Sawbug V

Tuesday morning Catherine O'Riley and I drove out to the Euchre Bar Trail and set off down to the North Fork. This is one of two trails which lead to bridges across the river, the other being far upstream, above the Royal Gorge, at Palisade Creek. The Palisade bridge is relatively new, a little over twenty years old, I believe; but the Euchre Bar Bridge is old, and has seen multiple incarnations over the past 100 to 150 years. The most recent incarnation dates from the 1964 flood event, which must have torn out the previous bridge.

At the bridge, one can see abutments and massive iron pins or bolts of various descriptions from an older incarnation of the bridge, slightly downstream from the present bridge. I do not know when a bridge was first built there; I have a newspaper article describing a collapse of the bridge, in the 1890s, which plunged two men, a horse, and a mule into the river, forty feet below. I also have the diary of I.T. Coffin, a gold miner who lived up in the Texas Hill area at the time (1863), which implies that the bridge existed then.

The long existence of the bridge shows that the Euchre Bar Trail's importance had more to do with points farther up the canyon, than with Euchre Bar itself. As one follows the trail up the North Fork from the bridge, one passes many old mines. In about two miles the trail reaches Humbug Canyon.

At Humbug Canyon, or rather, immediately downstream, another bridge crossed the river, at Humbug Bar. Like Euchre Bar, Humbug Bar was a large deposit of glacial outwash sediments. Both were mined heavily, probably by multiple methods, including drift mining, ground sluicing, and hydraulic mining. The Humbug Bar bridge facilitated access both to mines up and down the North Fork on the north bank, but to what I call the Sawbug Trail.

The Sawbug leads up to a pass, at 4000' elevation, on Sawtooth Ridge; from there, the Sawtooth Trail follows the ridge northeast and connects with a variety of other trails, giving access to, for instance, the Texas Hill and Burnett Canyon mining districts, where I.T. Coffin lived from 1858 to 1864. So again, the bridge's importance had as much to do with the Sawbug Trail as with mere access across the North Fork to Humbug Bar.

The Sawbug does not show on many maps. I can only think of the ca. 1900 USGS Colfax Folio maps. In November 2002 Tom Molloy and I searched for the upper end of the Sawbug, and found it. We covered a lot of ground that day, both in quartering the slopes trying to follow the Sawbug down towards Humbug Bar, and then later, walking the rest of the way to the very end of Sawtooth Ridge, above the confluence of the North Fork and the North Fork of the North Fork. We managed to get stuck on the wrong side of a huge patch of manzanita, and, by accident, stumbled upon the Rawhide Mine Trail.

Whew! That was one long, tough bunch of walking. Sawbug I.

Last summer, I visited Humbug Canyon and the Dorer Ranch with Steve Hunter and friends, and scouted for the lower end of the Sawbug, beginning at the bridge site. I entirely failed. Sawbug II.

In the fall, Ron Gould and I visited the upper end of the Sawbug, clearing some nasty little fallen Knobcone Pines from the trail. We failed, as Tom and I had, the year before, to find the true line of the trail as it dropped away into the great canyon. Sawbug III.

Last week, I returned to Humbug Canyon, again with Steve Hunter and friends, and Catherine, Ron, Jerry Rein and I scouted from the bridge site, in search of the Sawbug. We found it, but lost it at a shallow ravine, followed game trails and old human trails east on a climbing contour, and then found it again. Ron and I explored both east and west along the trail, over a distance of almost half a mile, perhaps. A very nasty patch of manzanita prevented us from connecting back down to the bridge site. Sawbug IV.

Yesterday, the plan was to hike on up to Humbug Canyon from Euchre Bar, where Catherine would enjoy a leisurely swim and a visit to Danny and Grant, the caretakers at the Dorer Ranch, while I thrashed around in the hot sun and heavy brush, in hopes of finding the complete line of the lower part of the Sawbug, from the bridge, up to where Ron and I had been stopped by brush, last week. Sawbug V.

Sawbug V proved to be the absolute charm. I forded the river, and clambered up to the bridge site, on a "strath terrace" (a bedrock terrace cut when the canyon was choked with glacial outwash, say, 12,000 to 20,000 years ago) about 60 feet above the river. Immediately I was sweating and huffing and puffing. It was just past noon and the day was fairly hot. Twenty or thirty feet above the strath terrace of the bridge site, there is another strath terrace. From here I picked up faint traces of the trail, which soon entered a dense patch of young Douglas Fir. All these slopes were scalded by the 1960 Volcano Fire, and a distinct generation of manzanita and young conifers seeded in after the fire. Many of the larger trees survived that fire, but some did not, and the bleached white trunks of fire-killed Ponderosa Pines criss-cross the slopes.

I had lopped a corridor through the young Douglas Firs last week. The Sawbug was quite well-defined, although buried within this dense little grove of conifers. At the east end, a shallow gully is met, and the trail disappears beyond. Last week we had continued a climbing traverse to the east, had found various suspiciously well-trodden game trails, had discovered an old hard-rock mining prospect well to the east, and then Ron had spotted the Sawbug, above us.

Yesterday I followed much the same course as we had last week, and met with the same difficulties, following a game trail onto steep rocky slopes where it eventually petered out, and I climbed higher to a very well-defined game trail, in open, easy terrain. Yet this, we had later found, was too low to be the Sawbug. I set my pack down and began a methodical scouting of the slopes around me. Bearing west, I squeezed through a gap in the manzanita and live oak, and suddenly found the Sawbug, wide, well-defined, and almost hidden in live oaks and young conifers. I lopped down and west, and entered a more open area, in which the post-Volcano-manzanita had mostly died, leaving an impassable welter of stiff branches. Several pines were down in the area. I trusted to a well-stomped bear trail, and began to detect traces of the Sawbug beneath the dead brush. Following the bear trail up the hill, looping around a fallen pine, found an old mining claim corner monument near a large multi-trunked Canyon Live Oak, with a bear bed beside the monument, and continued down in search of the Sawbug. At first it eluded me, and I ended up on a narrow promontory overlooking the bridge site, around 250 in elevation feet below and to the south. Retreating north onto the main canyon wall, a very faint trail appeared beneath a welter of mostly dead bushes, and between live oaks with many side branches to lower levels.

If this was the Sawbug, it meant that there must be a switchback; for my sense was that I was right up the hill from the corridor-through-little-conifers section of the trail, that I had lopped last Wednesday. So, I forced a route through the maze of trees and bushes, and, sure enough, about a hundred feet below, I found myself at the east end of the corridor, in the shallow gully. The vegetation was so heavy above that it utterly hid all signs of the switchback.

I was about 90% certain that I had found the true line of the trail, and put the loppers to work while following it back up. Most of the iron-hard dead manzanita was too big and too much for me to take on, but I hacked out a few short reaches of the trail, and even, horror upon horror, made a couple of rock ducks to mark its course. There were times I could not come within twenty feet of the trail, not while wearing shorts and a T-shirt, anyway.

I followed back up the Sawbug to the game trail where I'd left my pack, and thought I saw the Sawbug enter an even denser and even larger patch of half-dead manzanita and fallen pines. There was no possibility of following the old trail itself. I walked to my pack, just below the manzanita patch, and climbed onto a fallen pine and walked up the hill right into the worst of the brush. Fortunately other fallen pines made for a zig-zag route which allowed me to find the Sawbug again, and it was plain that just this one patch of manzanita and the fallen pines could keep four or five strong workers busy for hours, just to open less than a hundred yards of trail. Striking up (north) and east, I found another "corridor" which Ron and I had lopped last week, and realized I was exactly where we had stopped, when following the Sawbug back down towards the bridge.

From here it was easy going up and east, except, I was verging upon a sunstroke or something, in the hot weather, fighting brush and lopping and walking up and down and every which way. Since the trail entered a grove of larger trees, with almost no brush, and good shade, I didn't push it, but made slow steady progress, and stopped to rest frequently.

I reach the sunny bunchgrass opening with the view across the North Fork into Humbug Canyon and the Dorer Ranch. This was close to the highest, easternmost point Ron and I had reached. I GPSed my location, and, seeing how far the Dorer Ranch was below me, and knowing the ranch to be nearly if not all of 200 feet above river level (roughly, 2000' in elevation, at Humbug Bar), I figured I must be 400 to 500 feet above the river. However, the GPS settled into a reading of 2350' elevation, with reasonable satellite coverage. Later, when I plotted my track on the Westville quadrangle, it came in a little higher, about 2400' at that grassy viewpoint, or 400 feet above the river. I would still think I was a mite higher yet.

The trail remained open and easy to follow, although there were many oak branches and little conifers lopped. The lop count rose into the hundreds, and again and again I sank to the ground to rest, not even bothering to remove my pack. It was hot. I could hear a group of people playing and swimming and hooting and hollering far below, on the river. I heard children, too.

Climbing east and north, the trail narrowed, and I began to worry I might have lost it, when I began to notice very old cuts in manzanita branches, made by a machete twenty or thirty years ago. Why, they might even date to the Volcano Fire itself, when fire crews would have traversed the canyon walls to knock down hot spots, after the main fire had swept through. This was reassuring. Also, a bear or bears had made frequent use of the trail, which is often a good sign.

Eventually I hit a nasty little patch of manzanita and collapsed in a heap. After resting, I left my pack behind, and, carrying only the loppers and my GPS unit, climbed on up the trail.

Soon even better signs that I was on the true line of the Sawbug appeared: massive dry-laid stone retaining walls, quite a few of them, bolstered the trail. I was crossing a broad ravine or steep valley, easily a quarter-mile across, itself riven by many smaller ravines and gullies, some with impressive expanses of water-polished rock, pointing to transient, occasional flood events in the rainy season. The trail sometimes leveled out a little in crossing these minor ravines, but all in all maintained a steady climb to the north and east. I crossed the main axis of the valley, and ventured a few hundred yards further. I could scarcely even lift my loppers and was soaked with sweat. Several hours had passed since I had left Catherine, at the river, and I had told her I would be no more than three hours. It was time to retreat.

I switched on the GPS for the return, to record the line of the Sawbug. I was surprised by how far back down the trail I had left my pack. It took twenty or thirty minutes to reach the bridge site; I had followed the Sawbug almost a mile, almost half-way to the pass on Sawtooth Ridge. I was scratched bloody by the brush, and dripping sweat, and a kind of lanky horse-fly besieged me the whole way down to the river, and followed me right across as I forded. I stripped off my clothes and dove into the deep pool by the bridge site, hoping the lanky biting fly would leave me be, once I was a little cleaner, but, no.

Catherine was gone, up visiting Danny and Grant, but I had no wish to add another climb to the day's outing. I had climbed the better part of 1000 feet above the river, on the Sawbug, and had over 2000 feet of climb to get back out via Euchre Bar. So, I lazed around beside Humbug Creek, drank Gatorade, and stayed in the shade. After half an hour or so I began to wish Catherine would return so we could start the long march out, and gathered my stuff and climbed up a little ways to save her the trouble of dropping all the way to the river to find me.

Almost immediately I heard an engine, and surmised that Danny was giving her a ride down from the ranch, on some kind of ATV. This proved to be the case. Soon we were hiking back down the canyon, and to us both, the climb up from Euchre Bar seemed longer than usual. We hit the top about 7:30; the sun was lowering, and we could see the very notch in Sawtooth Ridge where the Sawbug Trail meets the Sawtooth Trail, just falling into shadow, while the "teeth" of the ridge were still up in the sunshine.

It had been another great day, but a greatly strenuous day, on the North Fork. Much progress had been made in establishing the route of a long-abandoned historic trail. Perhaps one day people will hike that trail again; perhaps, like I.T. Coffin, they will follow up Sawtooth Ridge, enjoying the awesome views of two awesome canyons. I hope the day will come when Sawtooth Ridge and the canyons on either side will be managed for wildlands and open space, and motorized vehicles will be blocked off well up the line of the ridge to the northeast, perhaps near the head of Wilmont Ravine.

To ever achieve this, Tahoe National Forest must acquire the private lands along Sawtooth Ridge, most of which belong to Sierra Pacific Industries, famous for clearcutting.

Ultima Humbug

Catherine O'Riley and I met Sunday morning for an expedition to Euchre Bar and beyond, to Humbug Canyon. High clouds filtered the sun at first, but the day had started mild and promised to ripen into warmness, which it did. The clouds soon cleared to a spotless blue.

We expected to find the inimitable Julie on what she had called the High Ditch Trail, and noted her truck near the trailhead. For those unfamiliar with the area, the Euchre Bar Trail descends about 1800' to the North Fork, from the vicinity of Iron Point, roughly, east of Dutch Flat and Alta. From the eastbound I-80 Alta exit, turn right and immediately left onto the frontage road (named Casa Loma Road), and in something like a mile, hang a right, leaving the frontage road, and crossing Canyon Creek on a narrow bridge. This is still Casa Loma Road. Pursuing a twisted course, it crosses the railroad and passes very recent, and, I think very regrettable subdivisions and developments, before entering TNF lands in a grove of tall old pines, and then suddenly breaking out into full view of the canyon. Giant Gap is to the west, the Sierra Crest to the east, Green Valley directly below. A spring issues into a metal trough, and once TNF's "Casa Loma" campground was here.

This is also the site of one of the more significant, and yet most distrupted and disturbed, Indian sites in the area. With its tremendous views and year-around, all-day exposure to the sun, it is a classic. It has been routinely dug and looted by artifact hunters for many decades. The site extends over a large area, and may even be taken to include a generalized zone of heavy use and occupation which runs west onto Moody Ridge. A complex of springs and associated meadows, related to a layer of rhyolite volcanic ash, runs all along the rim of the North Fork canyon here. The railroad rounds a long curve, cut into the serpentine bedrock, below the spring; this is famous Eureka Cut, the subject of many old photographs taken during and just after the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad, in the 1860s. Why "Eureka"? What was found, with such fervor, as Archimedes once found the principle of specific gravity? Gold? No.

Giant Gap and Green Valley were found, in a word, a few words, what would be known as the Great American Canyon. To call the view of Giant Gap awe-inspiring understates the case. For a time in the 1860s there was a movement to change the name to Jehovah Gap, and so one sometimes sees the old photos labeled.

A friend of mine, well-acquainted with the basics of local archeology, agrees that the flakes of stone marking the Indian site here exhibit enough in the way of fine-grained quasi-basaltic rock, to justify at least the tentative hypothesis, that occupation here may date back all the way to Martis Complex times, 1500 to 4500 years ago. The many flakes of chert also found at Casa Loma speak to more recent, Nisenan Maidu occupation, as well.

At any rate, we cruised past without stopping, crossed the tracks again to the south, losing the pavement in the process, and wound on down to Iron Point. Those who have been on this email list for a few years will recall an issue which reared its ugly head, involving a certain 40-acre parcel directly above Iron Point and the Euchre Bar trailhead. This parcel is flanked by TNF lands on three sides, and runs from Iron Point on the south, to the railroad, on the north. To reduce property taxes, the owner had it enrolled in the special, non-residential Timber Production Zone zoning, back in the 1970s. Although obstensibly this required a formal timber management plan, Placer County never requires any actual plan or actual work in such cases.

A woman from the Bay Area began negotiating the purchase of this 40-acre parcel a few years ago, contingent upon obtaining a Special Use Permit from Placer County to build a residence commanding the widest possible view of this so remarkable canyon, directly above the historic scenic overlook of Iron Point, and the Euchre Bar Trail. She needed a house in order to "manage the timber." Right.

Briefly, she was at first granted the permit; for why would Placer County refuse residential development, on a parcel with non-residential zoning, within one of the greatest canyons of California? Several of us decided to appeal the decision to the Planning Commission, requiring a filing fee of several hundred dollars. We appealed, then, and won: the Commission denied the Special Use Permit. The viewmonger appealed *that* decision to the Board of Supervisors, who calmly overturned the appeal and approved the permit.

Thus far no house has appeared on the sun-scalded, fire-swept ridges above Iron Point, but the oh-so-wonderful Timber Management has begun. The elfin manzanita which occupied these steep, almost soil-less slopes has all been ground down to the ground; a fence is a-building along the road, right at the fork to Iron Point, and "No Trespassing" signs warn us all away.

An request to Tahoe National Forest to take an interest in this issue met with some sympathy from the Forest Supervisor, Steve Eubanks, who at first agreed, in principle, that this 40-acre parcel might well be included among the land acquisition targets in the North Fork canyon--as well it might, considering its proximity to the historic scenic overlook of Iron Point, and to the historic and very popular Euchre Bar Trail, which begins there. However, TNF quickly retreated into a hands-off stance.

So, it was somewhat shocking to see the fence and the shredded manzanita and the no trespassing signs. Business as usual in Parcel County. We parked and set off down the trail.

Euchre Bar is just below the confluence of the main North Fork and its largest tributary, the North Fork of the North Fork. A bridge, in various incarnations, has spanned the river here for over one hundred years. The trail at first follows a ridge south, then drops away east onto one face of the ridge, and makes long switchbacks through a forest dominated by oaks, to the river. A trail forks away west to Green Valley at the top of this east-facing switchback sequence, but is faint and difficult to follow.

Near the river one passes an old house site, with a cellar and some remnants of stone and concrete work near its entrance. I believe a man named Ford lived there, around one hundred years ago. An inscription in concrete, at the entrance, may be read with some patience; as I recall, it reads "Enter Friend" and below, "Euchre Bar."

Euchre is the name of a card game popular with the 49ers.

From the house-site down to the bridge one passes a number of mining areas, in patches of glacial outwash which assume almost Green Valleyean proportions. An acquaintance hailed me, returning to the trail from one of these mining areas. Mike Perry had joined us last year for a romp down the Canyon Creek Trail. He had dropped down to Euchre Bar just for the morning. After a chat we bade him goodbye, crossed the bridge, pausing a little for photographs, and climbed to what I figured to be the High Ditch Trail, where Julie would be found.

This ditch leads up to the confluence and well beyond; it drew from the North Fork, and took its waters down the canyon to the Green Valley Blue Gravel mine. It crossed the North Fork on a flume right in the gorge between Euchre Bar and Green Valley. It is this ditch which inspired the HOUT, that is, the Giant Gap Survey, the 1890s scheme to deliver North Fork water to San Francisco. So in a way, we were on the HOUT.

We followed the old ditch-line upstream. For the most part is just a bench cut blasted out of the solid rock, sometimes on steep cliffs. The cut supported a wooden flume. We passed the confluence and soon reached an especially cliffy area where no bench cut was even attempted; they must have grappled the flume to the cliff using cables, and supported it by heavy timbers springing from tiny notches in the rock. These east-facing slopes are all green with moss and rife with springs, while directly across the North Fork are the sun-blasted, dry, mossless steeps of Sawtooth Ridge.

We retreated to the confluence and admired the roaring, brawling white water of the North Fork of the North Fork. The North Fork itself, although carrying more water, seems to carry less, as it quietly turns the corner in a deep green pool. Where was Julie? Probably long gone, in her usual hurry to reach ever-more-distant points. After a time we shouldered our packs, retreated to the main trail, and headed for Humbug Canyon.

The trail holds a nearly level line, a couple hundred feet above the North Fork, occasionally bucking up higher as a zone of more resistant rock has made for a higher cliff than usual, flanking the river. The rock is all the ancient metamorphosed sediments of the Shoo Fly Complex, fully 400 million years old, turned up on edge, and threaded with quartz veins. There are many many hard-rock mines and prospects in this area, and many, too, are the little patches of glacial outwash sediments which were worked off to varying degrees. Something like two miles brings one to Humbug Canyon, where the trail suddenly widens into a faint road. The old Dorer Ranch is just above. We stopped there, having seen only one down-crushed Shooting Star, of the early-blooming species called Mosquito Bills, to indicate that anyone at all had preceded us on the trail.

Lunch was in progress when Julie strode swiftly into view, coming down the trail from points beyond. It developed that she had meant a different High Ditch Trail than I had thought, on the south side of the river; she had gone there, duly worked away lopping brush from the canal berm, as planned, looked for us, waited for us, finally figuring we had cruelly left her behind for the glories of Ultima Humbug. So she whipped on up there, passing us while we were at the confluence, below the trail. She had crushed the Shooting Stars.

So we all rested and ate and, as Julie had a schedule to adhere to, more or less hurried back to Euchre Bar so that she could show us her High Ditch Trail, before leaving us in the dust in a pure gallop up the Euchre Bar Trail.

At the house-site she led us on a trail which contoured through a hollow and then dropped to the line of the ditch. A much more direct trail, tho overgrown, connects this ditch to the Euchre Bar Trail, just a little ways below the house site. The reason she calls it the High Ditch is that, much lower and near the river, the line of yet another old ditch can be seen from the bridge, leading up towards the confluence. This "Low Ditch" may record an effort to turn the whole North Fork from its bed, in order to work down to the bedrock floor of the channel, where the coarse gold lives. Its line seems too low to be of much use for working the glacial outwash terraces of Euchre Bar.

The High Ditch, tho, is high enough to supply water for mining the outwash terraces, and that is undoubtedly its purpose. Some little hydraulic mining occurred here in the 1860s and 1870s, and this High Ditch must have provided the water, which it took from the North Fork of the North Fork, well upstream.

The thing is rather large, for an in-canyon ditch, built to mine sediments of rather limited quantities. We followed it along for a quarter-mile. It is quite a lovely thing, and has clearly been heavily used as a trail, over the long years since it carried any water. The gradient of the North Fork of the North Fork is notably steeper than that of the main river, and the level of the ditch seemed to be rather quickly converging upon that of the river below. We wondered whether it might extend up to the Rawhide Mine itself. Julie pointed out a ridge another quarter-mile ahead, where the ditch was still well above the river.

We decided it would be a good thing to return to this High Ditch Trail next Saturday, and see about following it right up to its beginning. Those interested in joining us should contact me. While not as bad as the Green Valley Trail, the Euchre Bar Trail is strenuous, and there is a tremendous amount of poison oak over all that area. To follow the High Ditch Trail will require some scrambling, some lopping, maybe some crawling.

Julie sped off up the trail. Catherine and I made a slow slog of the long climb, slow but steady, and paused at the top of the switchbacks to scout the line of the trail west into Green Valley. This trail needs some work. Its few switchbacks have almost melted into the steep slopes, making its course almost impossible to see and follow.

Soon we were at the Land Rover and heading home, after another great day on the North Fork.

Visit to Humbug Canyon

One of the most popular trails in Tahoe National Forest is the Euchre Bar Trail, which drops something less than 2000 feet to the North Fork American. A drive of a few miles leads from the Alta exit on I-80 to the trailhead. At the base of the trail, a suspension bridge spans the river across opposing cliffs, and large trout can be seen swimming the deep pool hemmed within that little gorge.

Euchre Bar has a body of glacial outwash sediments clinging to the canyon wall. This was attacked by a variety of methods, and gold was wrested from the ponderous masses of boulders, cobbles, sand and silt. It was a mining camp in its own right, and in the early newspapers of Placer County one can read the election returns for many such camps, including Euchre Bar. Most are now deserted.

From the bridge a trail continues up the North Fork two or three miles to Humbug Canyon. This short tributary of the North Fork has its own complex of outwash deposits, and was worked quite intensively in the early 1850s. Like Green Valley it counted as a town, for a few years anyway. In 1862 it was regarded as "worked out," the "music of the saw and the hammer" was no longer heard, no one was left. Yet, as seems often the case, that "no one" was an inexact and relative term, and the Humbug Canyon of 1862 had a store, and sixty men worked the mines in the summer, and twenty remained working through the winter.

Later an era of hard-rock mining began, for many are the gold-bearing quartz veins which lace the Shoo Fly Complex rocks in that area. The Pioneer Mine, the American Eagle, the Dorer Mine, the Blackhawk, the Southern Cross, and many many more, are scattered across the steep slopes.

The Dorer family arrived in Humbug Canyon at least as early as 1864, and to this day own the Dorer Ranch, near the base of the canyon in a sunny meadow with an Indian grinding rock, on a glacial outwash terrace. A house and some outbuildings still stand there, and a road switches back and forth all the way down to the ranch, from Elliot Ranch Road, up on the canyon rim.

The easiest approach to Humbug Canyon from civilization is along the Foresthill Divide. Yet the Divide runs to near 5000' in elevation on the approach to Humbug, so snow lies deep in the winter. Hence from the earliest times supplies came, during the winter, on mule trains from Dutch Flat and Towle (near Alta). These pack trains continued into the 20th century.

Saturday Gay Wiseman and I joined Steve Hunter, and Alan and Jay Shuttleworth, for a visit to Humbug Canyon. Steve is a good friend of Bob Dorer and has a key to the gate. I was quite interested in trying to find an old trail from Sawtooth Ridge down to Humbug Bar, where a bridge once crossed the North Fork. Last fall Tom Molloy and I had found the upper end of this trail, but had been unable to follow it very far. It seemed to disappear. Here was an opportunity to follow the same old trail--call it the SawBug Trail--from the river, up. Waldemar Lindgren's ca. 1900 geologic map shows this trail crossing the Dorer Mine quartz lode on the climb to the summit of Sawtooth.

The ca. 1960 "Volcano Fire" burned a vast area between the Middle and North Forks of the American. We drove through the old burn for miles, up on top of the Divide, where plantations of young trees seem to be thriving. As we approached Humbug Canyon, more and more patches of larger, older trees appeared, which had survived the fire. The descent into Humbug was through forests of Black and Canyon Live Oak, alternating with coniferous forests dominated by Douglas Fir and Ponderosa Pine. Around springs there were masses of dogwoods and maples and alders and ferns.

We stopped for a time at the Dorer Ranch, and met Bob Dorer and the ranch caretaker, Danny. Then we walked to the North Fork, a scant couple hundred yards away.

The rest of the party, led by Steve, hiked up to the American Eagle Mine, and then crossed to the north bank of the North Fork to visit other mining areas, including a gigantic cavern with railroad tracks leading into it. I, however, hopped across the river at the confluence of Humbug Creek, found the old bridge site, and struck out upriver on the old north-side trail.

This upriver trail shows on various old maps, but not on our modern Westville 7.5 quadrangle. I was a little surprised to find it changing into a wagon road, complete with large dry-laid stone walls, and in places, blasted out of the very cliffs.

With loppers at maximum power I made swift progress in the midday heat. I sensed that I had likely passed the Dorer Mine, but had seen no sign of it, and the old road was so easy, that it seemed best just to follow along. Without realizing it, I walked nearly a mile, and entered a forested flat, with the remains of an old wood stove, and other artifacts of human occupation and mining.

Could this be the Dorer Mine? Scouting around, I found a couple of wagon roads leading up the canyon wall, and began following the most likely, the most user-friendly, of the two. Difficulties arose. Ten thousand small Douglas Fir trees blocked my way at first, and then my "wagon road" seemed to melt into a squirrel trail, and that led into a knot-hole, and I was done.

Done? No! I thrashed around on the steep slopes, up, west, east, and then, saw another trail, which insensibly widened, and widened, and my wagon road was reborn!

I followed it higher and higher as the day grew warmer and warmer. Could this be the pesky SawBug Trail? No; I was too far east; or was the old map in error, as old maps are wont to be, so that maybe I was *not* "too far east'' but rather, exactly the right farness east? These serious questions occupied me as I lopped hundreds of branches and watched my wagon road shrink and swell and admired its dry-laid stone walls and the places where even it was blasted from the very rocks ... .

But wait; why would the SawBug be blasted? How could one justify that much work on a mere trail? Surely this wagon road led to some obscure gold mine: a hole in the ground, masses of dirty quartz lying everywhere. And soon enough I found just that. A tunnel, partially collapsed, followed a quartz vein into the sun-kissed mass of Sawtooth Ridge, and, peering past a disturbed bat, I saw light within the gloomy room, and realized that a shaft opened to the surface, somewhere above.

My wagon road seemed to end right there. Yet, climbing to examine the shaft, I caught a glimpse of a trail continuing, climbing up Sawtooth Ridge, and bearing east. So I struck out on that, and lopped many many more branches and small Douglas Fir trees, and the trail shrank, and widened, and had dry-laid stone retaining walls, or had none, and once again I began to think, This is It! This is the long-sought-after, the legendary, the one-and-only SawBug Trail!

But then a nasty notion darkened my mind's eye: perhaps this fine old trail only led to yet another hole-in-the-ground-with-quartz-all-around.

And so it did. In fact, it led to a very deep hole, a strange rectangular shaft plunging at the least a hundred feet down, only two by four feet in cross-section. And near this shaft, some signs of a collapsed tunnel. And once again, the trail seemed to utterly end. I scouted higher and to the east, I followed a bear trail to a bear bed, and I found strange masses of white quartz sand sown across the steeps, and did some involuntary skiing on these sharp little shards. And so I knew that more mine workings were somewhere above.

I was over five hundred feet above the North Fork and was drenched in sweat. One member of our party needed to get back to Colfax by some ungodly early hour, so my explorations must stop. It was nearly two p.m.

So, I lopped along back down the trail, back down the high wagon road, to the main wagon road at Wood Stove Flat, and heard voices. I lopped along the main wagon road east and found the rest of the party near a pile of old narrow-gauge track and iron strapping, such as were used for ore carts. They had just visited a most amazing cavern, and reproached me for missing out. I in turn reproached *them* for missing out. Silly aficionados of mining history who laugh at my loppers!

Then we marched on back to Humbug Canyon and swam in the lovely pool near the bridge site and ate lunch and talked with Bob Dorer and Danny, the Caretaker. After a time we dragged ourselves up the short trail to our cars.

On the way back, I took Elliot Ranch Road and passed the long and lovely meadow at the ranch site. Skirting along the rim of the North Fork canyon, I passed the head of the Green Valley Trail and met with Giant Gap Road and at last was on pavement again at Iowa Hill Road.

In another hour I was home.

Such was a visit to Humbug Canyon.