County Canal Celebration

We copy from the Sacramento Union the proceedings of the Canal Celebration at Dutch Flat, on Tuesday. We acknowledge the kind invitation to be present on the occasion, but the unusual change in the affairs of our town [a major fire] in the early part of the week, prevented. Our wishes unite with those of the people of the Dutch Flat Divide in confidently anticipating manifold benefits from the large supply of water they will soon obtain for their mines.

We learn that the Canal is entirely finished, and the water turned in, but it will not reach Dutch Flat for several days, as it requires time to puddle the ditch well. The miners are preparing for the water, and will soon be tearing down the banks with their hydraulic pipes. Hurrah! The good time has almost come!

[Reported for the Sacramento Union.]
The residents of Dutch Flat, and vicinity, met on the morning of October 11th for the purpose of evincing their gratification at the completion of the above very important work, and at the same time tendering a complimentary dinner to E.L. Bradley & Co., the enterprising proprietors. As early as ten o’clock the town began to wear a holiday aspect, and the animated groups of miners, with a sprinkling of crinoline on the balconies, a company of small boys decorated with ribbons drawing the hose carriage adorned with evergreens, flags, and a bell or two, this with the nearly incessant roar of artillery on the anvil principle, with an occasional selection from La Fille du Regiment by the Dutch Flat Brass Band, constituted a very lively and pleasing contrast to the silent ravines, tunnels, rivers and cañons from which the miners had gathered themselves. About the hour of noon the scattered groups formed opposite the Blue Cut Hotel, and, with the “Star Spangled Banner,” in the hands of a stalwart standard-bearer, followed by the Band and the various mining companies with their banners, marched through the town, and by a slght circuit reached a platform and seats in the rear of town erected for the occasion.

Amongst the banners of the numerous mining companies we noticed the following: the Yankee Company—motto, “Take courage, there’s a good time coming.” The Badger Company: “What works long, works well at the last.” The Franklin Company: “Strike, while the iron is hot.” The American Company: “Long may the American River run. Ho! Every one that thirsteth come and drink.” The St. Nicholas Company, with emblem of a beehive: “By industry we thrive.” The Ohio Company, emblem of a shaft and windlass: “First be sure you are right and then go ahead.” The Buckeye Company, emblem a large stag. The Hog-eye Company, emblem a hog: “Root (the emblem) or die.” Also, the Dutch Flat Eureka Company, Boston Company, the Blue Cut Company—motto, “The Old Pioneer,” the Phœnix, and a number of others, whose names, in the long line, we could not catch. On reaching the aforesaid platform, after music by the Band, the meeting was called to order by J.W. Johnston, as the Marshal of the day, and the Orator, Judge Slade, was introduced by the President, H. Davis.
Judge Slade, in a short and eloquent retrospect of the past history of the world, showed the meeting that celebrations of a similar character, on the completion of works of art or utility, were of frequent occurrence in both ancient and modern times, and then passed on to consider the impetus to mining given, in the present age of the world, was secured, in our earlier mining days, through privations, toils, and the aid of the primitive rocker dug from the trunk of a tree; and now, by means of the same stout arms and hearts, but with increased facilities, there followed water on the mountain tops, sluices, comfortable homes, the solace of lovely woman’s society, and the various improved modes of mining introduced by the intelligent miners themselves. He showed, in conclusion, the identity of interests of the various proprietors of mining claims, property holders, storekeepers, and ditch owners, winding up with a most eloquent eulogy (frequently interrupted with applause) on E.L. Bradley & Co., the projectors and indomitable proprietors of the Placer County Canal.

After prolonged cheering, Mr. Bradley was called to the stand, and thanked the meeting for the cordial feeling manifested in the entire demonstration. Colonel Felloes was then called upon, and in a few well chosen sentences, declined making a speech, as dinner was waiting. Captain Pollard followed suit, when the meeting moved to the dinner tables and did ample justice to a capital dinner, provided by Charles Seffens. On the removal of the cloth the following toasts were given by the President and drank with enthusiasm:
The Placer County Canal—We celebrate its completion as a consummation of our most devout wishes, and long deferred hopes of the people of Dutch Flat. May our citizens generally realize their most sanguine anticipations, and be borne onward by its limpid waters to wealth and happiness. Music—Quickstep.
E.L. Bradley & Co.—Our friends and neighbors, to whose enterprise and energy we are indebted for the subject of our present rejoicings and high hopes for the future. May their efforts to advance our combined interests be duly appreciated and prove amply remunerative. Music, “See The Conquering Hero Come.”
The State of California—Our home. May it ever be a sweet home to her people, the “home of the free and the land of the brave,” may the wisest and the best ever control her destinies, and may her progress be onward and upward in all that tends to elevate a State and her people. Music, “Sweet Home.”
The Union of the States—May it forever be preserved, and we here resolve that it must and shall be. Music, “Hail Columbia.”
The Flag of our Union—May the lovers of freedom from every clime and latitude find a home and protection under our ample banner, and the breath of disunion never ruffle its graceful folds. Music, “The Star Spangled Banner.”
The Fair Sex, God Bless Them—Man’s most influential and best friend; beautiful in person, amiable in manners and industrious in habits; whether mothers, wives, sisters or daughters, their claims to our love and protection will ever be our first and last duty. Music, Polka.
The meeting then formed in line, and, preceded by the Band (who gave their services free, and added greatly to the enjoyment by playing well and willingly), returned to town and separated, apparently in the most pleasant frame of mind imaginable.
The whole concluded with a Ball, at which enjoyment seemed to be the order of the night.
*******

More and More Lost Locomotives

2007-06-14T11:54:00.000-07:00

[written June 14, 2007]

Wednesday morning Ron Gould and I drove up to Emigrant Gap on I-80, and then in on Forest Road 19 to Onion Valley (a lush wet glacial meadow just below the 4800' contour), hung a left on Forest Road 45, and very soon went right on 45-2. Our objective was the old Bradley & Gardner Ditch, or Placer County Canal. Following it in and out of Monumental Canyon we would reach the East Fork, and in another mile, the "take," where a small dam once diverted the East Fork into the Canal.

There we would find the old riveted steam engine boiler, twenty feet long and four feet in diameter. I had conjectured that this might be the source of the "Legend of the Lost Locomotive," the abandoned narrow-gauge logging engine supposedly hidden away in that remote, many-ravined East Fork Country.

The East Fork of the North Fork of the North Fork of the American River might better be named Azalea Canyon, for the Western Azalea, a species of rhododendron, is in full bloom along the banks of the creek, the large and graceful white flowers sweetly scenting the air. This shrub seems especially common there.

We parked at the end of Road 45-2 and began our hike.

All went as planned and Ron much admired the admirable old rock walls along the Canal, and the fine view of the Monuments, below, on Monumental Creek.

We reached the "take," and the putative Lost Locomotive. Ron has a keen eye. I had examined every exposed surface for some kind of maker's mark, but I found nothing. Ron immediately saw some tiny letters on two of the riveted iron plates forming the giant cylinder; one set of letters was legible, and read "CH#1," the other, longer set of letters seemed to spell "LOCHAIR" but was very faint, and may have had one letter preceding the "L."

Later, from the internet, Ron learned that "CH#1" means "charcoal hammered number one grade." This was a specialty rolled iron used for boilers.

We paused for lunch at the Lost Locomotive (which may well have been some kind of stationary steam engine, and in any case has no running gear or cab), and discussed its position, really right down in the bed of the Azalea Canyon, inches from the water. On the one hand, it might have rolled down the canyon wall: there was some denting to the cylinder. On the other hand, it might have been carried down Azalea Canyon from somewhere above, in a flood event, such as occurred in January of 1997. There are scratches running lengthwise on the cylinder.

Ron felt that, had the tons of metal been carried down the river, it would show more and deeper scratches. I on the other hand, who started by insisting it must have rolled down from some point above, now began to think that it must have been washed down Azalea Canyon to its current position.

We found a number of pieces of strap iron in and around the creek, which seemed to have nothing to do with our lonely Lost Locomotive, and I speculated that they may have been used to tie together the logs of the vanished diversion dam.

I was wrong, however, as will soon be made clear.

After lunch, we climbed to a century-old narrow-gauge logging railroad grade less than a hundred feet above the Bradley & Gardner, and followed it up the canyon, through occasional patches of thick brush. This old railroad grade bade fair to continue up Azalea Canyon for miles. However, in half a mile it turned into a side canyon and seemed to end altogether.

We could see a strange area of raw dirt across Azalea Canyon, and in the course of scouting the forested slopes in our ravine for any sign of our railroad grade's continuation, we drew nearer, and saw that near the area of raw dirt, some cliffs feel steeply to the river. So we made our way back to the river's edge, and saw immediately that a road descended to the river from the Texas Hill side, ending in a huge turn-around and log deck. A very high bank had been left by the big bench cut. So, there was our raw dirt.

Immediately upstream were the cliffs, and we entered a fascinating little gorge within Azalea Canyon, Shoo Fly Complex metasediments carved into pools and rapids. Smooth and rounded rocks along the stream gave way to ragged cliffs of slate rising hundreds of feet above. It was easy going, with the water so low, to ascend the gorge, and shortly we entered a more typical part of the canyon, with White Alders along the banks, and many boulders of glacial outwash and glacial till in the stream.

We rested. The day was quite warm and the shade was welcome. Looking at our maps, we saw that a certain road descended to the river from the north, only a little ways upstream. Ron began wandering up the creek, and soon a shout brought me scampering along after him. He stood triumphantly over a train wheel, which must have weighed hundreds of pounds, lying beside the creek on a bedrock outcrop. Now we must be within an ace of the road-from-the-north, so we forged on up the stream, finding more strap iron, and then, some narrow-gauge railroad track, and then ...

And then we reached the road-from-the-north, which I saw at once was a century-old railroad grade, unusually steep, but Ron kept on finding new and more exciting bits and pieces of old railroad junk down below, and I rejoined him. A little flat at the base of the old road held a sign on a tree reading "Time Bandit Mining Claim." The miner had found many square nails and spikes and whatnot in the course of suction dredging the creek, and these were in a pile. We saw large pieces of old iron equipment scattered beside the creek nearby, and another old railroad grade seemed to climb steeply away on the Texas Hill side. I followed this up a couple hundred yards, where it became indistinct, but did seem to continue, and then struck directly back down to the stream, crossed, and found myself in a vast springy area with an acre of Lady Ferns putting on new growth in the sunshine. I found a squishy path through the ferns and entered the forest above, immediately striking another old railroad grade, which I followed up the canyon a short distance, before it seemed to end.

Retreating, I began to see more old metal scattered in the woods, and soon found a cabin site, with pieces of an old cast-iron woodstove, and other oddities, scattered about. Ron joined me, and after looking at the antiquities, we saw a Forest Service sign advising that it was a historic site, and artifacts could not be taken.

Walking down the old railroad grade towards the flat with the mining claim sign, we saw some more old metal at the edge of the large springy area, much obscured by alder trees, and walking over, found a second boiler, like the first, about twenty feet long and four feet in diameter. This boiler had various appurtenances bolted on which were missing from the Bradley & Gardner boiler. Nearby were what appeared to be long sections of riveted light sheet iron smokestacks.

We interpreted this second boiler to be a stationary engine used at the base of a steep, tracked, "incline," although in retrospect I suppose it may have powered a sawmill. But we saw no sawdust pile, no artifacts which could only have derived from a mill.

Seeing all this antique logging gear, scarcely half a mile above the Bradley & Gardner boiler, led me to conclude that it had indeed been carried down the river in a flood event.

After exploring the area fairly thoroughly, we debated whether to follow the road-from-the-north up to where the top of the incline must have been, on the ridge dividing Azalea and Monumental canyons, but decided instead to follow back down the East Fork and look for the base of the Texas Hill Incline.

This historic incline connected the East Fork (Azalea Canyon) to the summit of Texas Hill, and thus to the Towle Brothers Lumber Company's "Burnett Canyon" mill, of the 1890s.

On our way back down Azalea Canyon, we saw more and more old strap iron, and soon enough found long pieces, some still nailed to wooden rails. This was a relatively primitive way of moving logs around; instead of laying "real" railroad track, which is expensive, one used wooden beams or logs for rails, and nailed strap iron on top. Then flat-cars, or log-cars, of some kind, could be rolled down these tracks, using oxen or even mules for motive force. It looks very much as if one of the primitive strap-iron railroads followed right down Azalea Canyon, sometimes directly beside the stream itself, sometimes fifty feet above it. We saw hundreds of feet of strap iron before we reached the Bradley & Gardner.

From the Canal, a few yards west of the "take," we followed an old railroad grade down to the stream, and immediately struck a continuation of the strap-iron railroad. As we followed downstream, crossing from side to side to take advantage of forested flat terraces of glacial outwash, so did the strap iron cross back and forth.

Eventually we reached the near vicinity of the Texas Hill Incline, but frustratingly, could not see it. Trees over a hundred feet high have grown up since then.

However, we did find a cable spool, which may be what was sometimes called a "gypsy head," associated with a stationary engine used for yarding logs, at about where we felt the base of the Incline must be.

Proceeding downstream, a much more substantial narrow-gauge railroad grade replaced our fragile strap-iron line, and this led to a crossing of Azalea Canyon exactly at the confluence of Monumental Creek. From there it was a short but not all that easy scramble back up to Road 45-2 and Ron's truck.

Before returning to the freeway and Civilization, we drove up Texas Hill Road past the spring of that name, and found the upper section of the Incline. However, we could not see all the way down into Azalea Canyon. The exact course of the Incline as it nears the stream will be found on some other trip.

Such was a very interesting day in the East Fork Country.

Monumental Explorations

2007-06-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

[written June 11, 2007]

The rock walls on the old Bradley & Gardner Ditch, above the Monuments, called me back. Catherine O'Riley and I had traced the line of this mining ditch only to its crossing of Monumental Creek. In recent days a patch of real weather broke upon us, with thunderstorms of sleet and rain. Wednesday afternoon being sunny, I dragged my teenage son, Greg, up to Emigrant Gap, and then six or seven miles in on Forest Road Nineteen. Our objective: the rock walls.

As we neared Emigrant Gap, a curtain of cloud blocked our view of the high country, and we could see sleet wafting down. We drove through that very sleet on The Nineteen, and, passing Onion Valley, hung a left on Forest Road Forty-Five, which climbs into the upper reaches of Monumental Canyon. The sleet turned to snow.

About a mile in, we parked and caught a view of Monumental Canyon, below. We were directly above the Bradley & Gardner "Canal Road," on the margins of a clearcut on steep slopes above the creek. The wet and heavy snow discouraged us from dropping down to the Canal and continuing across Monumental to the rock walls. So we enjoyed the warmth of the car and drove farther up The Forty-Five.

At a certain point, the USGS 7.5 minute topographic map (Blue Canyon quadrangle) shows the old Monumental Creek Trail (MCT) appearing out of nowhere, below The Forty-Five. We parked and walked through our minor blizzard on a gently descending side road, finally leaving the road and blundering down the side of Monumental Canyon in hopes of striking the trail.

We soon found a recent (less than thirty years) logging road, overgrown with brush and small trees, and saw, below it, another small road. Dropping to this smaller road, we saw that it looked quite old, as though it were an old narrow-gauge logging-railroad grade. Following it a little ways, we soon found some of the "small i" Forest Service blazes, and knew we were on the MCT. It was very brushy and we were already soaked. Greg had a crown of white snow on his red hair. We left the MCT and climbed back up to the gently-descending side road, following it east, imagining that soon it must cross the gently-rising MCT. We reached a hunters' camp in a grove of fir, with all manner of logging roads and skid trails in the immediate area, and as I scouted around, I found the MCT, with blazes on the older trees near it.

This was enough. We retreated to the warm car, drove another couple of miles up The Forty-Five, while the forest turned white with snow all around us, and then went back home.

Thursday dawned clear, and stayed clear, and in the early afternoon I suddenly decided to return to Monumental Canyon and visit the rock walls along the Bradley & Gardner. I had described finding the MCT to Ron Gould that morning; Ron and I had followed this trail from the top, on Black Mountain, down, into a grove of ancient Red Fir which had been logged by Sierra Pacific Industries, only a few years ago, and in the course of yarding big logs with bulldozers, they had utterly obliterated the MCT. We had found a few blazes, but the actual bed of the trail was gone. Now another piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. The position of the MCT where Greg and I had found it suggested that, farther west, this same railroad grade would be found between the Bradley & Gardner Ditch, below, and The Forty-Five, above.

Once again I drove to Emigrant Gap and followed The Nineteen to The Forty-Five, and parked about a mile in, near where Black Mountain Road forks away left. I dropped straight down the forested hillside, and sure enough, I found a little old narrow-gauge railroad grade. I saw no blazes. The area had been subjected to a thinning project similar to what is now proposed by Tahoe National Forest for large areas near Monumental Canyon and Texas Hill. The stumps of many small trees jutted from the forest floor, and the old railroad grade had been torn up a little here and there. No blazes, but this was a perfect match for the MCT. Dropping on down to the Canal Road, I followed it northeast into the clearcut, where the road climbs a few feet above the true line of the Canal. It looks as though Tahoe National Forest put their bulldozers on the Bradley & Gardner just for the purposes of this clearcut. I wish they had left the old canal alone. I wish they had not clearcut the steep slopes above the creek.

Did Tahoe National Forest know, when they bulldozed the Bradley & Gardner, when they bulldozed mile after mile of double-wide, freeway-style logging road in the area around the North Fork of the North Fork, and Onion Valley, and Monumental Canyon, that they were bulldozing the uniquely derived recreational territory of the town of Dutch Flat?

What I mean is, since the 1850s the people of Dutch Flat have hiked here, camped here, hunted and fished here. It is a matter of tradition. Begin with the 1850s: vast treasures awaited discovery at Dutch Flat, pending construction of a big ditch carrying lots of water, for hydraulic mining. The line was surveyed: it ran away up past Blue Canyon into the fabled canyons of the North Fork of the North Fork. There, miners lived in remote camps and cabins, receiving their supplies by mule train, from Dutch Flat. Work began on the ditch: it was called Gay's Big Ditch, after a man I take to be one Elkanar Gay. He built a sturdy fort on the sunny slopes above Blue Canyon, Gay's Fort, for which Fort Point on the Central Pacific Railroad was named, although the chances are about nil that any railroad historian knows that tiny fact.

Fort Point is quite close to Horse Cock Ravine, a name which has not survived on modern maps. A certain pillar of andesitic mudflow stood above the tracks, there. It is seen in some of the old railroad photographs.

So, yes, there was a "fort" along the line of Gay's Big Ditch, a fort probably made from thick logs. And ahead, to the east, lay the Complex of Canyons. The ditch would cross all of those canyons, finally reaching the East Fork itself. But the project failed, probably for lack of funds, and it remained for Elisha Bradley and Melvin Gardner, with their Chinese work force, to complete the Placer Canal, in 1859. Dutch Flat held a parade in celebration, with the individual mining companies carrying large banners inscribed with their names, their symbol and motto (if any), and exclamations of confidence and hope burning bright. Then came the speeches, and the tables groaning with food and drink, and then came the dance.

There were reservoirs, and remote ditch camps, and constant inspection and maintenance. This ditch was crucial to the future of Dutch Flat. Finally the mines could be well and truly opened.

But the summers burned hot and dull, then as now. The water in the ditch failed every summer, the mines shut down for their own cycles of maintenance and preparation for the next "season" of work, to begin some time in November, most likely. By then the first of the winter storms should have blanketed the high country in snow, and drenched the lower elevations in rain. But in the summer, and early fall, the people of Dutch Flat found ways to get to higher elevations. A wagon ride up the Old Emigrant Road brought one to Emigrant Gap, to Yuba Gap and popular Crystal Lake, but it also put one within reach of the East Fork.

Work on the Bradley & Gardner predated the Central Pacific's arrival (1866) by ten years or more. It is possible that Forest Road Nineteen actually dates back to the 1850s. The Nineteen stays high within the Complex of Canyons, where glacial till predominates and road-building is easier. The Canal hews to the 4800-foot contour in this country, having a slight grade down to the west, and can't choose to rise high or fall low to avoid a cliff or other obstacle, as a road can choose. This near-level path through the Complex of Canyons means making long turns in and out of each canyon. It makes for a poor trail, at least, for getting to Point B from Point A. For walking in the woods and canyons, it makes a truly great trail.

So, I would suggest that road access from Emigrant Gap may itself date from the 1850s, and in any case, preceded any significant logging in the area. Not until the Central Pacific arrived could the timber be brought to market. And way back in that East Fork country were the various mining camps, including Monumental Camp, and Texas Hill, and Burnett Canyon, and the folk from Dutch Flat would come up and camp and picnic and fish and hunt and hike. Here was the epochal mining ditch which fed the very mines. The Bradley & Gardner.

Both Bradley and Gardner became fabulously wealthy. Eventually they sold out to the Cedar Creek Company, of London. But that's another story.

Onion Valley may have been the site of Monumental Camp, from which a man named Gunnoldson would ski over to Texas Hill, to visit I.T. Coffin. They hiked and skied all the trails. The China Trail, the Sawtooth Trail, the Burnett Canyon Trail, and so on. Later they both moved to Dutch Flat itself. Decades later, about 1915 or 1925, cartoons were drawn of Dutch Flat men camping at Onion Valley, on a hunting trip. Buster Sharon and friends ... Buster Sharon, who had been one of the hard-hitting young men of Dutch Flat in the 1890s, who had killed a tall Swede with a single blow of his fist. The Swede worked as a logger for the Towle Brothers.

The Towle Brothers Lumber Company, of Dutch Flat, had extensive holdings up in the Texas Hill country, and established the Burnett Canyon Mill there, in the 1890s. They had sawed the lumber for the snowsheds of the Central Pacific Railroad, and had been paid, partly, in land. By 1890 they owned 19,000 acres and had thirty-eight miles of narrow-gauge railroad, not counting the temporary tracks which were quickly laid up this or that canyon to bring the logs out, and then as quickly dismantled.

Many Dutch Flat men worked for the Towles. The payroll was in the hundreds. Among these were the Chinese road crew, who laid in the railroad grades and set ties and tracks. There were about fifty in this crew alone.

Hence many Dutch Flat men who might otherwise never have visited Onion Valley and Texas Hill and the East Fork, came to know it through the Towle Brothers. And for many reasons, the gold mining, the construction of the Bradley & Gardner, the Towles, and the sheer magic and beauty of this land of tall trees and sparkling streams and waterfalls and lush meadows, over the decades a special connection arose between Dutch Flat and this East Fork Country.

But then came the bulldozer, and so many, many timber harvests, and so many, many miles of logging roads. The old trails, wrecked; the Bradley & Gardner, wrecked; the soulless calculations of the Forest Service, of how many cubic feet of wood, per acre per year, could be grown, calculations which returned that horrible and equally soulless solution, the clear-cut; and today very extensive "thinning" is proposed, much using ground-based equipment, and while trying to be a reasonable man, I can't help but feel that way more than enough damage has already been done in this area.

Well.

Regaining the line of the canal, I followed it up Monumental Creek to the crossing, skipped over the stream boulder-to-boulder, and soon I was sailing along atop the rock walls I had seen from a distance. Numerous small bits of blue flagging had been tied to small trees along the Canal, by Tahoe National Forest employees who were marking it for some reason. They litter the ground in places. Apparently this old ditch needs a lot of flagging.

Logging operations which seemed to be roughly contemporaneous with the clearcut, that is, roughly twenty-five years past, had come all the way down to the line of the Canal from the ridge above. Below the Canal were some huge Douglas Fir and Sugar Pine. This "ridge above" forms the divide between the East Fork of the North Fork of the North Fork (East Fork) and Monumental Creek. The ridge is made of Shoo Fly Complex metasediments in the usual near-vertical strata, like one sees in most of this area, and it seems as though a global westerly flow of the glacier in Monumental Canyon and the nearby East Fork had gone right over the tops of the Monuments, which inhabit a south-flowing section of Monumental Creek. Possibly glacial till had settled in deeply there, beneath the ice, and protected these precarious columns, these unusual rock towers which would have been instantly struck down if the main Monumental glacier had flowed south, along the present creek, rather than west, above it.

At any rate, the Monuments present a bit of a geological mystery. Despite the intense glaciation of this area, rock outcrops are not conspicuous; they exist, but far more commonly, the bedrock is blanketed with glacial till, which today supports the rich forests. This till contains numerous boulders of granite which were ripped from the South Yuba basin, somewhere "up-ice." For here, as in so many other areas, we see that South Yuba ice overflowed to the south, into the North Fork of the American basin.

I followed the Bradley & Gardner past the Monuments, gleaming in the midday sun, and into the East Fork proper.

I had reached this point twenty-five years ago, and found the brush very thick along the Canal, and so I did not follow it then. Today I was not going to be stopped. To my surprise, there was fairly easy going, through the thickets of Huckleberry Oak and Ceanothus and Manzanita, for bears had been using the Canal as a trail, as one often sees. There will often be a gap in the bushes one can sidle through, even though it can't be seen for all the leaves and branches. A closer examination reveals that many branches have been broken off by the bears, who perform their own version of trail maintenance. The bears also rip down small trees along their favorite paths, before they can mature into large trees which block the paths.

From the sunny point between Monumental Canyon and the East Fork, where the brush grew thick, I entered shady woods where I had easy going.

It was exciting to venture into unknown territory. I hoped I had seen the last of the logging, and would find the ancient ditch undisturbed the rest of the way to the "take," higher on the East Fork; but no. The logging of roughly twenty-five years ago had extended all the way down to the line of the Canal, and even below it, into the well-watered heavy timber along the creek, in alluvial terraces of glacial outwash sediments. However, this area must have been logged using helicopters, at least, it was not riven every which way by bulldozer skid trails, and the ditch itself was fairly intact, although often covered in logging slash.

Finally I left the logging behind. The Canal was very close to the East Fork, now; it was very close to the 4840' contour. I reached a bench cut in slaty bedrock directly above the creek, where some tall Douglas Fir had come crashing down along the line of the Canal itself, and--there was no more. I had reached the "take," where doubtless a log dam had been carefully fitted into the bedrock exposed on both sides of the creek, raising the water the ten feet needed to overflow into the ditch.

At just that point, a huge cylinder of riveted sheet iron lay in the creek. "Ah ha," thought I, "they used some hydraulic-mining penstock to convey the waters for the first twenty feet or so, from the dam." I clambered down through the wreckage of the fallen trees to the cylinder, and found it to be the boiler of a steam engine. It measured four feet in diameter, and twenty feet long, and was made from about quarter-inch-thick sheet iron. I could find no maker's mark.

Instantly I recalled the Legend of the Lost Locomotive. Many versions exist. The most common is that one of the Towle Brothers' narrow-gauge locomotives had fallen into a creek, somewhere in the East Fork country. No one knew where it was.

Some claimed that it had been lifted out of the area at long last, around 1990, by a logging helicopter. There are so many rumors, so many versions of the Legend of the Lost Locomotive. I remember one authority on local logging railroads assuring me that the lost locomotive dates from the 1920s, that it was in use by the Smart Lumber Company, of Dutch Flat, that a certain trestle had burned down, trapping it in the remote area, and eventually, it had tumbled into the creek.

Could this boiler be the legendary Lost Locomotive of the East Fork?

Perhaps. But it had not one speck of running gear. It was a boiler for a steam engine, plain and simple. It is slightly dented, as though it could have rolled down the side of the canyon. It must have rolled down; for it is far too heavy to have ever been floated by the East Fork, I should think.

I took some pictures. On the way out, I followed an old logging railroad grade I had spotted above the ditch, and ended up atop the dividing ridge, between Monumental and the East Fork, on more recent logging roads,but the brush became to bad, so I dropped back off the ridge to the Canal, and followed it back in and out of Monumental Canyon, until I could scramble up the steepish slope to my car.

Sunday I joined my sister, Karen, with her husband, Barry, and geologist Dave Lawler, for a return to the Bradley & Gardner, and the East Fork, and the putative Lost Locomotive. Dave and I had explored sections of the Bradley & Gardner further west, in the Complex of Canyons, some ten years ago, covering most of its course between Sailor Ravine and Lost Camp. So this was a return to an old subject of ours. Dave, Barry, and Karen much admired the ancient Canal, and the Monuments, and we found the Western Azalea bushes in full bloom, near the boiler, sweetly scenting the air. Some beautiful clouds, struggling to become thunderstorms, drifted overhead, and for a while a pair of hawks watched us, soaring in circles. I took the chance to explore more of the old logging railroad grade above the boiler. It clearly dates from about a hundred years ago, probably from the era of the Towle Brothers and the Burnett Canyon Mill and the Texas Hill Incline. It continues up the East Fork on a gently rising grade. I followed it for nearly half a mile, before brush closed in tight and stopped me. Soon I hope to follow it farther. On the way out, Barry and Karen and Dave and I saw that this same railroad grade had a spur dropping steeply to the East Fork.

Such have been some recent explorations in the good old East Fork Country.

The North Fork of the East Fork of the ...

2007-06-01T11:56:00.000-07:00

[written June 1, 2007]

I joined Catherine O'Riley for an unexpected hike into the wilds of Monumental Creek, or, as we jokingly named it, the North Fork of the East Fork of the North Fork of the North Fork of the American River. The NFEFNFNFAR, as it were.

It is actually called Monumental Creek.

We began by driving up I-80 to the Emigrant Gap exit, and navigating through what little remains of that hamlet to enter upon narrow, paved Forest Road Nineteen.

Since both the Bear and the Yuba rivers are tributaries to the Feather, Emigrant Gap is actually a "gap" or pass on the ridge dividing the American River from the Feather River. Here, in 1849, the trusty wagons which had endured over a thousand miles of plains and mountains and deserts were lowered by ropes into the verdant meadow of Bear Valley, thence to climb from the Bear to the crest of Lowell Hill Ridge, and trundle over hill and dale to the southwest, only a few days' travel, now, from Sutter's Fort and nascent Sacramento City.

When one adopts a long ridge, like the American/Feather Divide, for the purposes of travel, the gaps or passes often constrain the route. Hence at Emigrant Gap we find quite a series of routes converging upon that one point: a trans-Sierran Indian trail, the Donner Trail of 1846-49, the Dutch Flat Donner Lake Wagon Road of 1864, the Central Pacific Railroad of 1866, the Lincoln Highway of ca. 1915, Highway Forty, and now I-80; all these routes meet at Emigrant Gap.

By the 1890s Emigrant Gap had become a major shipping point for lumber. The primeval forests of giant pines were laid low. Much of this early logging was done using logging railroads, narrow-gauge lines carved into the various canyons so as to command the slopes above. The logs were, so often as possible, literally rolled down the hillsides, and on to waiting flat-cars, to be hauled to whichever sawmill.

Then there were the shake-splitters, who felled the giant Sugar Pines, sawed them into short lengths, and used the fro and the mallet to split their thousands of shakes, for roofs.

The early logging was followed by later logging and it never really stopped. Today, Tahoe National Forest's "American River Ranger District" is planning a major forest thinning project in the East Fork of the NFNFAR and Texas Hills area. I received a mailing from TNF notifying me of this "East Fork" project some time ago, and recently spoke with Karen Jones of TNF about what is planned. She told me that there will be a thinning of crowded stands of timber in that area, and that where the terrain permits, ground-based equipment will be used, but where the slopes are steep, helicopter yarding will bring out the thinned trees.

As always in such cases, I remarked upon the importance of protecting the historic trails and archeological sites of the area; I mentioned the Bradley & Gardner Ditch, or Placer County Canal, I mentioned Isaac Tibbetts Coffin, and his cabins at Texas Hill and in Burnett Canyon, and his tiny old mining ditch, and the Burnett Canyon Trail, and eventually Karen Jones lost patience and told me I should take all that up with Nolan Smith, the TNF archeologist overseeing the East Fork project. So, Nolan and I have made plans to visit the area on June 12th.

So much for prologue. Too much. But it bears upon what follows. I should say, tho, that the North Fork of the North Fork has many tributaries, which spread out like the fingers of a hand, and that Forest Road Nineteen, The Nineteen, as it were, winds in and out of several of these many canyons. It is a Complex of Many Canyons, which converge upon a Gorge of Many Gorges. First we crossed Fulda, and a few miles further brought us to the North Fork of the North Fork itself.

The Nineteen rarely drops below 5000' elevation, and rises to over 6000' on Monumental Ridge. It is covered in snow for much of each year. Once giant steam tractors hauled sawed lumber to Emigrant Gap on this road. That was a century or so ago. And decades before then, an army of men had hacked out the Bradley & Gardner Ditch. This ditch supplied water to the mines of Dutch Flat and Gold Run, reaching the former in 1859. Following, very nearly, a contour line, the Bradley & Gardner, or B&G, is all the more twisty and turny than The Nineteen, as it winds in and out of the Complex of Canyons. We first saw the B&G just a couple hundred yards shy of the NFNFAR. I pointed it out to Catherine, and then we crossed the river and parked just outside North Fork Campground, a popular drive-in TNF campground where one pays a fee every night.

Our objective was a beautiful waterfall, a scant quarter-mile or so down the river from the campground. Multiple trails lead down to the waterfall, really two waterfalls, each falling into deep pools ideal for swimming. It is quite a popular place. Nearing the falls, we saw a new OHV trail coming directly down the canyon wall to some toilet paper and miscellaneous garbage scattered above the waterfall.

The falls are spectacular. We clambered around on upturned strata of Shoo Fly Complex early-Paleozic metasedimentary rock, meta-sandstones, slates, etc. The Shoo Fly can vary wildly in a short distance, going from easily-eroded slate to massive and resistant meta-sandstone and chert. The waterfalls likely have to do with a stratum of this meta-sandstone. Downstream, a zone of slate has let the canyon deepen, but here, a resistant stratum has formed a step.

Hence the waterfalls. But as the North Fork of the North Fork proceeds downstream, to the south and west, the canyon steepens into a gorge and it becomes cliff upon cliff, waterfall upon waterfall, pool upon pool, and is pretty much impassable.

We gathered up the garbage as best we could and followed a different trail back up to the campground.

The overall idea of our day was to visit a number of different places, which, unaccountably, Catherine had never seen, to make a number of short hikes. The waterfalls were first. Next to come were the Monuments for which Monumental Creek and Monumental Ridge were named. To visit the Monuments we drove further along The Nineteen, past Onion Valley, to the East Fork, and parked near the entrance to Tunnel Mills Campground, a TNF reservation-only, group-camp area next to the river.

From here, I explained, one could work upstream towards Monumental Creek; a minor logging-railroad grade would provide a route, but eventually, we would reach the creek at the wrong place, and have to climb up in elevation a couple hundred feet, to a still-higher old road, from which we could reach the Monuments. And we would follow this higher road back out, and after a time drop cross-country to The Nineteen.

Just so it happened. We followed the old railroad grade, not far above the sparkling, murmuring East Fork, until at last the grade approached the river itself and we could see that Monumental Creek entered just above. But there is no following Monumental Creek up to the Monuments, from the East Fork: it is guarded by cliffs and waterfalls and deep pools. Years of experience had shown that one should approach the Monuments on the higher road, not on the railroad grade; but again and again I had ignored this wisdom, again and again I had been forced to make the haphazard bushwhack up steep slopes, from the end of the railroad grade. We made the climb, and found ourselves just above the creek and the Monuments. A very steep descent was needed to reach the foaming cascades almost ringing the base of the principal monument, a spire of rock perhaps a hundred feet high.

Here again, as at the North Fork Campground waterfalls, a stratum of quartzite, or chert, or of some resistant Shoo Fly rock, crossed the axis of Monumental Creek. An entire family of monuments rises at this place. It is picturesque and wild. Sharp crags of rock peek from the forest above, and among these crags one can see massive dry-laid stone walls along the line of the Bradley & Gardner Ditch. The principal Monument is crowned with white, quartz in part, but there seems to be a white stain extending down from the narrow flat summit, as tho an eagle nest had perched on that magic eyrie for many a century.

We took our lunch in that exceptional place, and then made the steep climb out, where the "high road" would lead us back west towards The Nineteen, and Catherine's truck. Gaining the road, we decided to follow it farther up Monumental Creek, rather than back towards the truck. Soon the road became overgrown with small trees and brush, but a path had been lopped in recent years, so we had easy going. It was clear that this road had been cut directly into the line of the Bradley & Gardner. We could look across Monumental Canyon to more cliffy terrain to the east, and we saw more and more of these huge old dry-laid stone walls along the Canal. I had only been over to see those walls once, more than twenty years ago.

I expected the Canal Road, then, would soon end, where a high wooden flume once crossed the canyon.

It did not soon end. It went on and on. We may have been the better part of half a mile above the Monuments, before at last the road did end, and yet the ditch continued, and in a couple hundred yards, it reached the creek itself. A small remnant of the concrete dam diverting Monumental Creek itself, into the Bradley & Gardner, was in the creek. The B&G was well-defined to the very crossing, but no sign of it persisted across the creek; it must have been led through a wooden flume, in that immediate area.

It has long been a dream of mine to open the Bradley & Gardner Ditch, the Placer Canal, as a hiking trail, from its source on the East Fork, west to Blue Canyon, at least.

Catherine and I had followed the Canal to Monumental Creek itself. This was enough for one day. We still had to visit Big Valley Bluff, and the sun was lowering. We were well pleased with our exploration, and talked of how excited Ron Gould would be, to see this place.

On our retreat to The Nineteen, we scared up a bear below the Canal Road, and stayed on the road farther than was necessary, eventually dropping to The Nineteen about a half-mile above Catherine's truck.

There were actually several other places, several other short hikes, I had had in mind, but time permitted only a visit to Big Valley Bluff, so we drove on out The Nineteen, crossing the East Fork, climbing Texas Hill, running out of pavement just where one turns right for Sawtooth Ridge, left for The Bluff; we made for The Bluff, and another four or five miles on the now rough and rocky road brought us to the End of the World.

A TNF fire lookout tower once stood here, but only the four cement piers remain.

Big Valley Bluff rises 3500' above the North Fork of the American, and stands directly across the canyon from the Beacroft Trail and Tadpole Canyon. It is an enormous mass of chaotic Shoo Fly Complex rocks, with more than the usual proportion of meta-sandstones and cherts, hence, it is very resistant, and has withstood the almost countless streams of ice which have scoured it, over the past million years or so.

The Bluff commands views which span much of Central California. It was too hazy, while we were there, to see the hundred miles of the Coast Range north of San Francisco, visible from The Bluff. To the south, snow-flecked peaks of the Crystal Range; to the east, the Sierra Crest, and the upper Foresthill Divide peaks, Lyon and Needle; to the north, Castle Peak, Basin Peak, and then closer by, Devils Peak and Snow Mountain.

We could see the Iowa Hill Canal and the Big Brush, the Ocean of Brush, very well, across the canyon.

It is the great canyon which enthralls one, there at The Bluff. I could go on and on, but it would be so much better for you to simply follow Forest Road Nineteen from Emigrant Gap, and in a reasonably high-clearance vehicle, persist and persist. It must be well over ten miles before the short side-road to The Bluff is reached. Go there in the late afternoon, when shadows are lengthening.

We saw a falcon and a hawk, there at The Bluff. I couldn't tell what species they were.

At last we left and made the long drive out to I-80, and thence to our homes. It was an exceptionally nice day in North Fork country, not down in the great canyon itself, for a change, but in its tributaries, and on the canyon rim, at the one, the only, Big Valley Bluff.

Visits to Canyon Creek and Giant Gap

2007-05-30T11:58:00.000-07:00

[written May 30, 2007]

Over the Memorial Day weekend I took a tour of the Gold Run Diggings with Rick Creelman and Gay Wiseman. We drove down Garrett Road to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) gate, a massive gate which serves to keep cars out of the Diggings, and to allow numerous Off-Highway Vehicles (OHVs) into the Diggings. Congress created the special Gold Run Addition to the North Fork American Wild & Scenic River (W&SR) in 1978. Their intent was that this remarkable area of old gold mines and historic trails should become a "portal" for public access to the W&SR. The Gold Run Addition was an addition to the W&SR "corridor" and thus would be closed to motorized vehicles and mining claims. Congress directed that all private inholdings in the Addition be purchased.

The BLM has had twenty-nine years to make the Addition a portal to the W&SR, twenty-nine years to purchase the private inholdings, twenty-nine years to close this part of the Diggings to motorized uses, and twenty-nine years to close these public lands to mining claims.

But not one of these goals has been met. Only one of the several historic trails in the area is unaffected by private lands, but even this one trail, the Pickering Bar Trail, does not have so much as one sign marking its location. Meanwhile, the OHVs have discovered the Pickering, and have transformed the upper end of the trail into an OHV road. "Quads," the four-wheeled OHVs, can drive quite a ways down the old foot trail.

And at least one of the mining claimants has exploiteded his privileged access to the public lands in the Diggings to steal tons of petrified wood, using a backhoe and a dump truck to remove pieces weighing in the hundreds of pounds, including the largest single chunk of petrified wood exposed in the Diggings, a tree trunk about sixteen feet long and three feet in diameter.

Rick and Gay and I followed the OHV trail past the gate. Ordinarily, I would write, "we followed the historic wagon road along the rim of the North Fork canyon, a road which dates back to the 1850s." But now it is just an OHV trail, which forks into more and more and more OHV trails. We passed the OHV road which was once known as the Pickering Bar Trail. Thankfully, so many Knobcone pines have toppled over the old road just beyond this new OHV-road-once-known-as-the-Pickering-Bar-Trail, the no OHVs can pass, for the moment, so at last we were able to enjoy a simple ancient road winding through the sunny manzanita. We reached the Secret World and used a faint and secret path to enter that World and eventually, to cross Indiana Ravine and visit the Stone Cabin.

From the Cabin we climbed out of the World on the east, picked up the Indiana Hill Ditch, built in 1852, and followed this charming avenue, through an arched grotto of manzanita, onto open slopes which offered fine views of the North Fork canyon, of Giant Gap to the east, Pickering Bar and the Diving Board Ridge to the west, and Canyon Creek plunging fifteen hundred feet to the North Fork directly below us.

Slowly picking our way along the tiny dry canal, we reached the Old Wagon Road and followed it down to the Canyon Creek Trail and thence the huge tunnel from the Diggings. From an 1874 book I extract the following:

"The Gold Run Ditch & Mining Company, of Gold Run, in this county, is engaged in an important undertaking, having for its object the "bottoming" (developing with a deep tunnel) of the deep placers of Gold Run district. Mr. H.H. Brown, the superintendent, communicates the following facts:

'We commenced constructing our bedrock tunnel in September, 1872, and made but slow progress until last August, when we put in two Burleigh drills, run by compressed air, and are now (December, 1873) making three and one-half feet in twenty-four hours in the hardest kind of rock, using XX Hercules powder as an explosive. The object of this tunnel is to furnish an outlet to all of the mines in Gold Run district east of the Central Pacific Railroad. The tunnel to reach the Blue Lead or channel will be 2,200 feet long, 12 feet wide and 9 feet high. We intend to put in two five-foot flumes. We shall tap the Blue Lead 70 feet below any point reached before, and 270 feet below any point where washing has been done. About 500 feet from the lower end of the main tunnel we are going to run a branch, diverging to the left, 7 feet wide and 7 feet high, to reach the celebrated Indiana Hill claims, which our company now owns. This branch will be 1,135 feet log, and will tap that claim 247 feet below any point that has now been worked off. We expect to complete the entire work within two years, at a cost of not less than $100,000.'"

I first visited this section of Canyon Creek, where cascades surge over water-polished bedrock, in 1976, by following the "branch" tunnel mentioned above all the way through from the Diggings.

Rick and Gay and I enjoyed the cold air flowing out of the tunnel, and then continued down the Canyon Creek Trail across the little bridge to Waterfall View. We found an astounding bloom in progress: Bush Monkeyflower and Brodiaea were at the very peak, and Mock Orange was just beginning. There were thousands of flowers.

We did not wish to follow the trail any lower, instead returning to the Diggings via the main Canyon Creek Trail, and to Garrett Road via the Paleobotanist Trail. We found a cute little Ringneck snake on the road, and managed to irritate it to the extent that it twisted its tiny tail into a kind of knot. When fully-grown this species only gets about fifteen inches long. Ours was about twelve inches.

Such was a nice five-mile loop through parts of the Diggings and Canyon Creek.

Yesterday Catherine O'Riley and I returned to the Canyon Creek Trail for a long ramble. On the way in to the trailhead we found two men in a pickup truck, who were on their way in to The Cave, as they called it, and one spoke of bringing his family in for a visit. I hope they know how to avoid poison oak.

Catherine and I made short work out of reaching Waterfall View, shed some clothes, and continued down and down to the HOUT. The bloom, which I expected to wither and decrease as we reached lower, hotter, drier elevations, if anything increased; it was all late-season stuff, the wonderful monkeyflowers, Brodiaea, tall larkspur, Lotus, Mock Orange, and Bi-Lobed Clarkia, all were present in the thousands. I was surprised. This has been such a dry spring I didn't expect such an exuberant bloom.

The flowers followed us onto the HOUT (High Old Upriver Trail), which took us east on an intricate path, through groves of Canyon Live Oaks, through heavy old brush, and across cliffs and rockslides, on and on and on, in the full heat of the sun, until we stopped to rest on a mossy ledge within Giant Gap. Here I discovered I could actually lie down at full length, inches from a 300-foot cliff, on moss so thick it was a perfect bed. I went to sleep. Catherine, in contrast, hiked another quarter-mile to Onion Point.

I awoke, she returned, we started back out, but, somewhat chastened by the glaring sun, we dropped to the clear cold river and splashed around for an hour, never really swimming, but getting wet, getting cool. The westering sun at last left the HOUT, which was our signal to resume the march, and the timing was perfect, so that even on the Canyon Creek Trail we enjoyed shade for the entire climb up and out. We reached the top around seven in the evening.

It was another very nice day in the North Fork.

Lost Camp; a Joke in New York Canyon

2007-05-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

[written May 14, 2007]

Lost Camp is an old hydraulic mining town, south of Blue Canyon, established in a rush, in 1857 or thereabouts. No buildings are left, although two are shown on both the USGS 7.5 minute "Westville" quadrangle, and on the official Tahoe National Forest (TNF) map. I have a web page devoted to Lost Camp, see

http://home.inreach.com/rtowle/NorthFork/Lost_Camp/Lost_Camp.html

The historic China Trail drops to the North Fork of the North Fork of the American from Lost Camp, and then climbs to the crest of Sawtooth Ridge, to the south. The trail was built in 1862. Forty-three years later, it was absorbed into TNF's system of trails. The old road to Lost Camp from Blue Canyon (Lost Camp actually predates Blue Canyon) has been open to the public since the 1850s.

Like many another old road and old trail, the Lost Camp Road and the China Trail pass through a mixture of private property, and public TNF lands. Ten years ago I began urging TNF to acquire the private lands at Lost Camp, and thus to secure public access to the China Trail. Nothing has been acquired, and we are now on the verge of losing access to road and trail alike.

Some of the private lands were subdivided and sold. The new owners wish the General Public would just go away forever; then the new owners could have the China Trail all to themselves. The summer before last, a "Private Road" sign appeared at the beginning of the Lost Camp spur road, near Blue Canyon. More recently, one of the new owners has been chasing people away at gunpoint, and trying to convince the other new owners to put a gate on the road.

I hear that Placer County does not regard the Lost Camp Road as a "county" road.

I thought to talk to TNF about the old road; after all, it shows on the old TNF maps, and is identified as TNF System Road "16N51," on the 1962-66 map. So I called Phil Horning at the Nevada City office, and spoke with him for about an hour, this afternoon.

Phil is currently much involved in TNF's OHV Study. Like other National Forests, the Tahoe is trying to regulate OHV use. This is a bureaucratic exercise of demonic and nightmarish proportions. It is an effort spanning several years. Now, I myself like our historic foot trails; I wish them to be preserved, protected, maintained, and put back on the maps--for hikers. Astoundingly, hardly any TNF employees have ever heard of these trails, and still less have they set foot on them.

I have been warned by sympathetic TNF employees, "Do not register your historic foot trails in the OHV study; if such a trail were to go on our map, it would (eventually) be designated an OHV route." So I have held my peace.

You see, the TNF OHV study will not examine each road and trail on its merits; TNF will not decree, "this trail is open to motorized uses, but that other trail is not." No. TNF will inventory all existing OHV routes, roads, trails, cross-country routes, whatever. Some few will be closed to OHV use, but most will become formally and explicitly open to OHV use; an Interim Order is about to be promulgated, which will add 50 miles of OHV routes to the existing two thousand miles or whatever it is.

When the final Decision is made, the most likely form it will take is that any and all roads, trails and routes now in use by OHVs will remain in use, *but* all further "cross-country" travel by OHVs will be illegal.

That is, at the bottom line, this vast bureaucratic exercise will in effect retain the status quo, but give TNF rangers more power to limit cross-country travel.

So. Back to Lost Camp. I was really interested in TNF's sense of whether the Lost Camp Road is a public road, or not; whether it is a TNF System Road, or not. I asked Phil, and I could hear the rustle of a large map unfolding through the telephone. It took a while to zero in on Lost Camp (Phil, despite twenty years at TNF, had never heard of the China Trail, never set foot in Lost Camp), and then he said, "Well, the road does not appear on the OHV Study Map at all."

How could that be? The Lost Camp Road is on the current official TNF "visitors'" map, the big map which unfolds to over two feet square.

I asked. Phil replied that, by its absence from the OHV Study Map, the implication is that TNF no longer considers it to be a System Road. Hence it does not appear on the map. And *hence* it will likely be closed to OHV use; for it has no formal standing, any more, as a Forest Road. It will count as "cross-country travel."

Note the conundrum here. Suppose we agitated the Lost Camp Road issue, and we went to TNF, and we said, "It is your job to conserve public access to public lands; you must keep the Lost Camp Road and the China Trail open to the public.

And suppose TNF listens, TNF agrees, TNF says, in effect, "Golly, you are right! It was once a System Road, and it shall forever be a System Road; the China Trail was once a System Trail, and it shall forever be a System Trail."

Oops! Now, like almost all System Roads and System Trails depicted on the OHV Study Map, the Lost Camp Road and the China Trail will be deemed "open" to OHV use!

Phil helped me sort out these imponderables.

He also told me an amusing story of a visit he made to the fabled New York Canyon and its giant waterfall, with John Skinner, at that time TNF's Forest Supervisor. John is on this email list, and may vouch for the veracity of the story.

According to Phil, they set out to find the giant waterfall, descending the ridge immediately east of the East Fork of New York Canyon. This eventually brought them to the top of the falls; but the cliffs there do not lend themselves to good views, so they made quite a scramble out of dropping below the falls, and then they climbed some kind of rocky eminence for a view.

They had some trouble descending from this eminence, and then were faced with the climb back up to the falls, and then, more climbing, up and up and up, to their vehicle. I mean, we're talking a couple thousand feet, maybe. This was a major effort, and the vicinity of the falls is rife with menacing cliffs. It is a dangerous place, and what's more, hardly anyone goes there. It really looks like no one has *ever* gone there. It is an amazing place.

So. They reached the top of the falls again, and Phil spotted some plastic flagging, some yellow flagging, tied to a tree. Below the flagging, he found a bottle nestled into a small cairn of rocks, and in the bottle was a message.

John and Phil were astounded. Who could have ever visited that place? And flagging! And a bottle! And a message in the bottle!

So they eagerly opened the bottle, and eagerly read the message.

It recorded a pleasant visit to the giant waterfall by such-and-such a *girl scout troop*!!!

After a time they came to realize that some TNF surveyors had visited that spot only days before; the surveyors had known of Supervisor Skinner's impending visit, and contrived a little joke.

At any rate, such is some news from Lost Camp and New York Canyon.

Return to the Iowa Hill Canal

2007-05-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

[written May 11, 2007]

I was surprised, Wednesday morning, by a thump on my lonely, lost-in-the-woods door, and gave an inarticulate shout of welcome, whereupon Ron Gould stepped in and asked if I was ready to go to the Iowa Hill Canal that very instant.

Of course I was ready!

In a few minutes I had thrown together one of my embarrassing sandwiches, filled a water bottle, and packed my little pack, with camera, binoculars, and something warm to wear, and off we went. We met Catherine "Canyon" O'Riley in Colfax and were soon embarked upon the tortuous windings of the Iowa Hill Road; for it was required to cross the American River Canyon. After an eternity we turned left on the Foresthill Road and drove upcountry another ten miles or so, to the Beacroft Trail.

Ron and Catherine were aware that, scarcely a week ago, Steve Hunter and I had somehow done what no five people together could ever have done, that we had achieved the impossible, that we had blundered slowly through that vast green Ocean of Brush, to the very end of the Canal. There, a distant and obscure ravine plunged into the dizzy blue depths of the North Fork. A 100-foot waterfall sprang from serried cliffs above. Ron and Catherine had personally confronted the Ocean of Brush, in years past, and must see for themselves if this were not one of Russell's tall tales, one of his myths of derring-do, and high old-fashioned romance.

These easternmost two miles of the Canal appear as a Tahoe National Forest system trail, on the map of 1947. And most interesting is the spur trail shown, east of Tadpole Canyon, leading down into the North Fork. From the overall look of things, neither trail has been maintained since 1947. It is not exactly easy, nor is it safe, to hike the Canal. There are rockslides on cliffs, where no trail exists. There is an often-difficult creek crossing, at Tadpole Canyon. But this old Canal Trail is surely one of the most scenic of all trails. We made our way slowly east, crossing Tadpole with a short hop, and took a break at the point where we guessed the spur trail forked away north.

Here a few stout firs and a Sugar Pine mark the intersection of a faint ridge with the Canal. It actually looks quite as though an old trail drops steeply past these trees. But the path instantly enters thick Huckleberry Oak, and is lost to sight. Ron and I had been convinced, on previous occasions, that this must be "the spur trail." A White Fir, just below the Canal, bears healed-over scars which might be blazes. I walked below this scarred fir and turned to face uphill, to face the Canal, to face the blazes. Once again I realized that, with enough imagination, a "small i" Forest Service blaze could exist. What had been notches through the bark had healed over until the new wood actually swelled out from the main mass of the trunk. Ron had always doubted this contorted excrescence could be a blaze.

The excrescence contains a rounded boss of woody tissue. Suddenly I saw what I'd always missed before: centered upon the rounded boss was an arrow, pointing to the right, or west, along the Canal, pointing to the Beacroft Pass and, eventually, Civilization.

With the arrow in play, there was about no question that this was indeed the spur trail depicted on the 1947 TNF map. I explored a little ways down, and found the trail continuing beneath the brush. It would not be easy to follow this trail. One would have to use patience and instinct, and be willing to lose the trail altogether from time to time, and just keep to the faint ridge, knowing it would reappear.

So, this was very nice. We had found the Old Spur Trail. But the Ocean of Brush beckoned. We left the shade of the spur-trail-trees and followed the outside-the-berm trail east into the many-flowered, sunny, silent Ocean.

The tremendous views were duly enjoyed. Somewhere ahead, Steve and I had dropped into the bed of the Canal, and had lopped the natural corridor a gnat's hair wider. Once we reached that spot we'd have easy going. Hence, with so much excess energy, it behooved us to pioneer an earlier, a simpler, and a better descent into the Canal. We began the fight.

Unfortunately, this turned into a lesson we had already learned all too well: the Ocean of Brush fights back; it fights hard; and it never gives up. In half an hour we reached the spot, about a hundred yards east, where Steve and I had entered the Canal. Here, then, would be the "easy going" I had bragged about.

Mysteriously, there was hardly a sign that anyone had ever set foot there, much less lopped a thousand branches. We advanced slowly. It took forever to cross the Ocean and enter the shelter of the firs to the east, where immediately one reaches a big rock outcrop, and the Canal becomes a bench cut again, and one enjoys really incredible views of cliffs and waterfalls and snow peaks.

A grouse could be heard booming, in the forest above us.

From here, I declared, it would be easy going; the fir forest kept the brush down.

But somehow I had forgotten that an outlier of the Ocean had invaded that fir forest, so the going was not very easy at all. We persisted, and entered the forest shade eventually, squishing over a few tiny patches of snow along the Canal, and at last , there it was, the End. The Beginning, in one sense. The little creek, the waterfall. Catherine was surprised this creek had no name. I suggested Tad-York, since it is midway between Tadpole Canyon and New York Canyon. Ron thought York-Pole might be good. Neither is euphonious.

After a good long rest we began the tramp out. The sun neared the horizon as we neared the Beacroft Pass. We were very glad to shed our packs and sit in the comfort of Ron's truck. It's good he was driving, for I was little better than a zombie, possessed by a haze of dreams, of cliffs and canyons, roaring waterfalls, and silent, grasping, many-armed and many-flowered Oceans.

It was another great day in the great canyon.

The Upper Iowa Hill Canal

2007-05-04T09:10:00.000-07:00

Years passed, and finally the day had arrived when I could show Steve Hunter, connoisseur of local canyons and old trails, the remarkable, the amazing, upper section of the Iowa Hill Canal.

In this part of the Sierra, where miners swarmed the hills and the canyons for decades, in search of the golden metal, there are many mining ditches, some miles long, some many miles long, all constructed to bring water to the mines, to the diggings, to this or that fabulous trove which would send one back home to the States a rich man—home at long last!—to live like a lord, within the encircling glow of a faithful and a grateful family.

Such a man would, someday, command quite a large tombstone, in the old cemetery on the hill.

Never mind that in reality, one worked and worked, one dug and dug and sweated and sweated and banged one's hands bloody, and the few rich strikes accomplished little more than to keep the anxious bill collectors at a respectful distance. One's credit was reestablished at the general store, and some spanking fine mules would amble, heavily laden with supplies, to one's remote camp, and the other miners would see those mules, and say, that Jones, he's onto something good!

If a mining ditch aimed high, aimed to stand head and shoulders above the general case, above the pitiful and impotent streams of the commoner sort, well, that ditch would be called a Canal. Thus the Placer County Canal, which served the mines at Dutch Flat, or the Iowa Hill Canal, which served the mines at Iowa Hill.

Ditch or canal, the thing had an alpha, an omega, a beginning, an end. Ditch or canal, end and beginning alike could become blurred: there might be tributary ditches, there might be distributary ditches, multiple beginnings and multiple endings; and such was the Iowa Hill Canal.

Today, after so long, I finally reached the Alpha of the Iowa Hill Canal. Or is it the Omega? It is where the Canal begins, yes, but this Canal was never finished, this Canal was pushed higher and higher, farther and farther east, commanding more and more tributary streams, gathering more and more water.

Then the money ran out, and work stopped. The Iowa Hill Canal was projected to begin high within the great canyon of the North Fork of the American River, at Old Soda Springs. It would have leeched the life blood of the North Fork itself, and all its southern tributaries: Wabena Canyon, Wildcat Canyon, Sailor Canyon, New York Canyon, all would have fed the monstrous ditch. Excuse me, the monstrous Canal.

I met Steve at Colfax and we drove his wonderfully underpowered, gas-scorning little Suzuki Samurai across the North Fork at Mineral Bar, climbing through tortured curves to Iowa Hill, and far beyond, to the Foresthill-Soda Springs Road, passing China Wall (a spot along this same Iowa Hill Canal), passing Mumford Bar Trail, passing the road to Deadwood, passing the site of Secret House, and after quite a long time, we parked at the Beacroft Trail, which drops 2800' to the rowdy, spring-high North Fork.

This ancient trail begins in a low gap in the Foresthill Divide and makes short steep work of its descent to the river. A rough little road continues north from the parking area to the trailhead proper. There is a complex of roads and trail and ditches in the area. The Secret Canyon Ditch converges upon the trailhead from the south, and appears to end. It took me a while to realize that just there it entered a short tunnel, which has since collapsed.

The topographic map shows the Beacroft Trail crossing the Iowa Hill Canal a little ways below the pass, to the north, just within the North Fork canyon. Following the trail, one reaches the north end of the collapsed tunnel, and behold! An old mining ditch, and a large one at that.

But this is just the continuation of the Secret Canyon Ditch, which was itself but a feeder to the Iowa Hill Canal. Continuing down the Beacroft, the trail steepens, and in a little ways one crosses a flat bench cut. This is the Canal, which at this point flowed through a wooden flume.

Strangely, if one follows the bench cut east, it soon ends altogether, in heavy timber. With sharp eyes one can barely discern yet another ditch, well above and to the east. This too is the Canal, which, as I eventually realized, makes a sudden drop of about a hundred feet in elevation at this point. This sudden change in grade may have been prompted by the steep cliffs farther east, in Tadpole Canyon; that is, when faced with these cliffs, and the inevitable blasting required to eke out a bench cut upon which to stand a wooden flume, the builders may have found that some great advantage accrued from the higher line, probably, by avoiding some one pernicious cliff.

So one can struggle up from the bench cut to the upper line of the Canal, where briefly it assumes the character of an unusually large ditch, six feet deep, five feet broad at the base, eight or ten feet across at the berm. Following this large ditch east, one soon reaches another bench cut, indicating that once again, a wooden flume had been built.

Ah, it took quite a few visits to this area to sort all these things out. Eventually, I discovered the Chinese Road.

The Chinese Road begins back in the Beacroft Pass, climbs slowly through the fir woods, and then drops slowly to the exact point where the upper, eastern line of the Canal changes from ditch to flume. I call it the Chinese Road simply because it is very likely that most of the work of building the Canal, back around 1873, was performed by Chinese immigrants. The Chinese Road owes its existence to the need to bring lumber to the beginning of a long flume section.

The flume section continues east into, and then back out, of cliff-bound Tadpole Canyon, a north-flowing tributary of the North Fork. After the Canal gets free of the Tadpole cliffs, it reverts to ditch-form again, and sweeps east into the main North Fork canyon, and into an absolute ocean of heavy brush. All the usual suspects are present in abundance: Huckleberry Oak, Bush Chinquapin, Green Manzanita, etc. etc. And further progress east on the Canal is over. I call this area the Big Brush.

Steve was suitably impressed by the Canal. Old Tahoe National Forest (TNF) maps (1947, 1962, 1966) show this section of the Canal, east of the Beacroft, as a foot trail. Like so many other historic trails, TNF abandoned this trail. It often narrows to a precarious thread, crossing some rockslide on a cliff. It is definitely not for everyone.

But the views are extraordinary. Directly across the North Fork, Big Valley Bluff rises 3500 feet from the river, in ragged cliffs. Sugar Pine Point, Cherry Point, Snow Mountain, Devil Peak, and even some of the Yuba peaks, like Red Mountain, Basin Peak, and Castle Peak, are all visible from the Canal. To the west, one sees away down the canyon to Moody Ridge, near Dutch Flat.

Quite a number of waterfalls are seen. There are waterfalls within Tadpole Canyon, and one sees a few of these. But once one gets out into the Big Brush, one begins to see various more distant waterfalls, such as the 200-footer at the base of Big Valley canyon, and the 200-footer up in Big Granite Canyon, and the waterfalls which adorn Sugar Pine Point.

This is indeed Placer County's Yosemite.

One can often hear the North Fork itself, although 3000 feet above it, and, strangely, one can hear the beautiful Big Valley Falls, a distinct roar, louder and more focused than the generalized murmur of the North Fork.

Steve and I made short work of crossing Tadpole Canyon and entering the Big Brush. The sky was clear, the sun was bright, and a cool breeze kept us comfortable. Here was the insurmountable obstacle I had chattered about, that infinite tangle of muscular branches which forced even bears to somehow scramble over the tops of the gnarled shrubs, rather than on the good earth itself. The line of the Canal led almost due east through the Big Brush, and entered a sparse grove of fir about a quarter-mile away.

There, one could hope, the brush would abate.

We had approached the Big Brush only rarely on the berm of the Canal, sometimes in its bed, at other times on a faint old trail just outside the berm. This faint trail seems to be continuous, from the end of the flume section bench cut to the Big Brush, but is itself, often, most horribly blocked by brush. There are signs that it maintains its outside-the-berm alignment into the Big Brush, but since one can usually not even see the ground, this is conjecture.

I climbed onto a sturdy bush on the berm, its limbs hardened by decades of heavy snow, and looked up the Canal, into that vast and gnarled sunny ocean. Once again I saw that the very bed of the Canal makes a faint and narrow gap, an almost imperceptible corridor, with here and there a patch of snow gleaming through the chaparral. Ron Gould and Catherine O'Riley and I had given this quasi-corridor a try. It was an impending disaster of interlacing branches. It was no kind of corridor for humans. A fox would love the thing. A mouse would stroll along with the greatest of ease. A bear would have problems. A deer would not even try. A human would merely ask for trouble. Lots of trouble.

But I mentioned the almost-invisible corridor to Steve, and, always sensible, he said, "Maybe we should give it a try." Steve was intrigued by the fact that no one had managed to follow the Canal east to its end, that is, its beginning, for a long, long time. For decades, maybe many decades.

So we lowered ourselves down to the bed of the Canal, clinging to slender and strong Huckleberry Oak branches, and with one pair of loppers, began making our way.

There was no walking. There was only lop and lop and lop and lop, and then throw aside the cuttings, which would reveal still more branches, so, lop and lop and lop and lop, and one yard was gained.

Then repeat.

Rarely, we saw signs that bears had shouldered through, and often they had climbed above the Canal bed on the uphill side, and we could take advantage of a few yards of relatively easy going.

In an hour or so we had made half the distance to the sparse grove of fir trees to the east. We rested. A worse-than-usual tangle of manzanita and the like blocked the Canal ahead. It was prudent to stop, to give up, to call it a day. My lopping count was up over five hundred branches, and my arms and shoulders were screaming. My pants were torn, my arms were bloody. I pulled myself up to the berm, a minor feat of gymnastics, climbed a bush, and gazed ahead.

Just beyond the knotted tangle which had brought us to a stop, the "corridor" seemed to open somewhat, and a number of small snow patches, up to fifty feet long, could be seen in the bed of the Canal. I reported to Steve, who calmly opined, "Maybe we should go a little further; after all, the trees are closer than they were."

We left our packs behind and attacked the tangle. By inches we made ten feet, and entered upon the most open section yet. Suddenly we could take five paces at a time without any lopping. Suddenly the bear trail became better-defined, and would always climb to the inside of the Canal to avoid bad brush tangles. Suddenly there were little snowfields where we could just walk along like real humans, without dodging a single shrub. No crouching, no intricate sidling motions, just plain walking.

It was a miracle.

We reached the trees, and at their fringes passed some White Fir in the bed of the Canal, where so many bears had shouldered past, for so many years, that they had stripped all the side branches away on one side, for five or six feet from the ground.

At last we had easy going. Soon a certain rock outcrop was reached, which I had often noted when scanning, with binoculars, the line of the Canal from Big Valley Bluff, across the canyon. Here the ditch ends and a bench cut resumed. At a certain promontory we found an old flume timber, almost intact, studded with twenty-penny square nails, and really incredible views of the Big Valley big waterfall, and the Big Granite Canyon falls, and we could even see parts of the Big Granite Trail, where it makes begins its final approach to the North Fork, from a few hundred feet above. Snow-spangled Snow Mountain; the wind-wavering little waterfall on Sugar Pine Point; the rarely-seen waterfalls on the west side of Big Valley, well back from the river ... the view was truly exceptional. Our hard work had earned us something very very good.

It remained to follow the last quarter-mile of the Canal east, to an unnamed ravine below some notable cliffs. We had a little trouble rounding the view-outcrop, as the bench-cut was not continuous, and some minor rock climbing-scrambling was needed, but soon enough the Canal assumed ditch-form again, and in the shelter of the fir forest, there was much much much less brush, and we had reasonably easy going, comparatively easy going, to the very end, or very beginning, I should say, of the never-completed Iowa Hill Canal.

A small creek rushed in cascades beside steep cliffs, and just upstream, dashed over a 100-foot waterfall in clouds of glowing spray, towards which we climbed, over rough slates of the Shoo Fly Complex, and enjoyed mystical views of the falls, looking almost directly up into the early-afternoon sun.

We were exhilarated with our success in performing the impossible, in actually crossing that green ocean of chaparral. Slowly we worked our way back along the Canal, here on the berm, there, in the bed, and sometimes on some faint little bear trail above the bed. It was nearing four o'clock when we reached the Suzuki Samurai. Steve, thoughtful as always, had packed a couple of cold Hamm's, which we savored in the shade of a fir tree, while munching some stale pretzels. Then followed the long mesmerizing drive down the Divide, through lonely Iowa Hill, and back across the North Fork to I-80, and Civilization.

It was another great day in the North Fork.

The Amazing Anne DeBusk

2007-04-22T12:03:00.000-07:00

[written April 22, 2007]

This afternoon I had the pleasure of spending a few hours with Anne DeBusk. She and her husband Lee had often hiked the North Fork high country, had carved their names into the trunks of ancient aspens, and it was by that strange chance I had met them. I saw those names, and Googled them, and found them to live scarcely a crow's mile away, in that merest dot of a town, Alta.

So I called, and visited, and listened to many a story of Snow Mountain, and the Royal Gorge, and the Lost Emigrant Mine, which last Lee's family had owned for several decades. This gold mine stands high on the ridge dividing Wabena Canyon from Wildcat Canyon, a ridge which falls away in sheer cliffs full three thousand feet to the North Fork. I heard of Lee's walk, as a seventeen-year-old, from Weimar to Ely, Nevada; and from Weimar, to Oregon. I had hoped to interview him at length, and record these extraordinary memories for posterity.

But Lee died last year, about this time. And Anne began sorting through his piles of books and papers. For decades he had told her of a certain green box, full of letters from his service in the Army, during the Korean War. They had searched and searched, and they gave the thing up for lost. Only a few days ago, Anne finally found the box. It was blue. I heard she wanted me to see the old letters, and thus it followed that today I drove up to her old old house amid a pounding shower of sleet. Her living room had the same old many-pointed mule deer and bear heads staring down from all sides, the same glass cases full of chert and obsidian spear points, the same odd assortment of cute knicknacks which seemed equally out of keeping with the spirit of either Lee or Anne.

On her coffee table was a stack of photo albums. I slowly leafed through them, while listening to a panorama of her life and times, a constant commentary often diverging widely from the particular page in view. She was raised in a lumber camp, up towards Chester and Portola, where the Sierra insensibly merge into Mt. Lassen and the Cascades. She was the only child in the camp. How exciting it had been to listen to the radio dramas! The thudding footsteps, the creaking doors! In those days there were few enough people in the Sierra, so it was natural for people from Portola to know people in Auburn. In fact, when it was time for high school, she moved to Auburn. She did not meet Lee, at first; a long time would pass, even though they shared fifty friends, before they met, and fell in love.

Lee's brother, Wilbur, died fighting, in the Korean War, and what little was left of Wilbur was laid to rest in Colfax. Anne attributed Lee's survival of that same war to his expertise at driving. Lee's father died young, his mother was very sick, and it was left to Lee, the eldest of several children, to be the man of the house, although only a boy in years. These responsibilities meant Lee could not finish high school. When he was eleven years old he was already driving the family truck up to the Lost Emigrant Mine, fifty miles from Auburn. He drove vehicles of every stripe: bulldozers, big trucks, cars, little trucks, mules, wagons, whatever, Lee knew how to drive it.

Hence when his infantry company was on the move in the bitterly cold Korean winter, all packed into a huge truck, and the driver was shot dead, the word went out, could anyone drive this rig? Lee could, of course. It turned out he could drive anything and everything, and for that reason alone he was not one those sent to take Hill 2115, etc., from the Chinese, inch by bloody inch.

I saw many photos of their camping trips to Snow Mountain. I told Anne that there was, so regrettably I will always think, a house, now, at Huntley Mill Lake. The deep-pocketed owner had actually paved the road in from the railroad tracks, a distance of several miles. This triggered a memory.

"Do you know the creek which flows out of Huntley Mill Lake, and flows down into Big Granite Canyon?" she inquired, and I responded in the affirmative; Tom McGuire and I had followed that very creek for quite a distance, last May, during our expedition to the huge waterfalls in Big Ganite Canyon.

"Well, one time, Lee and I were camping near the lake, and I walked down the creek a ways. It was all waterfalls, all twisty and turny, and not much water, it being the hunting season, and we were up there after deer, as usual.

"So I was following the little creek down, well, you know, little, at that time of the year, in the fall, and I found these pools which were just swarming with huge trout! I mean, these trout were eighteen, twenty inches long!

"So I took off most of my clothes and jumped right into this pool, ... ."

I interrupted. "You jumped into the pool?" This seemed a bit strange.

"Yes, I jumped right into the pool, and it was soooo cold! And I caught quite a few of those trout, and threw them up on the bank, and finally when it got too cold I climbed out, and, ... ."

I had to interrupt again. "OK, hold it right there, Anne. Are you trying to tell me ... do you want me to believe ... that you stripped naked ... ."

"Not naked, I still had some things on!" Anne replied, mock-primly.

"OK, not quite naked, you jumped into the pool, and you caught those giant trout by hand?"

"Well, yes, of course, I didn't have any gear with me, and it's not that hard; you see, you reach under a rock, and if you feel a trout, you don't grab it all at once, you stroke it a little, and that calms it down, and *then* you grab it!"

Well. Anne is an amazing woman. Later she showed me the old blue trunk stuffed full of letters, and photo negatives, from Lee's time in the Korean War. Most were addressed to his mother. There were hundreds. He was a terrible speller, was Lee DeBusk, but a great writer of letters. I could not take the time to even begin sampling these hundreds of letters, and I was worried about disturbing their original ordering. In the stacks I did find a receipt from a Foresthill gas station, from 1948. The gas station's telephone number was simply F-50.

Before I left I had a crack at repairing Anne's old record player, but failed. We made plans for another get-together after she has sorted through more of her archives. Perhaps then I will take a look at that infinitude of letters. There is a body of material, somewhere, Anne tells me, about the Lost Emigrant Mine. I hope to see that.

Such was an afternoon with Anne DeBusk, a fellow lover of the North Fork. One of the many stories I heard was about a visit she made to Helester Point, up on Sawtooth Ridge. She had led some friends from the Bay Area in there, a long long dusty drive. From the Point they could see mile after mile up the North Fork, to Snow Mountain. Her friends were exclaiming about the beauty of the great canyon, the infinite wildness of the view; and Anne said, yes, yes, this is wonderful, but just you go up to Snow Mountain, and camp out, and you will know you have been touched by God Himself! And she tried to explain how, when the sun was about to set, and the sky flamed into gold, and you were leaning against some giant old pine, away up on Snow Mountain, well, there was really nothing better in this world.

She's so right.

Visit to Gold Run

2007-04-18T12:03:00.000-07:00

[written April 18, 2007]

Wednesday morning I met Ron and Chris Lane, and Gordon Hinkle of Congressman John Doolittle's office, for a tour of the Gold Run Diggings and the Canyon Creek Trail.

Ron has developed quite an interest in this area; he sees that an irreplaceable resource hangs, so precariously, in the balance, that one of the most beautiful trails in the Sierra is "For Sale," that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has had a mandate to purchase critical parcels there, since the creation of the North Fork of the American Wild & Scenic River, in 1978, but that nothing has been purchased; Ron saw these things, and decided to do something positive. So, in a variety of ways, he has worked to bring Gold Run and the Canyon Creek Trail to the attention of the movers and shakers, the decision-makers, the responsible officials, and really, anyone who could help secure this incredibly beautiful and historic area for We the People and our posterity.

I deeply appreciate Ron's efforts.

For my own part, letters about Gold Run to my representatives, mainly to Senators Feinstein and Boxer, have fallen into the typical abyss. The Gold Run situation is complicated by mercury contamination, which derives from its use in the sluice boxes of the hydraulic mines; for mercury amalgamates with fine gold, trapping it. A single large sluice box, of a thousand feet in length, would be "charged" with an entire ton of mercury, and every day another hundred pounds would be poured in, to replace what inevitably washed out of the box with the tailings. This finely-divided atomic mercury made its way down Canyon Creek into the North Fork of the American, down the North Fork to the Sacramento, down the Sacramento to the San Francisco Bay, and on into the ocean. But a large fraction settled out before ever reaching the Pacific. It remains in our waters to this day, and one should not eat very many fish caught in the Bay, for one would poison oneself with mercury.

If it were not for the mercury at Gold Run, the 800 acres of old mining ground now for sale, embracing two miles of Canyon Creek, would have long since been sold. Offers have been made. It is mercury, and a bit of sheer luck, which have averted disaster.

At any rate, under cloudy skies, with the icy remnants of Tuesday evening's violent thunderstorms and ensuing snow lightly frosting the forest, we set out to give Gordon a tour.

We parked at the Gold Run end of things, near one of the gates barring access to the 800 acres, and walked down into the Diggings. We visited Stewart's Pond, where ducks and swallows were happily going about their business, and then continued south on the Main Diggings Road, to the obscure old road leading east to the Canyon Creek Trail.

Gordon is a fellow lover of history, and we talked a little World War Two, and a little Ancient Rome, but mainly we talked Gold Run, and hydraulic mining, and rich strikes, dark tunnels, drift mines, the Chinese, the Anti-Chinese (I was pleased to be able to inform Gordon of one curiosity of California history, stemming from the Constitutional Convention of 1879: the enactment of an official State holiday, "Anti-Chinese Day"), and many such things--sluice boxes, mining ditches, monitors, and the "State of California versus the Gold Run Ditch & Mining Company" (1881).

It was a gorgeous day, with flat-bottomed fair-weather cumulus clouds at first seeming to disperse and admit the glad sun, but too soon they coalesced and darkened, and our five-mile ramble ended under a light snowfall. The usual early-season flowers had arisen along the old trail, species of Larkspur and Poppy, Biscuit-root, Virgin's Bower, and some lovely liliaceous flowers whose name escapes me at this moment..

We dropped down the good old trail past Gorge Point to The Rockslide, where we decided it might be better not to descend all the way to the river, but rather, retreat up to the Old Wagon Road, climb to the Indiana Hill Ditch, and follow the ditch around into the Secret World, exiting the World to the north by the Wagon Wheel Tunnel, thence into the great 400-feet-deep pit of the Gold Run Ditch & Mining Company, and *thence* on the Main Diggings Road to Stewart's Pond and our vehicles.

All this came off without a hitch, and we stopped briefly for lunch at a sunny and propitious spot on the old mining ditch, high above Canyon Creek, with a bit of a view into Giant Gap. The clouds soon cast us into cold cold shade, so we picked ourselves up and kept a-walking.

It was a very nice day, and Gordon seemed to appreciate the beauty of the area, and its history.

Ron and Chris kindly drove me home, where the sleety, hail-like "snow" increased, and they hurried away to the lower elevations.

Such was a very nice day, rambling around the old gold mines and into the wilds of Canyon Creek. We even took Gordon out to the politically-incorrect Blasted Digger, that lightning-struck pine on the rocky ridge east of Canyon Creek, that wondrous spot which offers awesome views into Giant Gap, and even beyond, to the freshly snow-dusted mountains around the head of the North Fork of the North Fork.

Eagles on the Nest

2007-04-06T12:04:00.000-07:00

[written April 6, 2007]

Early this morning I drove out to Lovers Leap with camera and binoculars. I had a pretty good idea of where the Golden Eagle nest ought to be, not far from the Joint Plane which drops arrow-straight to the river from the V-notch on Pinnacle Ridge. First I scanned the main Lovers Leap Spur in search of Peregrines, but saw nothing. Then I braced my arms on my knees and carefully scanned the area around the Joint Plane, just above where it drops out of view behind the nearby Spur, perhaps 800 feet above the river, across the Gap from the Leap. I saw a tangle of dead branches beneath a rock overhang, and thought maybe I had it.

But no.

Ten minutes after my arrival, without having noticed any falcons in the air, I saw a Peregrine right below me on the Spur, on what I call the Second Step. It was silhouetted against the dark shadows which held everything across the river in their thrall, everything except the highest pinnacles. It clearly knew I was there; whenever I scooted out into plain view to get a really good look, it turned its head to fix me in the gaze of its right eye. It did not leave its sunny perch.

After a time, Deren Ross of Auburn quietly arrived, with his spotting scope, and we obtained incredible views of the falcon, every feather in focus, every subtlety of color revealed. I could see sun, sky, and canyon, all reflected in its eye, for goodness' sake. Then Deren put the scope on the eagles' nest, and I was amazed, it was scarcely a hundred feet from the false nest, but I doubt anyone, using binoculars, would spot it, unless the eagles were actually arriving or leaving. An adult eagle was on the nest, turning around from time to time. I could not see egg or eaglet. I never saw the mate.

The nest was beneath a small overhang, on steep north-facing cliffs, perhaps sixty or a hundred feet east of the Joint Plane. It was made of a mass of dead grey branches, four or five feet in diameter. I expect it was lined with the club moss which coats many rock surfaces in the Gap.

Clouds of Violet-Green Swallows and White-Throated Swifts circled over the cliffs below us, and a Kestrel, or Sparrow Hawk, the smallest of our falcons, came whirring by, scarcely twenty feet away, beating its reddish wings rapidly, climbing slowly. Occasionally we heard a Canyon Wren.

Late in the afternoon I enticed my son, Greg, out to some little cliffs, hoping to see some distant eagles or falcons. We saw nothing; well, there were more or less spectacular thunder-clouds over the high country, with rain showers drifting down, and bright-glowing snowfields on Snow Mountain. We could see the Iowa Hill Canal, east of Tadpole Canyon. But no falcons, no eagles.

Greg picked up a massive pine cone, from a tall and old Digger Pine leaning over us, and gave it a toss down the cliff. We could hear it rolling down the canyon wall for quite a long time. This scared up a few Band-tailed Pigeons, who flapped around noisily before landing in various trees. One seemed to immediately leave its chosen tree, typical pigeon behavior, but at once I saw it was larger, and put my binoculars on it.

After all that time looking for distant eagles, one had been roosting in a Douglas Fir maybe two hundred feet away, the whole time we were there! It soared west, with a few lazy flaps, and then plunged out of sight, making for a rabbit, snake, or squirrel, I would guess. It looked to be a yearling, with a hint of white left in its tail.

Such were some fine experiences in the Great American Canyon.

Peregrines in Giant Gap

2007-04-05T12:05:00.000-07:00

[written April 5, 2007]

This afternoon I ventured out to Lovers Leap in search of raptures, I mean, raptors, and found two men spellbound, gazing into the depths. All day it had been cloudy, the canyon dull and flat, shadowless, but as the afternoon waned the sun broke through. Thus the Pinnacles were sharply lit, and shadows deepened, offering more and more contrast, and many of the Sierran snowfields far to the east were luminous, etched whiter than white against the softer pastels of the clouds.

The men had hiked and climbed in the Sierra together since childhood. They contemplated a trip down to Green Valley. I began to expound upon the theme of Green Valley, and unleashed a torrent of words, while the North Fork's own dwindling torrent roared two thousand feet below us. I also told them of the Peregrine Falcons and Golden Eagles, but we saw none, though one of them remarked he had seen a Peregrine, while visiting Lovers Leap recently.

I had never ever seen one, anywhere.

After a time the men left, and I heard their voices as they ascended the steep trail; which way, one asked, go left, the other replied. Then their voices seemed to get louder, and again it was which way, but, go right was the reply. Then some excited nonsense about having a magical birthday, on the very equinox, and in olden times the Druids would have felt such a birthday must count for a lot, and so on and so forth, and lo! three teenagers shouldered through the blooming brush.

They were from Auburn, I found, and soon enough I was expounding upon the landscape, and it was not enough to say, "over here is Little Bald Mountain, and away over there, the Coast Ranges north of San Francisco," but, no, I must tell these young men of equinoctial birth about townships, sections, ranges, and Mt. Diablo, and how, since we were in fact within Township 15 East, Range 10 North, this meant we were "something like" six times fifteen miles east, and six times ten miles north, of the Diablo summit.

Which made perfect sense to me, and might have made more sense to them if we had been able to actually see the Diablo summit; but there was too much haze and moisture in the air.

I also explained to them about the falcons and eagles, and soon their sharp teenage eyes picked out a Peregrine, a mere dot of light against some vast canyon shadow, and I whipped my binoculars to my eyes, and, sure enough, there it was, my first Peregrine Falcon.

My overall impression was of a soaring bird, with much blue-grey, but with flashes of white, and not as big as a Red-Tailed Hawk.

It, or its mate, soared by several times, often a thousand feet below us, often seeming to move slowly, but in fact moving very quickly. This is also the case with the Golden Eagles; one sees them soaring so calmly, so effortlessly, yet in less than a minute they have moved a mile.

It was a very nice visit to Lovers Leap.

I was sad to see, however, that the whole area looks beaten up by OHVs, that many trees have been cut using chainsaws, that even the historic Incense Cedar logs lying athwart the trail down to the cliff have been sawn through, and the very sculptural root masses hauled away. I have suggested to the Bureau of Land Management, for quite a few years now, that a vehicle closure on the last couple hundred yards of road would be a good thing. All parking could be held to the north, before that last rise to the current parking area. Further depredations with chainsaws would be much less likely.

Finally, I now hear there is an Golden eaglet in the nest, down in the Gap, across from the Leap.

The Falcons and Eagles of Giant Gap

2007-04-01T12:06:00.000-07:00

[written April 1, 2007]

A correspondent, expert in all things avian, writes:

"Yesterday, I missed finding the Great Grey Owl on Pliocene Ridge (Yuba-Sierra Co.) but I came up big at Giant Gap. Shortly after getting out onto Lover's Leap, I heard the courting calls of two Peregrine Falcons. The sound was coming from across the river. The calls are often made in flight. I kept searching the cliffs and airspace near lower north facing cliffs. I was surprised that I couldn't find them. I then peered straight below Lover's Leap and spotted two adult Peregrines in courtship flight display. I am fairly certain they will be nesting on the south-facing cliffs below Lover's Leap. This angle is preferred by many birds including falcons. Besides, the other side is already taken. A Golden Eagle is sitting in a nest on the other side of the river. I spotted the nest with my binocs but it wasn't until I put up the scope that I could see the majestic ruler of Giant Gap's airways. The falcons are great to watch during courtship and when hunting but they're also very sensitive to presence of anything moving above them. "

This is good news, showing that the endangered Peregrine Falcon is re-occupying its old territories, and also that Golden Eagles, who always used to nest in Giant Gap, are at last nesting there again.

The Goldens were pretty thoroughly scared away by logging near the nest site, on Tahoe National Forest lands flanking Giant Gap, during the early Reagan years, when the word came down from above, to cut it all, to cut everything, to wreck everything wild, and to ruin every beauty.

But now the Goldens are back. My correspondent cautions that the Peregrines are "very sensitive to the presence of anything moving above them." The same is true enough of the eagles. They are easily scared from their nest sites by rock climbers, for instance. Hence we should take care, if we visit Lovers Leap, to be quiet and minimize our presence.

This quietness is something the bird-watchers know well; in fact, I remarked to a friend, this morning, that bird-watchers, almost above all others, know how to immerse themselves in wild places, know how to be quiet and yet alert, how to grasp every nuance without ever grasping, and that, in a way, they are like Zen Buddhists who do not even know they are Zen Buddhists.

To which he replied, "And that's the best kind (of Zen Buddhist)!"

A Virtual Landscape

2007-03-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

[written March 28, 2007]

I have posted, on YouTube, a 30-second animation depicting the terrain around the North Fork of the American River. The "virtual landscape" is seen as if from perhaps thirty miles above, looking straight down, and oriented like most maps, with north up, east right, west left, south down. See

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtPHJD1bVrw

The area encompassed by the animation extends from Colfax on the west (lower left) nearly to Donner Pass on the east (upper right); one can see, from north to south (top to bottom), portions of the canyons of the South Yuba, Steephollow, Bear River, Blue Canyon, North Fork of the North Fork American, North Fork American, Indian Canyon, Shirttail Canyon, North Fork of the Middle Fork American, Middle Fork American (with French Meadows Reservoir seen on center right), and at the lower right, a bit of the Rubicon and Hell Hole Reservoir.

The animation involves use of a sun position algorithm to move a virtual sun across the sky, along the exact path it would follow on the Vernal (and therefore, also, Autumnal) Equinox.

On the equinoxes, the sun rises due east and sets due west. As it passes through the southern sky, midway between dawn and sunset, it rises high enough to fairly well fill the various canyons with light; but in the early morning and late afternoon, deep shadows haunt the canyons, and the relief of the landscape is seen to its best advantage. Relief-enhancing low-angle illumination is usually preferred by those geologists who use aerial photos to trace the courses of fault zones, or to study geomorphology. I use this same trick on my "virtual" landscapes.

Here, about five minutes separates one frame of the animation from the next. I begin before dawn and finish after sunset. In the YouTube movie, the animation runs twice, and the second time through, little flashing lights were attached to Lovers Leap, on the west at Giant Gap, and Snow Mountain, on the east at the Royal Gorge. The two points are about twenty air miles apart.

Lost Camp Road Closure?

2007-03-22T14:24:00.000-07:00

[written March 22, 2007]

Ron Gould tells me that there may be a movement afoot to gate the old road to Lost Camp from Blue Canyon. It's been about ten years since I started asking Tahoe National Forest to protect the historic China Trail and the Bradley & Gardner mining ditch, both in the Lost Camp area. I believe outright acquisition of the private lands at Lost Camp is quite important.

Howsosever, it happens that the road running south from near Blue Canyon, across the railroad, to the historic mining town of Lost Camp, and to the China Trail, and beyond, to the overgrown old trail running down the Lost Camp Divide, to the Rawhide Mine--the old road, I repeat, passes through yet other private parcels, north of Lost Camp. One of these is owned by a man who posts huge "no trespassing" signs and carries a pistol. He even puts "no trespassing" signs entirely off his property, on Tahoe National Forest land.

This man, it seems, wants to close the Lost Camp Road to the public. It is said he has contacted other property owners nearby, and proposed that they gate the road.

This has been a public road since at least 1858. In case we have to go to court to show the public's right, Ron is interested in talking to anyone who has used the road before 1970. His email address is rgould@colfaxnet.com.

For more information about Lost Camp, see my web page at

http://home.inreach.com/rtowle/NorthFork/Lost_Camp/Lost_Camp.html

Garbage Supreme

2007-03-18T14:25:00.000-07:00

[written March 18, 2007]

After receiving a goodly number of emails of the "sorry, I can't make it" variety, and a lesser number reading "maybe I can make it," and but one single "I'll be there", I was not surprised to find only Joe Gerber at the Tesoro gas station at Dutch Flat. It was quite a beautiful day for hiking in the Great American Canyon, as it was once called. We waited until 10:08 for latecomers, and proceeded to the trailhead.

I knew that good old Steve Hunter would join our garbage party somewhat later, possibly with reinforcements, and I knew that whether it was today, or a month from today, the last of that despicable pile of trash left by "gold miners" was leaving the canyon. That garbage was marked for death. Its time in the great canyon was short, very very short. It really only remained to have some fun, see the river, admire flowers, lop some brush off this or that ancient trail, hoist some ungainly mass of junk onto our backs, and then trudge slowly up and up and up and out.

I had never met Joe. He recounted that he had moved to California in 1980, and had immediately run afoul of The Cedars, that club of wealthy self-admirers with land in the upper North Fork, who have arrogated unto themselves the historic public trail down the river to Heath Falls. Joe had found a way wide around, and had, of course, fallen in love with the place. So we soon established points in common.

It was Joe's first visit to Green Valley. I took him down the East Trail to the High Ditch, which we followed west through its sharp bends in and out of Ginseng Ravine (named for the water-loving native, Aralia californica, growing around perennial springs at its head), to the Meadow Cedar on the West Trail, and thence to the river, passing the old suspension bridge site, to trail's end, where some of the miners' garbage remained.

We had lunch amid many butterflies of many types, admiring the North Fork, flowing so high and fast and cold, what with the recent heat wave destroying the snowpack in the high country. We saw a group of seven kayakers whip past, on their way to Mineral Bar, near Colfax, a dozen miles or so downstream. They would dare the rapids of Giant Gap, which is much more than I would dare, incidentally.

Steve Hunter and Dan Farmer joined us, mentioning another man on the trail, who proved to be one of our party, although we did not know that yet, by name of Ron Brasel, and as we rolled up moldy sleeping bags and bulky foam mattresses and gathered the last odds and ends of the miners' mess, Steve and Dan said they were making for the Hotel Site, to the east, and would return to the Meadow Cedar to load up with garbage, later. So Joe and I were on our own again.

We climbed to the Meadow Cedar, and rested for a while, and I took my loppers and worked on an excellent route linking the High Ditch to the Low West Trail. The connection between the two has been difficult since many Ponderosa Pines died in a bark-beetle infestation nearly thirty years ago, and then fell, criss-crossing the trail in many places. After maybe an hour of this I rejoined Joe. The sun was still fairly high, and we didn't want to make the climb until shade had blessed the ridge bearing the Green Valley Trail. While I had been away lopping, Joe had worked on loading his pack, and it had become this gargantuan deformity which weighed around sixty pounds. This meant, first and foremost, that Joe would be slow. So we decided to leave without the full blessings of shade, and work higher until stopped by the sun.

We reached the Peter Wright Anvil, hidden along the trail, and took a sustained break, for sun still scalded the ridge above us. Steve and Dan and Ron caught us up, and I found that Ron had waited for us that morning, at the top of the trail, but we had missed him, taking a slightly different and shorter route. So, almost miraculously, but mainly because Joe was carrying so very very much, we five were carrying *all* the garbage left by the miners of last fall, the miners of the white van.

During our time at the Peter Wright Anvil, we talked about trails, and I expressed my usual dissatisfaction with Tahoe National Forest (TNF), for not only not maintaining its own trail system, but for allowing, with a murmur of protest, private interests like The Cedars to close public trails, here, there, everywhere.

Steve Hunter is about the straightest shooter a man can find and it happens that his sympathies seem to lie more with the private landowner than with the great unwashed, The Public. The conversation turned to a historic public TNF trail Dan had explored, running up the ridge dividing the South Yuba river from its Bowman Lake tributary, Canyon Creek.

Naturally I expressed my usual outrage that this trail had been abandoned by the Forest Service. I knew some of the details, having had conversations with Joe Chavez and other TNF employees about this very trail. A man had purchased a large parcel in the area, what seemed to be one of the old "railroad" sections, and had gated the old road, and had told TNF, "story over, trail closed, private property."

Steve, naturally, said something about property rights, and I held my peace, for a while. But then Dan told us of a similar situation near the Alta Sierra subdivision, over Grass Valley way, where a deeded trail easement had been recorded, way back when the subdivision began, several decades ago, but that now, in the fullness of time, and with new owners of the parcel through which the easement passed, these new owners felt they would enjoy their property so much more without hikers walking through, and now it was being fought out in court.

So Steve said something like, "That's ridiculous: the hikers have a deeded easement? End of story, it's a public trail, the property owners can't block them."

Which is only reasonable; but I saw my chance, and lunged into an inarticulate mish-mash of words, to the effect, "This case is no different from up there by the South Yuba: the Ridge Trail is ancient, it was not only open to the public for maybe 150 years, it was also a formal part of the TNF trail system, and We the People have an 'easement' on it! That fellow who bought the big parcel, I say to him, "Sorry, Mr. Sir, but you have purchased a piece of property encumbered with an easement, an easement to The Public, for use of that old Ridge Trail, and that is just the way it is."

I think I may have scored a point. But then even I had to agree that the situation is really more complicated: if We the People have an easement, does that mean that yahoos with quads and motorcycles and guns and garbage get to use it, too? The best I could come up with in response was, I myself would gladly support the property owner in seeking a motorized vehicle closure, and a firearms closure, on the trail in question.

We managed to distribute some of Joe's garbage to others, so for the last half of the climb he was carrying a paltry forty-five pounds or so. Some of us were faster, some were slower, and Joe was slowest, reaching the top a little after sunset. It was so so good to sit down, and drink a cold beer, and munch on chips and garlic olives and things. It was a supremely successful Garbage Hike, and of course we had the magic and mystery and beauty of the great canyon of the North Fork of the American River to distract us from what can only count as a galling tedium, carrying someone else's moldy bedding up miles of trail.

Garbage Hike March 17th

2007-03-11T14:27:00.000-07:00

[written March 11, 2007]

Today is Sunday, very bright and warm, registering 77 degrees in the shade, here at 4000'.

Sandhill Cranes make a great commotion during their migratory flights. Whether it's fall, and they seek the South, or spring, and they fly for the North, they constantly give loud calls to one another. Today the usual confused chorus announced the usual flock, of perhaps fifty of these very large birds. But then a second flock of fifty or a hundred approached in a broad 'V', and then, a third. All together they circled, around and around and around, a tornado of shouting birds, with one oddball raven circling above them, and making occasional feints as if to strike a crane. Pretending to the stature of a hawk?

Always, or most always, the flocks pause and circle above the sun-warmed, south-facing slopes flanking Green Valley. Strong updrafts rise from those rocky canyon walls. Having gained a few hundred feet, almost without effort, they continue on their way.

*****

Friday last I met Ron Gould and we ventured down to Green Valley. A large tree had fallen lengthwise down the trail, and we wished to see if Ron's big chainsaw was really, truly needed, way way down there, to cut it out of the way. If not, then, celebrate! for much exertion has been avoided!

Two minds are better than one, and in this case, Ron's mind was much better than mine, for he hit upon the labor-saving idea of leaving almost all the trunk in place, and just cutting a narrow gap for hikers. For, the tree, the thing, twenty or thirty feet of it, was mostly parallel to, and just above, the trail itself. My idea had been to cut it up into maybe ten pieces and roll each heavy round away into the manzanita. But with Ron's idea, only two cuts were needed. So we fired up my little saw and took care of business, cutting from one side and then another. Problem solved.

Not far below the tree, we finished dealing with yet another tree across the trail, where I had run out of fuel in mid-cut a couple weeks back, and then we rigorously restored a switchback which had been lost to heavy-armed manzanita for decades on end.

The last significant wildfire along both the trail and in Green Valley itself happened about 1955 (I have this date from examination of growth rings and fire scars in rounds of firewood, and from personal communication with one of the firefighters). This fire cleared a lot of brush. But since then, the brush has made a tremendous comeback, and now threatens to engulf about every trail in that area.

The main Green Valley Trail, the East Trail, the High East and Low East trails, the West Trail, the High West and Low West trails, the High Ditch Trail from the west end of Green Valley to the east end, the Iron Point Trail, the Green Valley Blue Gravel Ditch Trail, from the east end of Green Valley, up to Euchre Bar, crossing the river midway, and still other trails, are all either badly crowded, or blocked outright, by brush and fallen trees.

It's the same story with most of our old trails.

Ron and I also worked on the good old High Ditch Trail, and eventually found our way down to the Meadow Cedar, where the High West and Low West trails join, and where Steve Hunter and company left a cache of garbage they had cleaned up from the river, a couple months back.

There are three five-gallon plastic buckets crammed with garbage, and three garbage bags of smallish to moderate size, stuffed with garbage, plus a broken shovel and some other odd things. It comprises around six moderate backpack loads.

Several people expressed interest in helping haul this garbage up and out. Let's take advantage of this good weather and take care of the garbage next Saturday, March 17, meeting at the parking island of the Tesoro gas station at the Dutch Flat exit of I-80 at, say, 10:00 a.m., from which point we will drive to the trailhead. This should put us on the trail by about 10:30 and at the river for lunch. There should be time for at least a little exploration before we lash the garbage onto our packs and start the slow slog up and out.

It is a very strenuous hike!

No pets, and beware of poison oak. Frame backpacks are needed, with light rope or twine to lash on the loads, and of course plenty of water, lunch, sunscreen, etc.; and loppers are never amiss. We should arrive up top by five or six p.m. It's fine to wear shorts, but you may get badly scratched.

Please call with any questions (number below).

Snow, Storms, and Lions

2007-03-08T14:28:00.000-08:00

[written March 8, 2007]

At last the snow is melting away, the recalcitrant snow, the stubborn snow, the snow which defies day after day of temperatures in the sixties. At 4000' elevation it is all microclimate. Where I live, a few dozen yards separate "The Meadow," where it has been freezing every night, from "The Cabins," where it has not dropped below forty degrees for a week or more. The Meadow slopes gently south, but too gently. The Cabins are on a steep south-facing slope.

Hence The Meadow has an unbroken expanse of snow, and in the flat places the snow is still nearly two feet deep.

Yet The Cabins have only small masses of snow here and there, mainly where conifers shed big heaps--these are ring-shaped masses; or on trails, where the flatness of the trail-bed itself is not south-facing, and the snow has been slower to melt; these are linear masses.

They say that Eskimos have fifty different words for snow. We use a couple here in the Sierra, rather imprecisely. One will hear people talk of "powder snow," or its near-opposite, Sierra Cement. These terms lack precision. To confuse the matter further, the ski areas, knowing people prefer powder to ice, will report a "base" depth of, say, ten feet, and describe conditions on the ski runs as "packed powder," when a more truthful description would be "groomed ice."

Anything west of the Sierra Crest can be counted a maritime climate, versus the continental climates found east of the crest. The influence of the ocean moderates the climate west of the crest, keeping it much warmer. Hence Blue Canyon, at 5200', very very rarely ever has temperatures below zero, while Bridgeport, at the same elevation but east of the crest, along Highway 395, drops below zero degrees many times each fall, winter, and spring.

In fact, Bridgeport once held the low temperature record for the entire United States, flat-out 56 degrees below zero. It lies in a large flat valley encircled by mountains. Cold air settles in and intensifies.

At any rate, genuine powder snow, of the sort they have in the Rockies or in Utah, is a rarity in the Sierra. We do get it from time to time, but usually when the weather people on TV are waxing poetic about powder in the Sierra, it's really the good old Sierra Cement, which is a warm and heavy and sticky snow, somewhat light and fluffy in the first hours after it falls, but let one sunny day go by and, watch out.

The recent sequence of storms laid down the wettest and heaviest of Sierra Cement here at 4000', and as so often happens, periods of real snow were punctuated by periods of what I call "snain," a mixture of snow and rain, which often looks like snow from the comfort of one's living room, but go outside and you will be getting wet.

This "snain" settles and compacts and wets whatever real snow it falls upon. Freezing temperatures, such as are likely between storms, transform this dense snowpack into a nearly monolithic mass of ice. Let a mixture of snow and snain fall for a week running and one has three feet or so of a material which will stoutly resist melting.

Yesterday afternoon I thought it a good time to burn a pile of brush I had cleared from what we call the High Trail, on a steep slope west of here. The slope is too steep for safe burning in dry conditions. But I expected to find it still partially covered in snow, and it was, so I set to work, and safely burnt the slash, a struggle to be sure, since this brush was itself still partly buried in snow, and I had some wrestling matches merely to pull it free. As the sun lowered in the west, patches of bright sunlight broke through the clouds. I walked back to The Cabins in a meditative mood, my feet sinking deeply into the linear masses of trail-snow. I paused often to admire the scene, and visited some low cliffs which offer a view east. There was sun dappling the North Fork canyon all the way up to Snow Mountain and the Royal Gorge, where the snow-clad cliffs of Wabena Point were almost hidden within light snow showers. The crest itself was lost in clouds.

Now, night-before-last my son Greg reported hearing the sounds of an animal crashing through brush immediately below the Big Cabin, and whatever it was make cat-like "yowling" sounds.

"A bobcat," I responded at once. For bobcats are common here, and they often vocalize. Once the oak leaves which litter the forest floor dry out, even a small animal sounds like a big animal. A squirrel can sound like a bear.

But then, last night, I myself heard an animal crashing through the brush below the Big Cabin, and no yowling, but one explosive almost bird-like squawk, pitched high. The brush-crashing continued to the west and then quieted.

I related this to Greg and offered a guess, that perhaps a deer made the squawk, as they do make a wide variety of sounds, which few people ever hear. Deer bellow plaintively, for instance, and deer also bark, a dry, coughing, huffing bark. They also bleat like goats, but more softly.

This morning, at dawn, I decided to walk out west and higher to visit my burn pile. As I reached one of the linear masses of trail snow, I saw mountain lion prints from last night. They had not been there yesterday. They could only be from the animal which had been crashing around below the Big Cabin.

Mountain lion prints resemble those of a large dog, but there are no claw marks. These were well-preserved, as they had been made about eight p.m., and the coolness of the night had not melted much snow.

It was interesting to note that the lion had stepped in my own tracks of the afternoon whenever it could, and if opportunity offered to get out of the snow altogether, it took it. I photographed a few of the tracks; they are probably the most exact and complete lion tracks I have ever seen. For those who have Storer and Usinger's "Sierra Nevada Natural History," (U.C. Press, Berkeley), the tracks were exactly as depicted in the Mammals section, Figure 22, on page 328 of the 1973 printing.

So, I warned my family about the lion. Often they arrive home from work and school after dark, and nowadays, with the snow and all, it is a walk of a few hundred yards from car to cabin.

I tracked the lion quite a ways west on the Old Trail. Its tracks were only visible in the linear snow masses, and even then, where it had stepped exactly into one of my own boot-tracks, they were unrecognizable. Only in those few places where it was more or less forced to step in the unbroken snow, had it done so. Two nights in a row it has come near the cabins.

It is fun to observe animal tracks, and I have seen many fox trails, many squirrel paths, and even the tracks of ground-loving quail, written in the snow lately.

Giant Gap

2007-02-25T14:29:00.000-08:00

[written February 25, 2007]

I have posted a three-minute "Tour of Giant Gap" movie on YouTube, see

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=rufus16180339887

where it is currently the latest offering. By way of a sound track, I read an 1876 newspaper article about a visit to Lovers Leap.

Intractable Obstacles

2007-02-16T14:30:00.000-08:00

[written February 16, 2007]

What a day, what a wonderful day!

For weeks now, I have been saying, to myself, and to whomever, "I should take my chainsaw down the Green Valley Trail, and cut up some of the trees which fell this winter, and blocked it."

The weather has been nothing but perfect, well, most all of January was sunny, then followed some storms, some rain, and now, sun upon sun, a northeast wind, birds singing and chattering as though Spring is really here, and finally, and at long last, the weeks spent hunched in front of my computer, doing geometry, dividing the determinant of one square matrix by the determinant of another, oh glory of all glories, seemed far far too much. It was time to bust a move. Time to escape.

So I carefully cleaned the air filter on my chainsaw's carburetor, washing it in warm and soapy water, set it to dry, built a peanut butter sandwich upon some kind of blueberry-cinnamon bread, grabbed my ancient frame pack from the back outside wall of the little hexagonal cabin, threw in gloves, fully fueled chainsaw, ear protectors, hat, water, and sandwich, and, picking up some loppers at the last moment, I set off down the old old trail.

I had an ulterior motive. I wished to reach the High Ditch, which runs from the very east end of Green Valley to the very west end, with some fuel left in my saw, and work west along the ditch. This will make a fine trail, someday. About 80% has already been cleared. Some really hard work remains. So that was The Plan: conserve fuel, ignore this and that leaning manzanita, focus upon the various trees, and, having taken care of that most pressing business, proceed, in keeping with my own peculiar and cherished agenda: the High Ditch Trail.

The best-laid plans of mice oft gang a'gley, or whatever, and so also with my plans. For as I descended the ancient path, once the busy avenue for a thousand iron-shod mules (see how the bedrock bosses, rising from the bed of the trail, are rounded? human feet never wore them down, in that way), as I descended, I found manzanita which could not be idly passed, I found other trees, which I had forgotten, in my aged and forgetful way, and so, off came the pack, out came the saw, on went the gloves and ear protectors, and work was essayed.

Finally I reached the Big One, a two-foot-diameter Digger Pine fallen directly along the trail, only a few switchbacks below the Echo Tree.

The Echo Tree is an Incense Cedar, which, by its size, one would surmise could be but fifty years old. Except, it grows in plant-stunting serpentine, and is likely more than one hundred and fifty years old. It is scarcely fifty feet high, and a little over two feet in diameter, but I know from conversations with Bernie and Harriet Denton, that the Echo Tree was thriving in the 1930s, when they used to spend their summers in Green Valley. Those skinny little kids would swim the North Fork all summer long.

They called it the Echo Tree because a good shout to the west will echo back nicely, from the far wall of Ginseng Ravine. They considered it to mark exactly half the way to the North Fork. It provides welcome shade.

Bernie and Harriet would never walk the Green Valley Trail without each carrying a long thin stick, poking ahead to awake the rattlesnakes.

At any rate, passing the Echo Tree, I soon reached the Worst Offender, the aforementioned Digger Pine.

It did not look good. My saw has a sixteen-inch bar, the tree was on the beefy side of two feet through, and lay along fifty or so lineal feet of trail. Thus many cuts were called for, severing it into rounds, each round to be rolled away into the manzanita, below.

I tried one cut, at an advantageous spot, and was rewarded by being able to open ten feet of trail, rolling a massive log but a short distance.

That took care of the small end of the tree. Looking at the rest, I realized I would run my saw right out of fuel, and still not be done, making the other ten cuts needed.

I thought to myself, "This is just the job for Ron Gould's big chainsaw," and with that pleasant and rational thought, I packed up my gear and headed down and down and down.

Unfortunately, in only a little ways I came to one of the many charming Corridors of Manzanita which frame the old trail. This Corridor evoked the idea of an historic Gold Rush trail; one could almost see the bearded, red-shirted miners trudging along, hemmed in by the gnarled red branches.

And this Corridor had shrunk to dimensions even a deer might disdain. I could not even traverse the thing, with my chainsaw projecting from the top of my pack. There was really no choice. I had to work, and work hard.

So I cut and cut and cut, and pitched brush and pitched and pitched, and rested, and then cut and cut and cut and pitched and pitched and pitched.

I realized I was only a few yards above the Secret Side Trail to the Secret Old Miner's Cave in the Serpentine Fanglomerate of Ginseng Ravine.

Thus, I was only a few yards above yet another tree, this one a Douglas Fir, which fell ten years back, and is a real nuisance. There was no longer any chance of working the High Ditch. Too much fuel had been expended in the Corridor. So I waltzed down to the Secret Side Trail and attacked the Douglas Fir.

It was only sixteen inches or so in diameter, only a smidgin too large too cut through in one pass, and I made one cut, and then most of second, which pinched shut on me before I could finish, so I made a third cut between the two, which would have left me with two four-foot lengths to roll out of the way. Well within my capabilities.

An inch or so before the third cut was completed, my saw ran out of fuel.

What followed would have provided some good entertainment, had anyone been there to see.

I went in search of levers, confident I could just break the remaining wood in the second cut, and snapped one hefty, yet too-rotten, branch after another. Did I quit? Oh no! I just kept on scouting around for bigger and better levers. I found some. Using pieces of broken levers, I could lift the one free end an inch at a time, and shove the broken lever pieces underneath. I gradually, gradually, moved the free end full sixteen inches, to the accompaniment of various cracking sounds from the second-cut-which-had-pinched-shut-on-me. But it never broke.

Many a time I lay full flat on the ground, grabbing whatever was handy, and used all the power in my legs to try to move the eight-foot log that one last inch which would break the pinched cut.

To no avail.

I found natural wedges and used boulders to pound them into the pinched cut, which had opened considerably, the pinched cut which needed so very little to break that last vestige of solid wood.

To no avail.

Again and again I lay on the ground and strained with my legs. Again and again I pounded the ad hoc wedges deeper. Again and again I levered the free end up, or to the side, shimming it and chocking it in various ways, and using small boulders, with near-incredible cleverness, as fulcrums. Or fulcri.

To no avail.

I knew that, once in a blue moon, when the saw ran out of gas, I could start it up again for a few seconds. So I tried that.

To no avail.

At last, sweaty, dirty, and even leafy, with ants climbing all over me and through my hair, I had to give up. I left my wedges and levers just as they were. God. An hour, at least, I spent. I came within an inch of cutting through the damn log with my saw, and it ran out of gas. Did I give up? Yes.

But not without a fight.

Still, I lost. I lost that one. Darn it!

So, I trudged back up to my pack, finished pitching manzanita off the Corridor, loaded everything, and made a nice slow step-after-step ascent of the trail.

It was a day of bright sun and blue sky, of bright snow in the distance, of the fewest and scantiest of clouds, of a brisk northeast wind aloft, but the more typical upslope winds at the surface. I had a chance, of course, to ponder geology, for I really cannot stop pondering geology (it may well be a vice), and I concluded that the east wall of Moonshine Ravine, over towards Casa Loma, was really too high and too steep to be a result of mere stream incision, that it represented, in fact, a distinct record of the glacier which broke out of Canyon Creek into the North Fork canyon, either 65,000 years ago, or 130,000 years ago, or both; so that the gap, or pass, in the dividing ridge, should better be called Glacier Gap, than Hogback, which latter is its historic name, not that anyone remembers that that is so.

No, around here, the guiding concept of local history is, "I moved here in 1955, and you moved here in 1975; end of story."

Such was a wonderful if strenuous day in the great canyon of the North Fork of the American River.

Green Valley News

2007-01-15T14:31:00.000-08:00

[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.

The Mysterious Ming Sun Tai

2007-01-05T14:32:00.000-08:00

[written January 5, 2007]

***Curiosities Bearing Upon the History of Gold Run***

"At twilight, in the placer-scarred bed of Canyon Creek, South of Dutch Flat, Ming Sun Tai lighted a stick of incense from the glowing end of his fifty-cent cigar."

Over many years of enquiry into the history of Dutch Flat, Gold Run, etc., a number of curiosities have crossed my path. For instance, James Stewart of Gold Run, who once owned the "800 acres now for sale," comprising most of the Diggings, and the lower two miles of Canyon Creek, was not only born here, around 1885, but was a student of the local history, and amassed a large collection of materials, much of which was lost after his death, when his house was looted. Rumor had declared his fine old house full of gold nuggets.

This was around 1965 or so. Another Gold Run resident, hearing of this, walked out to the old Stewart place, in the Diggings, to see the looting for herself, and picked up a number of papers scattered in the mud.

Thirty years later, she let me see these papers. Among them was a letter written by Stewart, and dated to 1931, which described the discovery of gold at the head of Indiana Ravine, in 1851, and mentioned that the rich ground there was drift-mined, until, eventually, a Chinese company headed by one Tia Sing leased the old workings and hydrauliced away what remained.

Hence the Secret World, that isolated pit on the verge of the North Fork canyon, with its little stone cabin.

Now, one should not blindly trust historical sources, not even James Stewart, who grew up in this area. He was born too late to see hydraulic mining in full swing, although he did see it; in fact, there are photographs extant showing the young James Stewart, neatly dressed, watching a monitor at work, around 1895.

And the annual Report of the State Mineralogist, for 1896, records a Chinese company working at Indiana Hill. This can only be the very same company Stewart mentions, in his letter of 1931.

However, in 1896, this Chinese company could not have legally hydrauliced the old drift ground of the Secret World. Either we must imagine they operated illegally, or we must conclude that Stewart was mistaken. To me it seems much the more likely Stewart was mistaken, and that the Secret World was hydrauliced before the end of 1881, when the injunction against further discharge of mine tailings at Gold Run took effect.

That is, whatever the Chinese Company was up to in 1896, it was not hydraulic mining.

I wish I had known James Stewart. He seems quite an interesting man. He was the personal friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and of author Jack London, for instance. Could he have been acquainted, also, with author Hugh Wiley? The man who created the character of James Lee Wong, Chinese detective extraordinaire, Yale-educated James Lee Wong, a chemist?

Oh yes, James Stewart might have known Hugh Wiley; Hugh Wiley may well have stayed with the Stewarts at Gold Run, just as Jack London did.

At any rate, somehow, some way, Hugh Wiley came to know this area.

In 1921 Hugh Wiley wrote a short story titled "Joss." I will give a little excerpt, which the miracle of the Internet brought my way only this morning:

*******
At twilight, in the placer-scarred bed of Canyon Creek, South of Dutch Flat, Ming Sun Tai lighted a stick of incense from the glowing end of his fifty-cent cigar. The incense burned dull red at the origin of the twisted thread of smoke which spun in the early moonlight that lay on the Western slope of Moody Ridge. He set the stick of incense on a grey boulder and fixed it upright with three little pebbles.

"Pai seung tai," the Chinaman whispered. "In the love of a man's ancestors, he accomplishes the worship of the gods." He continued his course up the bed of Canyon Creek. A thousand feet farther on he lighted another stick of incense. To his left lay a half mile of open flat, slashed and bruised and welted from the conflict which had waged in the days when yellow gold lay from the grass roots to bedrock beneath.
*******

For more, see

http://books.google.com/books?q=%22Hugh+Wiley%22+%2B+Joss&btnG=Search+Books&as_brr=0

That Wiley used the phrase "gold from the grass roots to bedrock" shows that he really knew something about this area; for, there was no cap of "young volcanics" hiding the Eocene-age auriferous gravels, as was so common to the south around Foresthill. It was gold-bearing at the surface, and all the way down to the bedrock, hundreds of feet below.

So. For all these years I never even suspected that an author named Hugh Wiley existed.

Follow the link, and read Wiley's "Joss." It's not the highest of all faluting, but it's worth a read. The difference between a diamond and a sapphire can mean everything.

Miscellany

2007-01-02T14:34:00.000-08:00

[written January 2, 2007]

Happy new year, 2007 should be a good one!

The other day I approached my teenage son with an excellent idea: "I will first put the chainsaw in my old backpack; next, I'll put that old backpack on your broad shoulders; then, away we will go, down and down and down, into the depths of Green Valley, there to clear brush from the High Ditch."

To which he replied in a series of rather emphatic and mostly monosyllabic negatives, scarcely comprehensible, exclaimed in his curious teenage slang.

I decided not to press the issue, just then. Perhaps a negative would ripen into a maybe. A day later I recalled that the Green Valley Trail itself is getting so badly overhung by manzanita, that this business of carrying chainsaws in backpacks is maybe not an idea worthy of the brightest star in the heavens. So I rephrased my Plan: now he would carry the chainsaw a short distance, very short, really, and I would cut the gnarled deep red branches, and he would toss them off the trail.

Another series of foreign-sounding exclamations, all negative. Sigh.

So this morning I put the damn saw in the damn pack, and carried it down to the uppermost bad section all by myself. I worked over a reach of about two hundred yards and achieved something, less than I had imagined, better than nothing. The day was grey and cool and good for trail work.

Ron Gould suggests that we should round up a real work party and hit the whole trail. A good idea. The manzanita is getting worse and worse in a number of different trail reaches. Supposing we were to carry some of the dratted garbage up and out, from the end of the West Trail, down by the river, well, a frame backpack is the best tool for garbage, and the manzanita would drag and catch and claw at our packs and turn an already tiresome task into a bitter fight. So a bit of manzanita trimming is definitely in order. There are, also, one or two new trees down on the trail, which need cutting into pieces before they can be moved.

Life is more than trails and saws.

Music, music, music. Antonio Carlos Jobim! I rec'd a CD for Christmas, titled "Elis & Tom," the amazing Elis Regina singing the songs of the amazing Tom Jobim. One song especially excited my interest, Águas de Março, or Waters of March; here Jobim joins Elis in a duet. I Googled around in search of more information, for it seemed such an exceptional performance, and found a video of the actual recording session, in Los Angeles, in 1974!

What? How could that be?

It was on YouTube, of which I had heard but not seen. I naturally avoid such sites because I have such a poor internet connection, it takes forever to download content. For the Waters of March, however, forever was fine. I waited, I waited, I waited, and at last I watched.

Really really great!

So. I saw that anyone in the world can upload videos to YouTube. I quickly assembled a few short pieces of geometrical animations I had made years ago. See

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=rufus16180339887

The above page also contains a link to the Águas de Março video, which I highly recommend, especially if you like Brazilian music.

The Rarest Erratics

2006-12-06T14:35:00.000-08:00

[written December 6, 2006]

The rarest glacial erratics are to the west, away from the high country, away from any obvious evidence of glaciation. They are old; but how old?

From about 5,500 feet in elevation and up, one sees abundant signs of the most recent, "Tioga" glaciation, which ended a scant 12,000 years ago. But the Tioga is only one of many. It is thought that, over the past 800,000 years, glacial climates have dominated, with warm "interglacial" climatic episodes (like today's climate) comprising as little as 10% of the total. And it has long been understood that the most recent glaciation of magnitude, the Tioga, was preceded by earlier, more intense glaciations.

By 1975 I was much on the alert for signs of these older glaciations. Such signs are not too easy to find, here on the west slope of the Sierra, where very abundant rainfall and snowfall tend to blur moraines into formless glacial till, and eventually, strip away that till altogether.

When glaciation takes place, there is a "firn line," usually imagined to be a contour line of fixed elevation. Above this elevation, snow accumulates into glacial ice; below this elevation, it may snow and snow aplenty, but it melts away faster than it accumulates, over the course of years.

So there is a zone of ice accumulation above the firn line, and a zone of ice ablation, below the firn line.

Of course, valley glaciers flow down below the firn line; so, for instance, we might reasonably place the Tioga firn line at 5,500 feet, but also reasonably expect to find that the valley glaciers, which formed "distributaries" for the ice constantly building above the firn line, to extend to significantly lower elevations. For instance, Tioga ice may have reached down the South Yuba to near the town of Washington, and down the North Fork American to near Humbug canyon. These locations are down near 2,500' in elevation.

One subtlety about the firn line is that it will run higher on slopes with southern exposures, and lower on slopes with northern exposures. Hence if it is 5,500' on southern exposures, it may be at only 5,000 feet on northern exposures. Now, our coniferous trees can be very sensitive indicators of climate, and microclimate.

Take the White Fir, Abies concolor. Its principal range or locus of occurrence is between 5'000 and 6'000 feet, where it often grows in nearly pure stands. Hence, it occurred to me away back when, the main population of White Fir could be used as a proxy for the lower, western extent of Tioga ice.

And this works out rather well. These White Firs often grow directly on Tioga-age glacial till.

But the White Fir is very sensitive to climate. On warm slopes with southern exposures one may not find any White Fir until one reaches 6,000', but on cold slopes, or especially, down in shady canyons or ravines, one can find the White Fir down to 4,000', and occasionally, still lower.

Blurring one's focus, then, one could take this approach: we lack direct evidence, let us say, of glaciation, at such-and-such a place; there is no till, no moraine, no exposed bedrock, and no glacial striae. We know, let us say, that the *main populations* of White Fir roughly coincide with the Tioga firn line, and we know that prior glaciations were more extensive. But those prior glaciations would have been subject to the usual microclimatic variations in their firn lines, higher on warmer slopes, lower on colder slopes and in shady canyons.

Hence one could take the tack of letting the White Fir once again stand as a proxy for these older firn lines, not in its principal locus of population, but in its western outliers. These more western, straggling populations of White Fir could help mark the extent of the earlier glaciations.

In "Mudflows, Incorporated" I described the sequence of andesitic lahars capping Moody Ridge. The top of the ridge, the top of these mudflows, is just above the 4,160-foot contour. A goodly number of White Firs grow up there, where the gentle slopes of the uplands trap cold air at night. On the adjacent south-facing slopes, however, dropping away into the North Fork, cold air flows away freely, and the White Fir disappears; whereas on the also-adjacent north-facing slopes, the White Fir remains an important component of the forest.

I made these observations in August of 1975, at which time I also found one glacial erratic, only a little below the summit of Moody Ridge, on the northern slopes, facing the freeway, I-80, and Canyon Creek. The erratic was a lone boulder of granite, six feet long, the one and only boulder of granite among ten thousand boulders of andesite.

The bedrock in this area is all serpentine and metamorphic rock of various stripes; whereas the nearest body of granite is ten miles away to the northeast. Hence to see granite is to see something quite out-of-place. There is very little to no granite involved in the ancient Eocene river channels in this area, either (for, the subtropical climate which prevailed then seems to have acted to rot whatever granite boulders there may have been in the sediments, into sand and clay).

Now, I am a cautious man. I could not discount the possibility that one of the andesitic mudflows, which predated the glaciations of the Pleistocene, had itself swept up this granite boulder, and carried it down here to Moody Ridge.

Were I to accept the boulder at face value, as a glacial erratic, I would have to accept that a valley glacier came down Canyon Creek itself, and that this valley glacier was 500 feet thick or more.

I hoped to find other erratics, and bodies of till, but I did not.

It happens that the upland surface of Moody Ridge resumes to the northeast, on nearby Casa Loma Ridge, less than a mile away. Between the two is a gap or pass, which is directly above the Eocene-age "Nary Red" channel. There is, then, a thicker-than-usual section of the "Young Volcanics" of the Superjacent Series here, filling the old Nary Red valley.

It would make sense that a valley glacier, flowing down Canyon Creek, might have helped create this gap, or pass, in the ridge dividing Canyon Creek from the North Fork canyon.

But I am a cautious man. I had noted, in 1975, that in the Gold Run area, these same Young Volcanics had been stripped away, exposing the Eocene river channel of the Tertiary Yuba, below. What erosive mechanism could account for the disappearance of two or three hundred feet of rhyolite ash beds and andesitic lahars? Could my putative pre-Tioga Canyon Creek glacier have been at work in Gold Run?

I never liked *that* idea, but, being a cautious man, I have still not ruled it out. My own instinct was then, and remains now, that the weakness of the volcanic layers, combined with the beyond-normal quantity of groundwater within the broad confines of the Tertiary river valley, had somehow acted to remove the volcanics.

I imagined the Tertiary channel to contain beyond-normal groundwater partly because the underlying bedrock of the Subjacent Series would have itself tended to feed groundwater towards the center of the ancient valley.

But if I apply this rather diffuse model to the Nary Red channel, between Moody Ridge and Casa Loma Ridge, then why invoke glaciers at all? The mysterious pass could be the "same old story" of already-weak volcanic strata further weakened by an excess of groundwater.

And one lone granite boulder could not be enough to demonstrate a robust Canyon Creek valley glacier extending west to, say, between the Alta and Dutch Flat exits on I-80. No, one strange boulder from a strange land is not nearly enough.

There were various other clues, though, which suggested that such a glacier had existed: on the northeast end of Moody Ridge, cliffs of the "cement stratum" of andesitic mudflow are exposed. This a rarity, for, despite the seeming toughness of the Cement Stratum, it is very rarely directly exposed, below and west of the Tioga ice. Higher and to the east this same stratum, or its close analogues, are wildly well-exposed. But here, near the 4,000-foot contour, soil-forming processes outpace erosion, and keep the cement stratum well-hidden. Only the very steepest slopes, subject to mass wasting in the form of minor landslides and slumps, exhibit real outcrops, and these outcrops are typically scattered and small, and do not convince one that one is even seeing the Cement Stratum (the outcrops can easily look like mere boulders, not the massive and undissected lahar itself).

This tendency of the Young Volcanics, even in their most resistant strata, to hide themselves beneath a mantle of soil, is frustrating. Roadcuts are often the only way one can assure oneself just what is what, down here, below and west of the Tioga ice. In particular, the old strata of rhyolite ash, beneath the andesitic lahars, are almost never directly exposed. The rhyolite ash is not only covered by deep soils, but boulders of andesite have rolled down from the lahars above, so all one sees are these andesitic boulders, not the rhyolite itself.

Hence it seemed potentially significant that actual cliffs of the Cement Stratum are exposed on the northeast prow of Moody Ridge, facing directly into the gap or pass above the Eocene channel. I also noted, in 1975, that minor outcrops of the underlying rhyolite ash exist, also facing northeast across this same Eocene channel.

In 1976, while exploring Green Valley, I found huge boulders of this same stratum of rhyolite ash (it is the closest of all the local strata of rhyolite ash, to being a bona fide welded tuff), well above the river, concentrated just where a ravine leaves the steep slopes of serpentine, above, for the moderate slopes of glacial outwash, below. This ravine heads up in this same Eocene-age Nary Red Channel.

But what mechanism could have brought these huge boulders over a mile from their source, into Green Valley?

To me it seemed extremely likely that the rare cliffs of the Cement Stratum, the rare outcrop of the Welded Tuff, and the very very peculiar "region of giant tuff boulders" in Green Valley, all pointed to glacial ice flowing down Canyon Creek, and breaking out of the creek's own proper valley to flow south into the North Fork canyon. It is not impossible that the ice made it all the way down to the river, but if the Canyon Creek glacier were of *that* magnitude, why, the North Fork glacier itself could have reached down to Green Valley.

But I am a cautious man. If there was a Canyon Creek glacier big enough to rip through the Nary Red pass, in effect, creating the pass, and big enough to bulldoze huge blocks of rhyolite ash, fifteen feet through, down into Green Valley, then where are the moraines, and if no moraines are left, from the long blurring of erosion, where is the till? I could find none.

That I could find no till, and I still can't find any to this day, does not mean it is not here. It could be quite well-disguised. For instance: almost all of Canyon Creek to the east and upstream, up-ice, down which my putative glacier would have flowed, is incised into the Young Volcanics. Now, it is reasonable to expect that this ice was flowing from points still farther east, where there is granite exposed. So, if there is till from this glacier, there could be, and maybe should be, granite boulders in that till.

On the other hand, suppose very very few granite boulders were along for the ride, in the Canyon Creek glacier; the glacier would in any case have been quarrying the andesitic lahars, and whatever tills are left, will be made of andesitic material, and, most problematically, these andesitic tills will be resting, quite often, directly upon andesitic lahars, which in turn are subject to deep soil formation, so that one sees a smattering of andesitic boulders embedded in soil, and from experience one deduces that under that soil is the lahar itself.

But one could deduce wrongly; that same smattering of andesitic boulders embedded in soil could quite easily be a glacial till, perhaps only a few feet thick, mantling the andesitic lahar underneath.

Yesterday I went in search of that granite boulder I saw back in 1975. I also wished to use GPS to identify the elevation of the top of the Cement Stratum.

I did not find the boulder, but the steep slope to which it clung was logged in 1977 and 1978, and bulldozed skid trails criss-cross the steep slopes. Countless tons of topsoil have been displaced due to these 1977-78 skid trails. Apparently we Americans are so rich in soil, we can just throw it away.

I walked to the top of the northeast-facing cliffs of the Cement Stratum, and GPS showed the elevation to be about 4010'. Above the Cement Stratum is my Stratum of Big Boulders, and I followed up the spine of the ridge into this higher layer. This Stratum of Big Boulders seems to be, really, just the basal part of the Stratum of Rotten Mudflow, which forms the uppermost lahar in the andesitic sequence, in this immediate area.

I had walked this bouldery spine many times since 1975, but yesterday I was very pleased to find something new: a small granite boulder, perhaps two to three feet in diameter, visibly weathered and old-looking, compared to the Tioga-age granite erratics one often sees farther east and higher in elevation, as for instance near Emigrant Gap.

So. Granite Boulder #2. Of course, there is still nothing to show that it was not brought down with a lahar, that it was a glacier what done it, but I have never yet seen a granite boulder embedded in a lahar, here at Moody Ridge. They do exist elsewhere, for instance, a little west of Blue Canyon, along the railroad, are some granite boulders embedded in a lahar; and although rare, I have seen a few here and there, in the higher elevations.

I was excited to find Boulder #2. I dropped down the north side, off the bouldery spine of the ridge, and followed skid trails down to Moody Ridge Road. I examined hundreds of boulders torn up by the logging, all andesite. And then I found Granite Boulder #3.

It looked very much as I recalled Granite Boulder #1, which I last saw in 1976 or 1977, being about six or eight feet long, and four or five feet thick. However, it was not in the same place, and was pretty clearly in its natural spot, undisturbed by skid trails. It was so well covered in moss I could not be sure it was granite, but, kicking away the moss, I was able to break off a dirty flake a foot across, and then break that flake, and I saw that, yes, it is granite.

Having observed three granite boulders in the near vicinity of the Nary Red pass, I am not so cautious, now, and I declare that:

*******
Once, if not many times, a glacier flowed down Canyon Creek, and once or several times this glacier was at least 500 feet thick, or, more pertinently, its top was at least as high as 4100' in elevation, near Moody Ridge. This glacier (or glaciers) broke through the ridge dividing Canyon Creek from the North Fork, creating the Nary Red Pass, and bulldozing huge blocks of rhyolite tuff into Green Valley. This glacier also broke out of Canyon Creek to the north, deepening the pass or gap near Lake Alta, and leaving the rare outcrops of rhyolite tuff exposed, near that lake. From the degree of weathering of the granite boulders, and the degree of weathering of the rhyolite boulders in Green Valley, and the degree of weathering of the rhyolite outcrops near Lake Alta, and the degree of weathering of the rhyolite outcrops flanking the Nary Red Pass on Moody Ridge, all of which degrees suggesting age but not "great age," I attribute the most recent Canyon Creek glacier to the Tahoe II glaciation, of approximately 65,000 years ago.
*******
If not Tahoe II, then to Tahoe I, ~130,000 years ago, do I turn. It is quite possible that several distinct glaciers broke through these passes, for instance, the Sherwin Glaciation of about 800,000 years ago, or the McGee Creek of ~1.3 million years ago; but I cannot accept that either of these older glaciations could have left these fairly sound and only slightly weathered granite boulders.

Why, one might ask, was this Canyon Creek glacier so eager to break out of the confines of Canyon Creek? I answer, because the valley of Canyon Creek narrows to a gorge between the Alta and Dutch Flat exits on I-80. This would have inhibited passage of the ice, which would have backed up upon itself, deepening until it was able to break through the two divides.

Actually, both passes, the one near Moody Ridge and the one near Lake Alta, are linked to the same Eocene-age (and also intervolcanic), Nary Red Channel. The southern pass connects Canyon Creek to the North Fork American, the northern, "Lake Alta" pass connects Canyon Creek to the Bear River.

After discovering Granite Boulder #3 I walked north to Casa Loma Ridge, and climbed it, searching for more granite erratics, but finding none. I used my GPS to locate the top of the Cement Stratum at about 4020', or about ten feet higher than at the northeast corner of Moody Ridge.

Although I have walked around Lake Alta and explored nearby ridges and swales several times over the years, I have never seen a granite boulder there. If my hypothesis about a Canyon Creek glacier breaking through both passes is correct, there ought to be at least one or two such granite boulders kicking around over that way.

I guess it's time for a fresh look.

OK, that's all for now folks, except, I will provide a limited bibliography, of works I have consulted over the years, below. For some of the best and most recent discussions of landscape evolution here in the Sierra, see the papers by Greg Stock and John Wakabayashi. My friend L.A. James has also made very significant contributions, although I disagree with his interpretation of the Tioga glaciation, among other things.

Bibliography:

Bateman, P.C. and Wahrhaftig, C., 1966. Geology of the Sierra Nevada. In: Geology of Northern California, Calif. Div. Mines and Geol., Bull. 190, pp.107-172.
Birkeland, P.W., 1964. Pleistocene glaciation of the northern Sierra Nevada, north of Lake Tahoe, California. J. Geol., 72: 810-825.
Blackwelder, E., 1931. Pleistocene glaciation in the Sierra Nevada and the Basin Ranges. Geol. Soc. Am. Bull., 42: 865-922.
Brewer, W.H., 1966. Up and down California in 1860-1864. Reprinted in: F.P. Farquhar (Editor), 3rd Ed. Univ. Calif. Press, Berkeley.
James, L.A., Harbor, J., Fabel, D., Dahms, D. and Elmore, D., 2002. Late Pleistocene Glaciations in the Northwestern Sierra Nevada, California. Quat Res., 57(3): .
Lindgren, W., 1897. Description of the gold belt: description of the Truckee Quadrange, California. U.S. Geol. Surv. Geol. Atlas, Folio 39; 1:125,000; 8 pp.
Lindgren, W., 1900. Description of the Colfax Quadrangle, California. U.S. Geol. Surv., Geologic Atlas, Folio 66; 1:125,000; 10 pp.
Lindgren, W., 1911. Tertiary Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California. U.S. Geol. Surv. Prof. Pap. 73, 226 pp.
Matthes, F., 1930. Geologic History of Yosemite Valley. U.S. Geol. Surv. Prof. Pap. 160, Wash, D.C., 137 pp.
Muir, J., 1873a. Discovery of glaciers in Sierra Nevada. Am. Jour. Sci., 3rd series, 5: 69-71.
Muir, J., 1873b. Explorations in the great Tuolumne Cañon, Overland Monthly. Reprinted in: A. Gilliam (Editor), Voices for the Earth: A Treasury of the Sierra Club Bulletin. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, CA.
Russell, I.C., 1889. Quaternary History of Mono Valley, California. U.S. Geol. Surv. 8th Ann. Rpt., Pt.1, Wash., D.C., pp. 261-394.
Stock GM, Anderson RS, Finkel RC. 2004. Pace of landscape evolution in the Sierra Nevada, California, revealed by cosmogenic dating of cave sediments. Geology 32: 193-196.
Wakabayashi J., Sawyer TL. 2001. Stream incision, tectonics, uplift, and evof the Sierra Nevada, California. Journal of Geology 109: 539-562.
Whitney, J.D., 1865. Geology of the Sierra Nevada. Geologic Survey of California, Geology, Vol.1, Calif. Legislature, CA, 498 pp.
Yeend, W.E., 1974. Gold-bearing Gravel of the Ancestral Yuba River, Sierra Nevada, California. U.S. Geol. Surv. Prof. Paper 772, Wash., D.C., 44 pp.