Rich Cross sent the following description of a recent exploration to some petroglyph sites in the Nevada County high country. Meadow Lake was the site of a major gold rush and a town grew up there in 1866, at nearly 7000' elevation, with hotels, a newspaper, and claims being filed every which way on the mineralized, gold-bearing quartz veins in the area. Some of the earliest accounts of skiing in the Sierra are from Meadow Lake.
I recelty found an 1866 magazine article describing this same area and hope to transcribe it for y'all sometime soon.
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Sometimes when I write about my trips, I feel like my four year old son, telling complete strangers in the grocery store about the waterfall he saw that day. "I saw a cool waterfall today!" he'll tell the clerk. I guess there's still some kid inside of me, thank god, because I still get giddy over my trips to the hills.... Plus, I like the exchange of information. Your descriptions of North Fork trips have given me a huge list of places I need to visit. I had a great trip yesterday. I started out with no firm plans, just wanted to check out the territory between Highway 89 north of Truckee and Bowman Lake. I've done a fair amount of walks south and west of Fordyce Lake, but never been in the Meadow Lake area. I took I80 through Truckee, then worked my way back via dirt, past Webber Lake. Arriving at Meadow Lake after a couple minor stops, I drove up the ridgeline east of the lake, hoping for good views of the Fordyce Creek drainage and beyond. The views were great, as expected, but not spectacular, due to too many trees (ever hear my lecture on why some clear-cuts are good, haha?). I descended back to the north side of Meadow Lake, then headed around to its outlet near Hartley Butte, still trying to get that spectacular view of Fordyce, et. al. I started to descent the "jeep trail" shown on the map just east of the Butte, but the rocks were getting bigger and sharper and I was sick of driving. Time to walk a bit.... As I got out of my truck, a big fat marmot ran over a nearby outcropping and hid. I wasn't aware marmots could be found this far north, I've never seen them outside of the Sequoia area. This sucker was so big and moving so fast that my first (wishful thinking) thought was wolverine. So I start climbing the butte and almost immediately cross a road, not shown on the maps, which ascends almost to the summit. I hate when that happens. I walked up to the top and found the view I was looking for. Words can't describe. Sitting there, watching the world go by, I recalled reference to the "Meadow Lake Petroglyphs." So after looking around some more, the most likely spot for this site appeared to be directly below me. Not on the way back to my truck, but still an interesting looking "granite planet," so what the hell, let's check it out. And I found them! Amazing, a classic Style 7 site and I found it on the first try! So I used up most of the memory on my camera taking pictures. Then an interesting-looking mushroom rock caught my attention, to the south, so I packed up and went to climb it. Cools views, but no ancient rock shelters like I'd been hoping to find. Well, time to return to the truck and head on down the road, but I didn't actually finish exploring the northern side of the petroglyph site. Obsessive compulsive that I am, I backtracked back north through the site again, down towards a small pond; then I found the main petro site! Very extensive, probably larger than the Donner Summit site, with the art inscribe not just in the reddish-pink rock, but also in a black-colored kind of desert varnish. Neat stuff, including a stick figure human that appeared genuine. There was more modern art, too, boneheads. Found some ugly-looking tailings fields with nasty little creeks draining them. Also a number of flooded holes in the ground, don't know if they were just prospect pits or actual shafts. Not a good place to bring my kids, I'm thinking. Certainly not a good place to walk backwards. I eventually found my way back to my truck and continued on down the road northwest, past Tollhouse lake (worst biting flies I've seen in years, mosquitoes as bad as that hike we went on together to the Palisade Creek site), and on down to Bowman. The closer I got to Bowman, the more people I encountered. Towards its dam I got stuck behind a Forest Circus cop and a guy towing a boat, neither of whom would pull over to let me by, even though we're going maybe 10mph. Well, I also recall a site being near the dam, and I know of a big granite outcropping which fits the description, so I might as well pull over and let the slowpokes go on their way. I started checking out the outcropping, and within 5 minutes I found the site. Unbelievable, how lucky I'm getting today. I found three different glyphs, each carved into a natural round inclusion (is that the right word?) on a fairly vertical surface, creating a picture frame effect. Pretty neat, something I haven't seen at the other sites. I spent another hour walking around, but didn't find any more. The trip home from there was uneventful, about 6:30pm, medium traffic, but moving fast. I avoid Sunday hikes because that Sunday night traffic scares the hell out of me. Take it easy, rc
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Showing posts with label Meadow Lake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Meadow Lake. Show all posts
Monday, July 12, 2004
Tuesday, October 7, 2003
Visit to Meadow Lake
On Monday Ron Gould and I made a visit to Meadow Lake, the site of a gold-mining boom town of the middle 1860s. This lake stands high on the divide between the South and Middle Yuba at nearly 7000' elevation. A low dam of dressed granite was made late in the 1850s to impound water for hydraulic mining, and the lake trends nearly north and south, draining south to Fordyce Creek, a major tributary of the South Yuba.
Nothing is left of the town, with its many buildings, saloons, hotels, stores and houses. Several wagon roads led to Meadow Lake, one from near what would be known as Cisco. The story of this town makes a fascinating chapter in local history. The gold is found in heavily mineralized areas which to my eye seem unusual, since they do not seem to be dominated by quartz. The gold proved too difficult to refine away from its binding mineral matrix, the boom ended abruptly, dozens of claims and thousands of stock certificates became instantly worthless, a fire swept off most of the buildings, and now, nothing. Just high rocky ridges, and high forested ridges, and sloping dry meadows, and a top-of-the-world feeling, with the granite massif of Old Man Mountain rising to the southwest.
Driving up Highway 80 eastbound, one gains several fine views of this same Old Man Mountain, a sort of grey half-dome-looking-thing. A glimpse near Nyack is followed by more sustained and closer views at Yuba Gap and just beyond. Like Red Mountain, Grouse Ridge, Black Buttes, Snow Mountain, and Black Mountain, Old Man Mountain is a "bedrock high," a topographically high part of the old, ancestral, pre-volcanic Sierra. Now that the glaciers have ripped up and torn away so much of the great plateau of andesitic mudflow and rhyolite ash, these old mountains have been redefined and reexposed. They are found in a rough line parallel to the Sierra crest, about five to ten miles southwest. Some stood too high to ever have been buried by the young volcanics, others were so buried, but only shallowly.
At any rate, Ron and I drove up to Highway 20, dodged a few miles down towards Nevada City, and picked up the Pacific Turnpike, one of the old wagon roads to Virginia City. One branch of this road began in Dutch Flat, another, in Nevada City. It crossed the Sierra at Henness Pass. We drove north across the South Yuba and, passing the side roads to Grouse Ridge etc., paused a minute at Windy Point, above a major tributary of the South Yuba called Canyon Creek. Here a trail drops away into the heavily-glaciated canyon and proceeds down towards the Yuba, near the town of Washington. We scouted around for the trailhead, and saw something which looked probable, tho unsigned and unmarked in any way. This trails runs along the base of the canyon for maybe seven miles before climbing to Windy Point.
Just east we passed Bowman Lake, an old hydraulic mining reservoir revamped by PG&E. This was once a huge meadow. In a few miles we turned south onto a road which climbs past Tollhouse Lake to finally reach Meadow Lake. Here some signs inform one of the town's history. One is a polished rock slab placed by the Clampers, a joking take-off on fraternal organizations like the Masons and Odd Fellows, dating nearly to the Gold Rush.
We had two main objectives: to find and explore a trail leading north from Meadow Lake down into the headwaters basin of the Middle Yuba, near Moscove Meadow; and to visit some petroglyphs just southwest of Meadow Lake.
Ron had seen this trail on several old maps. It is not shown on modern maps. By correlating the old maps to one another and then to the modern topographic map, we felt we had a good sense of its course. We had visions of some fine old path winding through ancient forest with ancient blazes cut into the trunks of the gigantic trees.
At the north end of Meadow Lake the dividing ridge separating the South and Middle Yuba has been torn down by the glaciers into a low pass. It looks much as though ice from the Fordyce basin, to the south, spilled north through the pass into the Middle Yuba. Here a topographic low in the pre-volcanic topography had accumulated especially thick sequences of andesitic mudflows, on the order of 1000' or more. All of the ridges nearby, and the pass itself, were carved from these mudflows or lahars.
As we approached the probably trailhead, in the very axis of the pass, we saw a road leading north into the Middle Yuba. We parked and scouted widely for blazes or any sign whatever of our trail; I went east, Ron west. We found nothing certain, except skid trails, stumps, log decks, roads, and OHV tracks.
Undaunted, we descended a couple hundred feet to a lower level. The nearly flat-lying strata of volcanics often find topographic expression in broad terraces. Again we scouted high and low and every which way. Rich forests of Red Fir, Western White Pine, and occasional Lodgepole Pine were interspersed with sloping dry meadows, with a precious few late-season wildflowers still gleaming with color here and there. I saw some asters and some Mustang Mint in bloom. Troops of birds threaded through the forest. Once again we found nothing of our old trail.
A still lower terrace level seemed to express the presence of a layer of welded rhyolite ash, probably the same "pink welded tuff" one sees exposed at many places in the upper North Fork American.
Eventually, we drove on down the road to Moscove Meadow, explored various side roads, and returned back up to the pass. We were struck by the almost universal extent of timber harvests in the area. Often many large trees remained, to the point one might well expect vestiges of a trail to persist; but the logging had been done with bulldozers swarming everywhere, plowing up the forest floor into grooves and ridges, and despite our best efforts, we never found even one blaze, or one scant inch of the trail itself. By constantly comparing our maps with the topography, we at last concluded that there was a good chance the main road had been cut directly into the line of the old trail. We had to leave it at that.
Returning to Meadow Lake, we parked near the southwest corner and followed an old trail through the woods, past several mining prospect pits, to an exposure of glaciated fine-grained granitoid rock threaded through with a million tiny dikes and veins of lighter rock, perhaps aplite. A small woodland pond nestled nearby, and Hartley Butte reared up darkly to the east. On this expanse of polished and striated rock are the petroglyphs. Here and there patches of a dark, almost black "varnish" had developed somehow on the smooth surfaces, and many of the petroglyphs were cut into these dark areas.
There were a wide variety of designs spread across a broad area. I was struck by the seeming absence of the "bear footprint" motif, and yet in general, the petroglyphs looked distinctly akin to those found elsewhere in the upper Yuba and American basins, a style which has been called "Sierran Abstract." These carvings are thought to date back before the advent of the bow and arrow, to between 1500 and 4500 years ago.
The Meadow Lake site is one of the largest, in terms of number of designs and areal extent. One projecting boss of rock was covered with circles and concentric circles. At other places, strict geometric patterns of triangles or ladder-like objects are found, or closely-spaced sets of curving lines, or star motifs. There is one design which looks as tho it was meant to depict a rattlesnake.
We spent a couple of hours wandering around the site, and resting on the sun-warmed rocks, until the sun lowered and the breezes began to bite shrewdly cold. We left via a road leading east and then north, to Webber Lake and a paved road breaking east to Highway 89. We had rejoined the line of the Pacific Turnpike. It had been a very nice day in the local high country. A longish drive took us to Truckee and I-80 which we followed west across the Sierra to our homes.
Nothing is left of the town, with its many buildings, saloons, hotels, stores and houses. Several wagon roads led to Meadow Lake, one from near what would be known as Cisco. The story of this town makes a fascinating chapter in local history. The gold is found in heavily mineralized areas which to my eye seem unusual, since they do not seem to be dominated by quartz. The gold proved too difficult to refine away from its binding mineral matrix, the boom ended abruptly, dozens of claims and thousands of stock certificates became instantly worthless, a fire swept off most of the buildings, and now, nothing. Just high rocky ridges, and high forested ridges, and sloping dry meadows, and a top-of-the-world feeling, with the granite massif of Old Man Mountain rising to the southwest.
Driving up Highway 80 eastbound, one gains several fine views of this same Old Man Mountain, a sort of grey half-dome-looking-thing. A glimpse near Nyack is followed by more sustained and closer views at Yuba Gap and just beyond. Like Red Mountain, Grouse Ridge, Black Buttes, Snow Mountain, and Black Mountain, Old Man Mountain is a "bedrock high," a topographically high part of the old, ancestral, pre-volcanic Sierra. Now that the glaciers have ripped up and torn away so much of the great plateau of andesitic mudflow and rhyolite ash, these old mountains have been redefined and reexposed. They are found in a rough line parallel to the Sierra crest, about five to ten miles southwest. Some stood too high to ever have been buried by the young volcanics, others were so buried, but only shallowly.
At any rate, Ron and I drove up to Highway 20, dodged a few miles down towards Nevada City, and picked up the Pacific Turnpike, one of the old wagon roads to Virginia City. One branch of this road began in Dutch Flat, another, in Nevada City. It crossed the Sierra at Henness Pass. We drove north across the South Yuba and, passing the side roads to Grouse Ridge etc., paused a minute at Windy Point, above a major tributary of the South Yuba called Canyon Creek. Here a trail drops away into the heavily-glaciated canyon and proceeds down towards the Yuba, near the town of Washington. We scouted around for the trailhead, and saw something which looked probable, tho unsigned and unmarked in any way. This trails runs along the base of the canyon for maybe seven miles before climbing to Windy Point.
Just east we passed Bowman Lake, an old hydraulic mining reservoir revamped by PG&E. This was once a huge meadow. In a few miles we turned south onto a road which climbs past Tollhouse Lake to finally reach Meadow Lake. Here some signs inform one of the town's history. One is a polished rock slab placed by the Clampers, a joking take-off on fraternal organizations like the Masons and Odd Fellows, dating nearly to the Gold Rush.
We had two main objectives: to find and explore a trail leading north from Meadow Lake down into the headwaters basin of the Middle Yuba, near Moscove Meadow; and to visit some petroglyphs just southwest of Meadow Lake.
Ron had seen this trail on several old maps. It is not shown on modern maps. By correlating the old maps to one another and then to the modern topographic map, we felt we had a good sense of its course. We had visions of some fine old path winding through ancient forest with ancient blazes cut into the trunks of the gigantic trees.
At the north end of Meadow Lake the dividing ridge separating the South and Middle Yuba has been torn down by the glaciers into a low pass. It looks much as though ice from the Fordyce basin, to the south, spilled north through the pass into the Middle Yuba. Here a topographic low in the pre-volcanic topography had accumulated especially thick sequences of andesitic mudflows, on the order of 1000' or more. All of the ridges nearby, and the pass itself, were carved from these mudflows or lahars.
As we approached the probably trailhead, in the very axis of the pass, we saw a road leading north into the Middle Yuba. We parked and scouted widely for blazes or any sign whatever of our trail; I went east, Ron west. We found nothing certain, except skid trails, stumps, log decks, roads, and OHV tracks.
Undaunted, we descended a couple hundred feet to a lower level. The nearly flat-lying strata of volcanics often find topographic expression in broad terraces. Again we scouted high and low and every which way. Rich forests of Red Fir, Western White Pine, and occasional Lodgepole Pine were interspersed with sloping dry meadows, with a precious few late-season wildflowers still gleaming with color here and there. I saw some asters and some Mustang Mint in bloom. Troops of birds threaded through the forest. Once again we found nothing of our old trail.
A still lower terrace level seemed to express the presence of a layer of welded rhyolite ash, probably the same "pink welded tuff" one sees exposed at many places in the upper North Fork American.
Eventually, we drove on down the road to Moscove Meadow, explored various side roads, and returned back up to the pass. We were struck by the almost universal extent of timber harvests in the area. Often many large trees remained, to the point one might well expect vestiges of a trail to persist; but the logging had been done with bulldozers swarming everywhere, plowing up the forest floor into grooves and ridges, and despite our best efforts, we never found even one blaze, or one scant inch of the trail itself. By constantly comparing our maps with the topography, we at last concluded that there was a good chance the main road had been cut directly into the line of the old trail. We had to leave it at that.
Returning to Meadow Lake, we parked near the southwest corner and followed an old trail through the woods, past several mining prospect pits, to an exposure of glaciated fine-grained granitoid rock threaded through with a million tiny dikes and veins of lighter rock, perhaps aplite. A small woodland pond nestled nearby, and Hartley Butte reared up darkly to the east. On this expanse of polished and striated rock are the petroglyphs. Here and there patches of a dark, almost black "varnish" had developed somehow on the smooth surfaces, and many of the petroglyphs were cut into these dark areas.
There were a wide variety of designs spread across a broad area. I was struck by the seeming absence of the "bear footprint" motif, and yet in general, the petroglyphs looked distinctly akin to those found elsewhere in the upper Yuba and American basins, a style which has been called "Sierran Abstract." These carvings are thought to date back before the advent of the bow and arrow, to between 1500 and 4500 years ago.
The Meadow Lake site is one of the largest, in terms of number of designs and areal extent. One projecting boss of rock was covered with circles and concentric circles. At other places, strict geometric patterns of triangles or ladder-like objects are found, or closely-spaced sets of curving lines, or star motifs. There is one design which looks as tho it was meant to depict a rattlesnake.
We spent a couple of hours wandering around the site, and resting on the sun-warmed rocks, until the sun lowered and the breezes began to bite shrewdly cold. We left via a road leading east and then north, to Webber Lake and a paved road breaking east to Highway 89. We had rejoined the line of the Pacific Turnpike. It had been a very nice day in the local high country. A longish drive took us to Truckee and I-80 which we followed west across the Sierra to our homes.
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