[written November 15, 2006]
What a glorious season! Indian Summer grading into the storms of winter. The Black Oaks, Bigleaf Maples, Pacific Dogwoods, Blue Elderberries, Thimbleberries, Bracken ferns, and all manner of deciduous plants are blushing into all manner of golds and reds and purples and browns. Wow.
This has been a time of no expeditions down into the canyon, but many short hikes near my home, on Moody Ridge, near Dutch Flat. I have decided to make a precise geological map of Green Valley, a Gold-Rush-era mining camp of huge proportions, down along the North Fork, below Moody Ridge to the south. I actually began work on this map years ago, but now I will collate results, and also use GPS to exactly locate the boundaries of the various Quaternary units and bedrock structures in and around Green Valley.
I decided, too, that I would map Moody Ridge, for a big part of the story I want to tell has to do with the actual incision of the North Fork canyon; when it began, how quickly it proceeded, and so on.
Now, it happens that all the main ridges in this area, about half-way between the great plains of the Sacramento Valley, and the frozen summits of the Sierra, heh heh--in this area, I repeat, at around four thousand feet in elevation--it happens that all the main ridges are "accordant," that is, their summits are all at very much the same elevations, and these summits all slope very very gently to the southwest.
Moody Ridge is one of these accordant ridges. They are without exception relics of the Pliocene-era volcanic mudflow plateau which covered all this region, for many dozens of miles south and north. The plateau extended almost to the Tuolumne River on the south, and on up through the Feather River country to the north. It was pervasive, huge.
But then a gigantic slab of the earth's crust was tilted up like a trap door, a slab four hundred miles long and about one hundred miles wide; and we call this slab the Sierra Nevada.
It is worth noting that the crest of the Sierra itself is self-accordant, as it were, in that the many summits gradually increase in elevation, southward; we go from a paltry 8000' in the northernmost Sierra, to 9000' near Donner Pass, 10,000 feet at Highway 50, 13,000' at Tioga Pass near Yosemite, and 14,000' at the Palisades and Mt. Whitney itself, away down by the great canyon of the Kern, that strange Sierran canyon, unlike all others, which parallels the crest, instead of running away at a right angle.
At any rate, this self-accordant, smoothly-rising-to-the-south Sierra crest suggests that more uplift has occurred in the south than in the north. It is thought that there has been 10,000 feet of fairly recent uplift near Mt. Whitney, but only 4,000 feet, or thereabouts, near Donner Pass. There is some debate about Sierran uplift, its timing, and its magnitude, but I cannot go into the details now.
Here in the Dutch Flat area, the general pattern obtains, and all the major canyons trend from northeast to southwest, as do the long axes of all the ridges dividing such canyons; and Moody Ridge is among these many accordant ridges. If one had a giant ruler and laid it across the North Fork canyon, on a right angle, from Moody Ridge, to, say, the accordant Giant Gap Ridge, across the canyon to the southeast, one would find that that ruler was about dead level.
One can actually fit a plane to these accordant ridges, and thus restore implicitly the surface of the Pliocene andesitic mudflow plateau. I have done experiments with such plane-fittings using software which allows me to create virtual landscapes, based upon USGS Digital Elevation Model data, for this area--very very accurate models in which elevations are known on a square grid of 30-meter intervals. The software requires me to express the planes I use for fitting in terms of their surface normals and distance form the origin. It is a little cumbersome.
The Pliocene plateau sat atop the Sierran slab, and when the slab tilted up, the plateau tilted with it. There appears to have been about 4000' or 5000' of uplift at the Sierra crest near Donner Pass. It occurred over a few millions of years, and is still occurring. We shall have earthquakes which will thrown down many or all our old brick and stone buildings, in towns like Dutch Flat, Colfax, Grass Valley, and Nevada City.
So, the whole slab is tilted up like a trap door, sloping gently down to the southwest, and a system of "consequent" streams developed on the plateau; geomorphologists might say that the streams (the Feather, Yuba, Bear, American, etc.) are "consequent upon" the gently sloping surface. In other words, they incised their courses directly downhill, to the southwest.
Then came the Pleistocene, less than three million years ago, and glaciation seems to have spurred rapid incision of the canyons, so that they cut through the andesitic mudflow, cut through the rhyolite ash beneath it, cut through whatever river gravels etc. which may have been underneath that rhyolite ash, and then hit the bedrock, and just kept right on cutting, down and down and down.
So that, for instance, right here at the northeast end of Moody Ridge, the North Fork canyon began by cutting through 250 feet of mudflow (4200' to 3950'), then 50 feet of rhyolite ash (3950' to 3900'), then 2,100 feet of the Mesozoic serpentine of the Melones Fault Zone (3900' to 1800').
And all this happened within, let us imagine, the last four million years.
So with simple arithmetic we can express the *average* rate of incision, in, say, inches per thousand years, or small fractions of an inch, per year (nowadays geologists like to express incision in terms of millimeters/year; I like inches per thousand years, myself). We say, the canyon has incised itself 2,400 feet in 4 million years, and find the average rate to have been, then, 7.2 inches per thousand years, or .72 inches in a hundred years.
This is quite a rapid rate of incision. My own instinct is that it is slower than that, right now, and that it accelerates during glacial maxima, of which maxima there have been many, over the past few million years.
Now, the sources of the andesitic mudflows which had built up the plateau, over millions of years time, were volcanos near, or on, the present Sierra crest; so it is natural, and correct, to surmise that these mudflows are thicker near the crest, and that they thin as one gets farther and farther away from the crest.
A geologic map of this whole part of the Sierra confirms that surmise; if one focuses upon the mudflows, which are typically given some kind of orange or tan color on the map, one sees as it were the many accordant ridges, with the dendritic branches of the canyons dividing one patch of mudflow, one ridge, from the next; and the patches are larger and much concentrated in the middle and upper elevations, but become scarcer and smaller down lower in the foothills.
Nevertheless, to this day one can find andesitic mudflows which reached the Sacramento Valley itself. One is exposed along Sierra College Boulevard, near Rocklin, south of I-80.
All the above is prologue, then, to a simple question: given that the northeast end of Moody Ridge is capped by 250 feet of andesitic mudflows, how many different mudflows can be identified within this section?
At higher elevations, where recent glaciation has exposed huge expanses of mudflow, one sometimes obtains quite a good look at multiple different layers of andesitic mudflow. These would probably obtain the status of distinct named "formations," if a precise geologic map were made.
Since I aim to make a precise map here, it behooved me to go out hiking and walking and thrashing through the brush and try to establish exactly how many different mudflows exist, right here.
I was surprised to find only two, or possibly four, different mudflows within this 250-foot section.
From the summit of the ridge, at about 4200', down to about 4100', there is one mudflow, characterized by very rotten boulders of light brown and yellowish and tan andesite, embedded in a matrix of very light-colored, grey and tan andesitic (?) ash.
This stratum, of about one hundred feet in thickness, is well-exposed in a certain roadcut. The rotten boulders were cut in a perfect plane; it is quite amazing and even pretty, in its way, to see all these thousands of spheroidal andesite boulders, in cross-section. I hesitate to even call this stuff andesite, for it is so deeply weathered and rotten now, despite being the highest and youngest mudflow locally, that it simply cannot be the same rock as the very sound and solid boulders of the lower, older strata.
As one drops lower in the upper, rotten mudflow, there begins to be an admixture of real, sound, andesite boulders. And as one nears the base of the stratum, there is a discrete layer containing many large andesite boulders, perfectly sound, and in freshly-broken chunks this rock is seen to be dark grey to black, with small white flecks of feldspar, such as one should see in a proper andesite. These boulders range up to four feet in diameter. There are occasional very small fluvial deposits, or so they seem, within this Stratum of Big Boulders. The Stratum of Big Boulders is only about ten feet thick. It seems to grade directly into the Stratum of Rotten Mudflow above it, yet I am tempted to separate the two into distinct formations.
Immediately below the Stratum of Big Boulders, and extending from about 4100' down to 4000', is the Stratum of Cement. This is a classic andesitic mudflow, identical in appearance to many exposures in the higher elevations, such as on the very summit of Castle Peak, near Donner Pass. Boulders and cobbles of sound andesite, up to a couple feet in diameter but commonly less than one foot in diameter, and sometimes well-rounded, but often quite angular and only slightly rounded off, and all these boulders and cobbles are embedded in a light grey matrix of andesitic ash.
In this Stratum of Cement (for this mudflow looks much like a rough concrete) one can find the remains of branches and limbs of trees, and fragments of leaves and conifer needles. Usually the wood rotted away to nearly nothing and left a hollow, a perfect mold, in the mudflow; but sometimes one can find the punky remains of wood millions of years old, within these hollows.
I speak of the Cement Stratum here on the northeast end of Moody Ridge; elsewhere, and more typically, the same formation, or its close relatives, will not display any fossil organic material whatsoever.
On the other hand, near Donner Summit I myself found a perfectly-preserved impression of a Madrone leaf, in just such a mudflow stratum, a stratum which contained a thin layer of finer sediments; and in these fine sediments are many leaf fossils, mainly, though, fir needles, by their appearance. The Madrone leaf was quite a lucky find. Geologist David Lawler saw that the fossil found a proper home, with the paleontology people at U.C. Berkeley.
Back to the northeast corner of Moody Ridge: below the ~100-foot thick Cement Stratum is a very poorly-exposed stratum which for all the world looks like something intermediate between the out-and-out andesitic mudflow above, and the out-and-out rhyolite ash strata, below: it is a light-grey stratum of volcanic ash, perhaps andesitic ash, perhaps grading towards rhyolite in chemical composition, and embedded in this ash stratum are just a few cobbles and small boulders of sound andesite. The stratum appears to be about twenty or thirty feet thick, maybe a little more.
So, naming this the Intermediate Stratum, I have tentatively identified four distinct mudflows or "formations" in the global andesitic mudflow "cap" at the northeast end of Moody Ridge. Listing them in descending order, youngest first and oldest last, we have, then,
1. Stratum of Rotten Mudflow.
(unconformity?)
2. Stratum of Big Boulders.
(unconformity)
3. Stratum of Cement.
(unconformity)
4. Stratum of Intermediate Composition.
(unconformity)
rhyolite ash, fluvial deposits, several to many unconformities
(unconformity)
bedrock
I write "unconformity" wherever there has clearly been a break in the deposition, that is, many thousands of years, perhaps even a million years or several millions of years, could fit into any one of these unconformities. During those time periods the uppermost stratum was an erosion surface.
Between the Rotten Stratum and the Big Boulders Stratum I am not sure if an unconfomity exists. It could well be that the Stratum of Big Boulders is derived from, say, a few million years of erosion of the underlying Stratum of Cement. This erosion freed big boulders from their matrix as the fines washed away, and thus slowly concentrated these very slowly-eroding boulders at the surface. Then, as I imagine it, the Rotten Mudflow roared over the erosion surface of the Cement Stratum, and very likely swept up and entrained into its own messy mass many of these boulders. Being dense and heavy, they tended to remain at the bottom of the flow. Hence they remained concentrated, and hence the Stratum of Big Boulders.
Beneath the andesitic mudflows are various strata of rhyolite ash, in this area interbedded with volcano-fluvial deposits, since the Eocene-age Nary Red Channel is quite close by on the northeast. This ancient prevolcanic river channel, akin to those in Dutch Flat and Gold Run, was apparently never entirely blocked up by the rhyolite ash eruptions of the Oligocene and early Miocene, so the river continued to flow, but the erosion surfaces upstream were fairly well covered in volcanics, so most of the cobbles and sediments in the upper strata of the channel are of rhyolite.
However, the andesitic mudflows subsequently filled up the Nary Red Channel valley to overflowing, and that was that.
Well, I haven't been writing much lately, but I have been at least thinking about the North Fork, and its geology, and its trails, and so on. I have studied the geology of the Sierra for about forty years now. So far as my understanding of purely local geology goes, I find myself collating results as it were, re-examining my own observations and my readings and drawing new conclusions, of which I hope to wrote more in the future. For instance, I am about certain that in older glaciations, such as the Tahoe I and Tahoe II, of 130,000 and 65,000 years ago, ice came down Canyon Creek and broke through the divide just northeast of Moody Ridge, directly over the axis of the ancient Nary Red Channel (no coincidence, the dividing ridge was weaker there), and hung down the canyon wall at least a little ways towards Green Valley, all the while quarrying out the gigantic chunks of rhyolite ash which one finds, today, away down on the floor of Green Valley itself.
This patch of rhyolite mega-boulders is drastically out of place and will definitely appear on my precise map of Green Valley. It is one of the more interesting formations down there.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Gold Run
Yesterday I met Todd Leonard, Senior Scientist of SECOR International, Inc., at the Dutch Flat exit on I-80.
Todd had contacted me a few weeks back, wishing for a tour of the Gold Run Diggings with an historical emphasis, and a focus upon mercury; for he was retained by The People Who Own The Famous 800 Acres Now For Sale, to evaluate the degree of mercury contamination of their property, and advise them of what to do.
These 800 acres of old hydraulic mining ground include the last two miles of Canyon Creek, and extend from I-80 on the north to the North Fork American River on the south. It is quite an exceptional property, and my fondest hope is that somehow We The People can buy it and keep it open and wild forever.
The Diggings, with its infinitude of tiny hills and valleys and its more-than-a-thousand infinitudes of glaring white quartz pebbles, perhaps marking the many ways to any number of witches' cottages (how else explain these rocks)--the Diggings, with its fossil leaves so perfectly impressed within those easily-cloven lamina of clay, that every vein visible, fifty million years later; with its petrified wood, so much of which was stolen recently, off one of the scraps of public land which remain to us there--the Diggings makes up most of the 800 acres.
But then there is Canyon Creek, and the Canyon Creek Placer Mine, another one of those old mining claims which comprise the 800 acres. This is all wild canyon, cascades and waterfalls and water-polished metavolcanic rock, with that old-time, Gold Rush trail wasting precious little time delivering one down and down and down and down to the sparkling North Fork. The Canyon Creek Trail is one of the best trails anywhere, and it is for sale. Thousand-foot cliffs and waterfall after waterfall after waterfall, and all is For Sale.
Congress wished the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to purchase this Canyon Creek parcel back in 1978, but it was not for sale, then.
Today it is for sale. It has been on the market, since about 2000. However, since large quantities of mercury were used in the hydraulic mines, way back when, which mines "tailed into" (discharged their mining debris into) Canyon Creek, potential buyers have never closed a deal, fearing what could ensue, if, for instance, California, or the Federal government, were to order the 800 acres to be cleaned up.
The cost of such a cleanup could run to the many millions. I pointed out to Todd some few of the innumerable sluice cuts in the Diggings, each one of them contaminated with mercury; I told Todd that all two miles of Canyon Creek on the property are filthy with mercury, as is Indiana Ravine; and I went on and on in my usual way, about all the mining history and so on.
I had feared, when Todd contacted me, that I would, in some weird way, end up helping The People Who Own The Famous 800 Acres Now For Sale to sell their beautiful property, to some wealthy "Cedars"-type folk, who will make all kinds of noise about Preserving The Wilderness, behind a long, long wall of "No Trespassing" signs.
However, I found Todd quite sensible, and appreciative of the unique beauty of these 800 acres. He too wishes it to remain open and wild. Why, so do at least some of the current owners of the 800 acres.
Adding even more complexity to all this, the mercury contamination effectively prohibits purchase of the property by the BLM. Somehow, some way, the property must receive a bill of good health, first. That is, We The People could spend millions to clean up the 800 acres, just for the privilege of spending millions more to actually buy the property.
And this does not seem fair.
Todd and his assistant Bert and I walked down the Canyon Creek Trail to Waterfall View, the spot where the 1875-era photograph on my website was taken, and later visited Gold Run Ravine, where a drain tunnel breaks out, from one of the claims to the west. Gold Run Ravine itself served as a sluice box run, and even has some sluice cuts blasted out of the so-solid rock, over fairly long distances. These blasted cuts were likely made in 1868, when almost all the claims at Gold Run were simultaneously losing their "grade," that is, they could no longer discharge directly into Canyon Creek. As the active mining surfaces lowered in elevation, they approached the same elevation as the creek itself. Tailings do not flow uphill, not well, anyway. So, when grade, or slope, was lost, mining must stop.
These sluice cuts in the bed of Gold Run Ravine would have earned the owners of the claims upstream the ability to work only about ten feet deeper into the gravels; that would be less than one mining season's work (the hydraulic mining season ran from about November to May). They had already worked off 150 feet of gravel above the 1868 working level, and another 200 feet remained below, deeper and richer yet, if only "grade" could be had, if only a sluice box could lead away, downhill, from those mysterious depths.
The only solution to the problem of grade was the construction of the giant drain tunnel into Canyon Creek, in 1873, by the Gold Run Ditch & Mining Company. But that's another story.
Todd had contacted me a few weeks back, wishing for a tour of the Gold Run Diggings with an historical emphasis, and a focus upon mercury; for he was retained by The People Who Own The Famous 800 Acres Now For Sale, to evaluate the degree of mercury contamination of their property, and advise them of what to do.
These 800 acres of old hydraulic mining ground include the last two miles of Canyon Creek, and extend from I-80 on the north to the North Fork American River on the south. It is quite an exceptional property, and my fondest hope is that somehow We The People can buy it and keep it open and wild forever.
The Diggings, with its infinitude of tiny hills and valleys and its more-than-a-thousand infinitudes of glaring white quartz pebbles, perhaps marking the many ways to any number of witches' cottages (how else explain these rocks)--the Diggings, with its fossil leaves so perfectly impressed within those easily-cloven lamina of clay, that every vein visible, fifty million years later; with its petrified wood, so much of which was stolen recently, off one of the scraps of public land which remain to us there--the Diggings makes up most of the 800 acres.
But then there is Canyon Creek, and the Canyon Creek Placer Mine, another one of those old mining claims which comprise the 800 acres. This is all wild canyon, cascades and waterfalls and water-polished metavolcanic rock, with that old-time, Gold Rush trail wasting precious little time delivering one down and down and down and down to the sparkling North Fork. The Canyon Creek Trail is one of the best trails anywhere, and it is for sale. Thousand-foot cliffs and waterfall after waterfall after waterfall, and all is For Sale.
Congress wished the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to purchase this Canyon Creek parcel back in 1978, but it was not for sale, then.
Today it is for sale. It has been on the market, since about 2000. However, since large quantities of mercury were used in the hydraulic mines, way back when, which mines "tailed into" (discharged their mining debris into) Canyon Creek, potential buyers have never closed a deal, fearing what could ensue, if, for instance, California, or the Federal government, were to order the 800 acres to be cleaned up.
The cost of such a cleanup could run to the many millions. I pointed out to Todd some few of the innumerable sluice cuts in the Diggings, each one of them contaminated with mercury; I told Todd that all two miles of Canyon Creek on the property are filthy with mercury, as is Indiana Ravine; and I went on and on in my usual way, about all the mining history and so on.
I had feared, when Todd contacted me, that I would, in some weird way, end up helping The People Who Own The Famous 800 Acres Now For Sale to sell their beautiful property, to some wealthy "Cedars"-type folk, who will make all kinds of noise about Preserving The Wilderness, behind a long, long wall of "No Trespassing" signs.
However, I found Todd quite sensible, and appreciative of the unique beauty of these 800 acres. He too wishes it to remain open and wild. Why, so do at least some of the current owners of the 800 acres.
Adding even more complexity to all this, the mercury contamination effectively prohibits purchase of the property by the BLM. Somehow, some way, the property must receive a bill of good health, first. That is, We The People could spend millions to clean up the 800 acres, just for the privilege of spending millions more to actually buy the property.
And this does not seem fair.
Todd and his assistant Bert and I walked down the Canyon Creek Trail to Waterfall View, the spot where the 1875-era photograph on my website was taken, and later visited Gold Run Ravine, where a drain tunnel breaks out, from one of the claims to the west. Gold Run Ravine itself served as a sluice box run, and even has some sluice cuts blasted out of the so-solid rock, over fairly long distances. These blasted cuts were likely made in 1868, when almost all the claims at Gold Run were simultaneously losing their "grade," that is, they could no longer discharge directly into Canyon Creek. As the active mining surfaces lowered in elevation, they approached the same elevation as the creek itself. Tailings do not flow uphill, not well, anyway. So, when grade, or slope, was lost, mining must stop.
These sluice cuts in the bed of Gold Run Ravine would have earned the owners of the claims upstream the ability to work only about ten feet deeper into the gravels; that would be less than one mining season's work (the hydraulic mining season ran from about November to May). They had already worked off 150 feet of gravel above the 1868 working level, and another 200 feet remained below, deeper and richer yet, if only "grade" could be had, if only a sluice box could lead away, downhill, from those mysterious depths.
The only solution to the problem of grade was the construction of the giant drain tunnel into Canyon Creek, in 1873, by the Gold Run Ditch & Mining Company. But that's another story.
Friday, October 13, 2006
Government Springs
Car troubles have kept me at home in recent weeks, where I have been much devoted to my guitar, learning the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim; and, finding that one piece, Insensatez, had been derived from Chopin's famous little Prelude in E Minor, Op. 28 #4, I was led to acquire the sheet music for the Prelude, and to adapt it for guitar.
Now the car is fixed, and so yesterday I took a hike with Alex Henderson, that Dutch Flat philosopher with whom, long ago, I patiently investigated the question of just how far a Frisbee might fly, if thrown with great vigor and force directly down Main Street. We were never quite satisfied with the answer, feeling that, if a Frisbee could just maintain a level and straightforward attitude, a truly manly state of mind, it might succeed in passing the Hotel altogether, and reach the Oddfellows Hall, or even the Runckle Bakery.
And those are both historic buildings!
At any rate, Alex and I drove up to Emigrant Gap and thence on Forest Road 19 to Texas Hill and the road to Sawtooth Ridge. As always, deep philosophical questions occupied us. Could it be, that for all this great length of time, for all our long and noble history, we humans have been wrong, and very much mistaken, and that we should never, ever, refer to the "speed" of light, but only to its slowness?
In such fashion we drove past Burnett Canyon and followed the Sawtooth Road south to a fork where a shotgun-blasted Tahoe National Forest (TNF) sign may once have said, Go Left to Government Springs; we went left, and in half a mile another shotgun-blasted TNF sign marked another left, but a metal gate blocked our way so we parked and started down the trail to Mumford Bar.
These sparkling clear and sunny October days are ideal for hiking.
This was Alex's first time on one of the Upper Canyon trails; we strode merrily along down the narrow track, down and down and down and down, switching back and forth in an ancient forest of Canyon Live Oak, and when finally we stopped to rest, we were still a thousand feet above the river, yet we had already hiked the equivalent of the Euchre Bar Trail.
I had planned to explore a little side-trail which, I remembered, broke away west a little below our resting-spot, and soon we reached the thing and followed it along, over a rock outcrop which had pretty clearly been hacked out to make the trail, and on to a larger outcrop laced with quartz veins. We could see signs that the quartz had been hammered and samples broken off; possibly this happened in the 1860s, when the riches of Virginia City and the excitement at Meadow Lake made many men wonder whether they might become millionaires overnight, too; all it took, after all, was finding a rich gold vein.
I had hoped that this little westward-trending trail had led to the river itself, a mile or two downstream from Mumford Bar; but no. It appears to have been constructed merely to access the quartz veins. Nowadays bears like to use it, and we saw a couple of small conifers torn down and broken, as bears are wont to do to small trees along their favorite trails. They will grab the tree about five feet above the ground and just snap the trunk.
Alex deeply appreciated the depth of the great canyon, so deeply that he decided the better part of valor was to descend no further, but only to ascend, ascend, ascend. There is a kind of terror which can strike, when following one of these fine old trails to the river; one cannot forget that here, at least, what goes down must come back up. And that climb back up and out can be a bit of a pain. It's that climb Gene Markley and his gorge-scrambling gang used to call the Bath of Fire.
So the question becomes, just how bad is the Bath of Fire, on such-and-such a trail?
It's a pretty long and hot and bad bath, on the Government Springs Trail to Mumford Bar.
On these south-facing slopes of Sawtooth Ridge, the soils are thin and rocky, and sometimes an almost pure stand of Canyon Live Oak, Quercus chrysolepsis, covers the canyon wall. The bedrock is meta-sandstone and slate of the early-Paleozoic Shoo Fly Complex, but here and there on the steep slopes, vestiges of glacial till persist.
In these usually small areas, the soils deepen and consequently are richer and better-watered, so a smattering of Kellogg's Black Oak will mix in with the Canyon Live Oaks. Often the till is almost unrecognizable, in that it itself is made of Shoo Fly Complex rocks; so there is nothing much to tell the till apart from the ordinary run of rocks littering those steep slopes, except that the till rocks are often somewhat rounded.
Many a wildfire has swept these slopes, and almost every single Canyon Live Oak is a multi-trunked stump sprout from wildfires sixty or a hundred and sixty (or whatever) years ago. In contrast, the Kellogg's Black Oaks, which will also stump-sprout vigorously if their trunks and tops are killed in a wildfire, are nearly all sprung from acorns, and are single-trunked trees less than one hundred years old. I am not sure how to interpret this difference in growth form between the two species, on the same canyon wall.
It is notable, and perhaps pertinent to the above, that the larger Canyon Live Oaks are often found rooted directly on rock outcrops. It may take a much hotter fire to completely kill the Canyon Live Oaks, than the Kellogg's Black Oaks.
For, a really hot fire can kill the root systems of these oaks, in which case, they cannot stump-sprout.
The crest of Sawtooth Ridge, here, has the usual couple-few hundred feet of Miocene-Pliocene andesitic mudflow capping it, below which is the Oligocene-Miocene rhyolite ash layer, marked by Government Springs itself and by other springs (for there is always a perched aquifer on such ridges, and whatever water soaks into the andesitic mudflow, emerges eventually in the rhyolite springs--for the rhyolite acts as an aquaclude, preventing the water from soaking down through it).
Below the rhyolite ash (usually included in the Valley Springs Formation, although it is clearly more than one "formation") are the Eocene-age gravels of an ancient river; and below these gravels, the much much much more ancient bedrock, the Shoo Fly Complex metasediments.
It was here, by Government Springs, that Dutch Flat gold miner and photographer I.T. Coffin had his "Big Spring Mine," which tapped the Eocene river channel via one or more "drifts," horizontal tunnels. The pay gravel came out ore-cart-load by ore-cart-lode, and was washed through a sluice box with spring water stored in a small reservoir. Coffin worked the Big Spring Mine in the 1880s and 1890s. Earlier, from 1858 to 1864, he had lived in Burnett Canyon.
Alex and I walked slowly up the gently graded trail, and once back at the car, we enjoyed some almost cold brown ales and some spicy potato chips, and counted it a Job Well Done, and a Good Hike, even tho we had never reached the North Fork; for what can there be to complain about, in wandering the elfin sunlit oak woods, following bear trails which maybe just maybe could be old human trails, and watching and watching all the sun-spangled shimmer of gold and green leaves trembling against the deep blue depths of the great deep canyon? No, we had nothing to complain about.
So it was another great day in the canyon.
We intend to do something about the damnable slowness of the speed of light, but thus far we lack any actual plan of attack. Philosophy does not always come easy.
Now the car is fixed, and so yesterday I took a hike with Alex Henderson, that Dutch Flat philosopher with whom, long ago, I patiently investigated the question of just how far a Frisbee might fly, if thrown with great vigor and force directly down Main Street. We were never quite satisfied with the answer, feeling that, if a Frisbee could just maintain a level and straightforward attitude, a truly manly state of mind, it might succeed in passing the Hotel altogether, and reach the Oddfellows Hall, or even the Runckle Bakery.
And those are both historic buildings!
At any rate, Alex and I drove up to Emigrant Gap and thence on Forest Road 19 to Texas Hill and the road to Sawtooth Ridge. As always, deep philosophical questions occupied us. Could it be, that for all this great length of time, for all our long and noble history, we humans have been wrong, and very much mistaken, and that we should never, ever, refer to the "speed" of light, but only to its slowness?
In such fashion we drove past Burnett Canyon and followed the Sawtooth Road south to a fork where a shotgun-blasted Tahoe National Forest (TNF) sign may once have said, Go Left to Government Springs; we went left, and in half a mile another shotgun-blasted TNF sign marked another left, but a metal gate blocked our way so we parked and started down the trail to Mumford Bar.
These sparkling clear and sunny October days are ideal for hiking.
This was Alex's first time on one of the Upper Canyon trails; we strode merrily along down the narrow track, down and down and down and down, switching back and forth in an ancient forest of Canyon Live Oak, and when finally we stopped to rest, we were still a thousand feet above the river, yet we had already hiked the equivalent of the Euchre Bar Trail.
I had planned to explore a little side-trail which, I remembered, broke away west a little below our resting-spot, and soon we reached the thing and followed it along, over a rock outcrop which had pretty clearly been hacked out to make the trail, and on to a larger outcrop laced with quartz veins. We could see signs that the quartz had been hammered and samples broken off; possibly this happened in the 1860s, when the riches of Virginia City and the excitement at Meadow Lake made many men wonder whether they might become millionaires overnight, too; all it took, after all, was finding a rich gold vein.
I had hoped that this little westward-trending trail had led to the river itself, a mile or two downstream from Mumford Bar; but no. It appears to have been constructed merely to access the quartz veins. Nowadays bears like to use it, and we saw a couple of small conifers torn down and broken, as bears are wont to do to small trees along their favorite trails. They will grab the tree about five feet above the ground and just snap the trunk.
Alex deeply appreciated the depth of the great canyon, so deeply that he decided the better part of valor was to descend no further, but only to ascend, ascend, ascend. There is a kind of terror which can strike, when following one of these fine old trails to the river; one cannot forget that here, at least, what goes down must come back up. And that climb back up and out can be a bit of a pain. It's that climb Gene Markley and his gorge-scrambling gang used to call the Bath of Fire.
So the question becomes, just how bad is the Bath of Fire, on such-and-such a trail?
It's a pretty long and hot and bad bath, on the Government Springs Trail to Mumford Bar.
On these south-facing slopes of Sawtooth Ridge, the soils are thin and rocky, and sometimes an almost pure stand of Canyon Live Oak, Quercus chrysolepsis, covers the canyon wall. The bedrock is meta-sandstone and slate of the early-Paleozoic Shoo Fly Complex, but here and there on the steep slopes, vestiges of glacial till persist.
In these usually small areas, the soils deepen and consequently are richer and better-watered, so a smattering of Kellogg's Black Oak will mix in with the Canyon Live Oaks. Often the till is almost unrecognizable, in that it itself is made of Shoo Fly Complex rocks; so there is nothing much to tell the till apart from the ordinary run of rocks littering those steep slopes, except that the till rocks are often somewhat rounded.
Many a wildfire has swept these slopes, and almost every single Canyon Live Oak is a multi-trunked stump sprout from wildfires sixty or a hundred and sixty (or whatever) years ago. In contrast, the Kellogg's Black Oaks, which will also stump-sprout vigorously if their trunks and tops are killed in a wildfire, are nearly all sprung from acorns, and are single-trunked trees less than one hundred years old. I am not sure how to interpret this difference in growth form between the two species, on the same canyon wall.
It is notable, and perhaps pertinent to the above, that the larger Canyon Live Oaks are often found rooted directly on rock outcrops. It may take a much hotter fire to completely kill the Canyon Live Oaks, than the Kellogg's Black Oaks.
For, a really hot fire can kill the root systems of these oaks, in which case, they cannot stump-sprout.
The crest of Sawtooth Ridge, here, has the usual couple-few hundred feet of Miocene-Pliocene andesitic mudflow capping it, below which is the Oligocene-Miocene rhyolite ash layer, marked by Government Springs itself and by other springs (for there is always a perched aquifer on such ridges, and whatever water soaks into the andesitic mudflow, emerges eventually in the rhyolite springs--for the rhyolite acts as an aquaclude, preventing the water from soaking down through it).
Below the rhyolite ash (usually included in the Valley Springs Formation, although it is clearly more than one "formation") are the Eocene-age gravels of an ancient river; and below these gravels, the much much much more ancient bedrock, the Shoo Fly Complex metasediments.
It was here, by Government Springs, that Dutch Flat gold miner and photographer I.T. Coffin had his "Big Spring Mine," which tapped the Eocene river channel via one or more "drifts," horizontal tunnels. The pay gravel came out ore-cart-load by ore-cart-lode, and was washed through a sluice box with spring water stored in a small reservoir. Coffin worked the Big Spring Mine in the 1880s and 1890s. Earlier, from 1858 to 1864, he had lived in Burnett Canyon.
Alex and I walked slowly up the gently graded trail, and once back at the car, we enjoyed some almost cold brown ales and some spicy potato chips, and counted it a Job Well Done, and a Good Hike, even tho we had never reached the North Fork; for what can there be to complain about, in wandering the elfin sunlit oak woods, following bear trails which maybe just maybe could be old human trails, and watching and watching all the sun-spangled shimmer of gold and green leaves trembling against the deep blue depths of the great deep canyon? No, we had nothing to complain about.
So it was another great day in the canyon.
We intend to do something about the damnable slowness of the speed of light, but thus far we lack any actual plan of attack. Philosophy does not always come easy.
Friday, September 15, 2006
Four Horse Flat
Yesterday Ron Gould and I drove up past Lake Valley and Huysink Lake to the head of the Big Granite Trail (BGT), and dropped down through Four Horse Flat to the upper junction of the Old (west) and New (east) trails. Ron wanted to get a look at the first mile or so of these trails south of the Flat, to weigh the need for another work party, probably in late October.
The old maps show the BGT following down the west side of Little Granite Creek, but an at least somewhat newer trail parallels this older route, across the creek to the east. The two trails converge on the east side of the creek, a mile or so south of Four Horse Flat; thus there is an Upper Crossing and a Lower Crossing, of Little Granite Creek.
The Upper Crossing is overgrown with Mountain Alder and is about invisible. The Lower Crossing is obscure, as well.
A fresh cool wind dragged dark clouds and light showers over us for half an hour.
At any rate, walking in a light rain or mist, we made the loop, and Ron saw a number of places which need some work. We explored around the site of an old cabin and hunters' camp near the Lower Crossing. Nothing is left of the cabin, but there is an interesting table, involving a hand-hewn slab of Incense Cedar 4" by 20" by 48".
On the way back up the New Trail, we saw an Aspen with the dates 1950, 1951, and 1952 carved in the bark. So we find that the New Trail is at least 56 years old.
The showers abruptly ended and the clouds scudded away, leaving a deep blue mountain sky, and afternoon sunshine slanting in through the huge old trees along the trail
Back in the Flat, we amused ourselves with trying to sort out the exact route of the historic Cherry Point Trail (CPT), where it crossed the Flat from east to west to join the BGT. There seem to be two or more trail alignments, marked by various huge old Aspen trees with names and dates carved in them.
Several of the trees had what I took to be Basque names , and one tree at least had some Basque art, tho I could not quite see what the art actually was--an owl, perhaps. And a head. We saw the names Viscaino Uriarte and also, simply, Barbieri. My guess is that these names date from the 1950s. Perhaps they herded sheep, that is what the Basque are especially known for.
In which case, the sheep themselves would have beaten multiple trails into the sometimes-wet, sometimes-dry meadow of Four Horse Flat.
The shadows were growing very long as we trudged up the Big Granite Trail to Ron's truck. It was fun puttering around on these once well-known, now-obscure old trails.
The old maps show the BGT following down the west side of Little Granite Creek, but an at least somewhat newer trail parallels this older route, across the creek to the east. The two trails converge on the east side of the creek, a mile or so south of Four Horse Flat; thus there is an Upper Crossing and a Lower Crossing, of Little Granite Creek.
The Upper Crossing is overgrown with Mountain Alder and is about invisible. The Lower Crossing is obscure, as well.
A fresh cool wind dragged dark clouds and light showers over us for half an hour.
At any rate, walking in a light rain or mist, we made the loop, and Ron saw a number of places which need some work. We explored around the site of an old cabin and hunters' camp near the Lower Crossing. Nothing is left of the cabin, but there is an interesting table, involving a hand-hewn slab of Incense Cedar 4" by 20" by 48".
On the way back up the New Trail, we saw an Aspen with the dates 1950, 1951, and 1952 carved in the bark. So we find that the New Trail is at least 56 years old.
The showers abruptly ended and the clouds scudded away, leaving a deep blue mountain sky, and afternoon sunshine slanting in through the huge old trees along the trail
Back in the Flat, we amused ourselves with trying to sort out the exact route of the historic Cherry Point Trail (CPT), where it crossed the Flat from east to west to join the BGT. There seem to be two or more trail alignments, marked by various huge old Aspen trees with names and dates carved in them.
Several of the trees had what I took to be Basque names , and one tree at least had some Basque art, tho I could not quite see what the art actually was--an owl, perhaps. And a head. We saw the names Viscaino Uriarte and also, simply, Barbieri. My guess is that these names date from the 1950s. Perhaps they herded sheep, that is what the Basque are especially known for.
In which case, the sheep themselves would have beaten multiple trails into the sometimes-wet, sometimes-dry meadow of Four Horse Flat.
The shadows were growing very long as we trudged up the Big Granite Trail to Ron's truck. It was fun puttering around on these once well-known, now-obscure old trails.
Monday, September 4, 2006
Visit to Snow Mountain
Saturday morning Gay Wiseman and I threw packs and sleeping bags into the Subaru and drove up I-80 to Soda Springs, thence to the Serene Lakes subdivision (at Ice Lakes, also known as Serena and Dulzura, supposedly so named by Mark Twain), thence on Pahatsi Road west to Cascade Lakes, where we parked.
Our goal was the West Summit of Snow Mountain. It had been ten years, no, closer to twenty years since I had last visited Snow Mountain, on skis with PARC's Eric Peach, in one eternally long spring day, beginning and ending near Kingvale on I-80. My first visit had been in 1972, also by way of Kingvale and the old Devils Peak road.
Although its summit barely exceeds 8000' in elevation, Snow Mountain is blasted by powerful winds, and what little forest clings to its bald crown (Western White Pine, Mountain Hemlock, etc.), is stunted and gnarled and the limbs often "flag" to the northeast. The mountain has the form of a long ridge, trending east and west, and on the south, a long line of ragged cliffs falls away 4000 feet into the Royal Gorge. The East Summit, being a few hundred feet below the storm-ravaged crest, has the only real forest on the mountain, a grove of Red Fir. I camped there once, almost accidentally, abandoning my first choice because it was haunted by bears, but there was no escaping the bears of Snow Mountain. When dawn's first light struck the East Summit, I realized I had slept within a few yards of a bear bed.
The Main Summit has a few little towers of rock rising above the main crest. There are some deep beds of talus on the summit, and I have always suspected that Tioga-age ice, of the most recent glaciation, ending 12,000 years ago, never covered the summit of Snow. No, in my imagination I could see the summit ridge poking up above a sea of ice. Under such conditions the summit would be exposed to severe frost wedging, hence the deep beds of talus; and with no ice flowing directly over the summit, the talus was never scraped away.
I have seen rattlesnakes on the Main Summit, where the deep talus conceals an infinitude of rodents, and also, on the Main Summit, I found two Indian hunting blinds, rough circles of rock stacked up, with chips of obsidian, quartz, basalt, and chert within the circle. I have only seen the like in the Great Basin, also on windswept summits. Perhaps Bighorn Sheep once frequented Snow.
From the Main Summit the ridge drops gently west until the many West Summits are met, a series of rock knolls at about 7600' elevation, the most westerly offering wonderful views of Big Granite Canyon, Big Valley Bluff and Sugar Pine Point, the main North Fork canyon, and more. Gay and I wished to visit these West Summits and, also, find and follow the "jeep trail" shown on the USGS 7.5 minute Royal Gorge quadrangle, said trail crossing the summit ridge from north to south just east of the rocky West Summit knolls, and dropping away south into a large flat. I had never tried to follow the jeep trail beyond its crossing of the Summit Ridge.
We marched south on the Palisade Creek Trail from Cascade Lakes, and veered west onto the old trail to the north end of Devils Peak. Or rather, sometimes we were on that trail, and other times we lost it, for it is not maintained and is overgrown in places, but it was easy going over glaciated granite, passing just north of two deep tarns, before reaching the pass on the Palisade-Big Granite divide. Here all signs of the old trail disappear in the aftermath of timber harvests of fifteen or twenty years ago. Once again, it was the sudden sale of the old railroad lands which triggered the harvests which destroyed the trails.
The trail history in this area is complicated. Somehow we've arrived at today, in which most of the old trails, the historic Tahoe National Forest trails, have been ruined by logging or closed off to the public in some way. So. Here we are. And just a few decades ago, the trails were intact. Or mostly so ... by the late 1930s a sawmill was erected back by Snow Mountain at Huntley Mill Lake. So roads had penetrated as far as the lake, seven decades ago. This road paralleled, and sometimes coincided with, the historic Snow Mountain Trail.
Various trails linked to the Snow Mountain Trail; the Long Valley Trail connected down to the Palisade Creek Trail, east of Huntley Mill Lake; the Big Bend-Devils Peak Trail intersected near the north end of Devils Peak, as did the Palisade-Devils Peak Trail, which Gay and I followed. So. All four of these trails have either been ruined by logging, or have been abandoned, or have become roads. The final indignity was the construction of a house at Huntley Mill Lake.
I wish the house would be torn down and every vestige of its existence removed, and the whole region around Devils Peak, Snow Mountain, Cherry Point and Sugar Pine Point and the Loch Levens, etc., be managed for the preservation of wilderness and open space and non-motorized recreation. To do this will require much land acquisition. But it is worth it.
I had dreaded visiting Snow Mountain for fear of this one house. But there has been another dread. With Ed Pandolfino and Terry Davis, seven or eight years ago, I was involved with a group trying to identify areas in Placer County suitable for Wilderness designation. The North Fork American River Roadless Area was our largest potential Wilderness. We were unsure whether to include Section 13 of T16N R13E, up on Snow Mountain, within the potential Wilderness boundaries, for fear that timber harvests might have marred the area; and I was supposed to hike in and see for myself. But I never did. I dreaded to see the ancient giants of Snow Mountain's north slopes reduced to stumps.
These two dreads have kept me away from Snow Mountain, never an easy destination in any circumstances, for those four or five miles one sees on the map somehow propagate into, well, almost any number of miles.
So. Gay and I hit the logged forest in the pass and just blundered through stumps and slash, and skirted wet meadows and alder thickets, westbound, until we reached the Devils Peak road, and turned south.
Devils Peak is a funny edge-up axe blade of a mountain, made of columnar basalts from two separate flows. I was pleased, on this hike, to scan the mountain carefully enough to distinguish between the two flows, a discernment always beyond me in times past. But from the west the two flows are fairly easily seen. The upper, younger flow makes up both of the two main summits and almost the entirety of the summit ridge to the north as well, but as the axe blade falls away to the north, the lower, older flow takes over. It makes a kind of secondary, lower summit at the north end of Devils Peak. The lower flow is characterized by long thin columns, mostly vertical, and a darker, browner color. The upper flow is also columnar, but the columns are larger and blockier and less regular, and are also of a slighter lighter and grayer color.
A ridge a few miles long connects Devils Peak and Snow Mountain. In this area, the shallow upper South Yuba basin could not by any means contain its ice-fields, during glacial maxima, and ice a thousand feet thick overflowed south into the much deeper North Fork American. This tremendous escape of ice from the Yuba into the American occurred over at least ten miles of the dividing ridge. Devils Peak, however, split the flow; a more easterly lobe of ice in Palisade Creek, a more westerly lobe in Big Granite Creek. Only the upper few hundred feet of Devils Peak protruded above the ice.
A sedimentary feature sometimes observed in glaciated regions is the so-called "crag and tail." A mass of resistant bedrock, forming a knoll or peak, is flowed over by a glacier. On the up-ice side the knoll or crag is abraded, and to either side it is steepened; but on the down-ice side, a mass of bouldery till may extend quite ways, protected by the crag. This is the "tail."
Devils Peak presents the case of a crag-and tail where the peak itself is the crag, of course, and the ridge of andesitic mudflow extending south to the bedrock high of Snow Mountain is the "tail." But the Devils Peak tail was not detritus deposited by the ice, merely mudflow protected from deep-scouring erosion by the crag of Devils Peak.
The height or depth of the ice surrounding Devils Peak is marked by the many glacial erratics, nearly white granite boulders up to twenty feet in diameter, quarried from the higher terrain to the north and east, towards Castle Peak and the Sierra crest. These granite boulders can be found right up to the summit axe blade of Devils Peak. It is not impossible that the entire mountain was under ice, but the erratics, fresh, unweathered granite boulders, can only be found up to about 7500', and the summit of Devils is at 7704'.
We marched along under partly cloudy skies, joking that, since we'd elected to leave the tent at home, we were now bound to get rained on. Immediately west of the main summit of Devils we left the main road to Huntley Mill Lake for the "high" road on the left, which, although somewhat longer, keeps one away from the horrible house at the lake.
At a second fork we kept to the lower of two roads, and watched Snow Mountain slowly grow near, and soon found ourselves on the old Snow Mountain Trail, with numerous blazes marking the large Red Fir and Western White Pine along the way.
Someone has been outlining the blazes in blue spray paint. Most of the blazes are not standard "small i" Forest Service blazes, but simple squares about four to six inches on a side. An unusual blaze began to appear, peculiar, one imagines, to this one old trail: a large "X" cut with a saw, each diagonal about eighteen inches or two feet long.
At about this time we entered Section 13, where I found what I had feared, stumps. However, thank God for small favors, the missing trees looked to have been all yarded with helicopters, not bulldozers, so if the slash and stumps were burned, the terrain would appear as wild as it ever was.
The Snow Mountain Trail climbed through rocky and meadowy terrain, with more and more of the X-blazes appearing, and fewer of the other types of blaze, until at last we reached the crest of the summit ridge, near point 7680', one of the West Summits.
We paused to explore, and found awesome views, north to the Sierra Buttes, south to the Crystal Range, with some excellent looks west into the North Fork canyon. All the terrain around the Loch Leven Lakes was in view, as was Big Valley, Castle Peak, Devils Peak, and even Mt. Rose.
Most all of Snow Mountain is made of the Tuttle Lake Formation, a series of volcaniclastic sediments, thousands of feet in overall thickness, now tipped up on edge, beds of sandstone made of volcanic ash, let us say, interlayered with beds of mudflows, and debris flows, and all these disparate types themselves intruded by coeval mafic magmas, of andesitic mineral composition, some of these intrusive igneous rocks cooling slowly, and becoming something like a diorite, and elsewhere, lenses and sills and pipes of andesite, which andesitic magma, at times, intruded soft wet sediments (it was coeval--remember?), and interacted explosively, producing a bizarre rock called peperite.
These Tuttle Lake Fm. rocks were deposited, and formed, in an ocean basin, near a line of volcanos. How they ended up here in the Sierra Nevada is not especially well understood. They are about the uppermost rocks in a quasi-stratigraphic column whose base is the (early Paleozoic) Shoo Fly Complex, separated by an unconformity from the overlying (middle-late Paleozoic) Taylorsville Sequence, over this are thin beds of Triassic conglomerate and limestone, separated by an unconformity with the (Middle Jurassic) Sailor Canyon Fm., and over this last somewhat conformably lies the (Middle Jurassic) Tuttle Lake Fm.; the whole ball of wax seems to have been rotated ninety degrees east and welded to the edge of North America, 145 million years ago.
There are spectacular glaciated exposures of these interesting metamorphic rocks all over Snow Mountain. The Tuttle Lake Fm. is only slightly younger than the Sailor Canyon Formation underlying it, to the west, about Middle Jurassic, say, 160 million years ago.
We had considered camping up among the West Summits, but there was no water, save a tiny tarn, almost evaporated, so we decided to keep with the original plan and follow the jeep trail down to the big flat at 7000', to the south. However, the trail had faded away to nothing at the crest. Scouting in the likely direction yielded no more blazes. We set off down the hill, hoping to find the jeep trail at some point.
We had fairly easy going, although big brushfields made us swerve drastically off-course several times. Finally we reached the flat. We were more than ready for a rest; most of the day had been given over to marching, and the sun was sagging into late afternoon, and we wished only to sag into a total recline. We stirred a bear from his afternoon siesta, fifty yards away at the base of a Red Fir, and the dark brown big-fellow went loping away through a brushy patch of woods, raising a tremendous clamor of breaking twigs and branches. The sound slowly faded as our scaredy-bear got farther and farther away.
These big flats, call it the Flat, making a couple hundred acres in TNF's Section 14, are a mixture of wet meadows, dry meadows, forests, and thickets of Mountain Alder. Lee DeBusk, an Alta man who has hiked all these old trails, beginning in his childhood in the 1940s, had told me that the "jeep trail" led to "old Doc what-his-name's camp," at a spring. Doc was a shepherd. A cattle man maybe. The thickets of alder and the wet meadows showed there was plenty of water in the Flat; but where was old Doc's camp, where was the spring, where was the jeep trail?
After a short break we started scouting and, after ten minutes or so, we felt drawn to some huge Red Firs near a certain alder thicket. We found a blaze on a large Lodgepole Pine, and this blaze was outlined in orange paint. Suppose this was the jeep trail? I forged through the alder thicket near the blaze, and soon popped free beside another grove of tall firs, some quite large and ancient. A pair of giants stood a few feet away, and between them, a Lodgepole scarred with many bear claw scratches. I walked over for a closer look, and right behind the bear claw tree, a well-beaten trail led into the thicket.
"Ah ha!" thought I, and followed the trail to a pool of open water, with a slow flow down the thicket.
I should say that the bear-claw tree was quite amazing. It looked as though it had been climbed many many times, by bears, frisky bears delighting in their ability to leave deep scratches in the thin bark. The claw marks were thick for the first twenty feet above ground, and continued up to forty feet.
OK. We had water. But where was Doc's camp? A wide search turned up nothing. We determined to camp along the fringes of a huge open dry meadow, a hundred yards away. There were no more distant views than the stars themselves, which was enough, and we felt lucky to camp in such an obscure and recondite place.
This area forms the headwaters basin, as it were, for West Snow Mountain Falls, which Tom McGuire and I saw this spring, and are about 600 feet high. The Flat is both hemmed in by a terminal moraine and dotted with vestiges of other moraines. Often the slightly higher moraine crests are of the "drained-down" type, so porous they cannot retain ground water, hence cannot grow trees, hence are bouldery quasi-meadows threaded through a million times over by gopher tunnels. In places the moraine vestiges are just beds of raw talus, scattered at random, no cliff or outcrop visible as a source.
We explored that Flat rather throughly that evening and the next morning, and found that we were quite close to Section 23 to the south, which as I understand it is owned by Croman Lumber Company; I have long advocated that this Section 23 should be acquired by Tahoe National Forest; but nothing has ever happened in that way, and yesterday, I found "Timber Harvest Boundary" flagging, near the section line.
In fact, it began to seem that the one blaze I had found in the Flat had only to do with the section line, for I found more blazes of that type, a few hundred yards west.
I found and explored two different possible alignments for the seemingly mythical jeep trail, but was unable to settle on one over the other. We followed the one which ran along level in the Flat for quite a ways before climbing steeply out to the northeast. But we were unable to follow it all the way up. Once on the ridge crest, we made for Point 7680 and took a prolonged break, eating lunch and sketching and exploring the various summits. I took a serious peek at my map and deduced that the jeep trail ought to be scarcely more than a couple hundred yards away, and when we walked over there, sure enough, we found a blazed tree, the blazes outlined in blue paint, and were able to follow the jeep trail down a little ways. The thing is almost completely formless, now, and has been overgrown in many places; not even an old cut branch is to be seen, showing that it had ever been cleared. There are no ruts or anything like ruts. In fact, over the dry meadows, the gophers stir up the dirt so well, that no trace whatsoever would be visible.
It is quite possible that the jeep trail has more than one alignment. We found two X-blazes high on the West Summit ridge, which are difficult to reconcile with the map.
So we had some gratification at discovering at least one small part of the west-side jeep trail. It was time to start back out to civilization, a hike of several hours, which we enjoyed, taking it slow. We stopped for a few minutes while Gay swam at Long Lake.
It was quite a nice camp-out in North Fork country.
Our goal was the West Summit of Snow Mountain. It had been ten years, no, closer to twenty years since I had last visited Snow Mountain, on skis with PARC's Eric Peach, in one eternally long spring day, beginning and ending near Kingvale on I-80. My first visit had been in 1972, also by way of Kingvale and the old Devils Peak road.
Although its summit barely exceeds 8000' in elevation, Snow Mountain is blasted by powerful winds, and what little forest clings to its bald crown (Western White Pine, Mountain Hemlock, etc.), is stunted and gnarled and the limbs often "flag" to the northeast. The mountain has the form of a long ridge, trending east and west, and on the south, a long line of ragged cliffs falls away 4000 feet into the Royal Gorge. The East Summit, being a few hundred feet below the storm-ravaged crest, has the only real forest on the mountain, a grove of Red Fir. I camped there once, almost accidentally, abandoning my first choice because it was haunted by bears, but there was no escaping the bears of Snow Mountain. When dawn's first light struck the East Summit, I realized I had slept within a few yards of a bear bed.
The Main Summit has a few little towers of rock rising above the main crest. There are some deep beds of talus on the summit, and I have always suspected that Tioga-age ice, of the most recent glaciation, ending 12,000 years ago, never covered the summit of Snow. No, in my imagination I could see the summit ridge poking up above a sea of ice. Under such conditions the summit would be exposed to severe frost wedging, hence the deep beds of talus; and with no ice flowing directly over the summit, the talus was never scraped away.
I have seen rattlesnakes on the Main Summit, where the deep talus conceals an infinitude of rodents, and also, on the Main Summit, I found two Indian hunting blinds, rough circles of rock stacked up, with chips of obsidian, quartz, basalt, and chert within the circle. I have only seen the like in the Great Basin, also on windswept summits. Perhaps Bighorn Sheep once frequented Snow.
From the Main Summit the ridge drops gently west until the many West Summits are met, a series of rock knolls at about 7600' elevation, the most westerly offering wonderful views of Big Granite Canyon, Big Valley Bluff and Sugar Pine Point, the main North Fork canyon, and more. Gay and I wished to visit these West Summits and, also, find and follow the "jeep trail" shown on the USGS 7.5 minute Royal Gorge quadrangle, said trail crossing the summit ridge from north to south just east of the rocky West Summit knolls, and dropping away south into a large flat. I had never tried to follow the jeep trail beyond its crossing of the Summit Ridge.
We marched south on the Palisade Creek Trail from Cascade Lakes, and veered west onto the old trail to the north end of Devils Peak. Or rather, sometimes we were on that trail, and other times we lost it, for it is not maintained and is overgrown in places, but it was easy going over glaciated granite, passing just north of two deep tarns, before reaching the pass on the Palisade-Big Granite divide. Here all signs of the old trail disappear in the aftermath of timber harvests of fifteen or twenty years ago. Once again, it was the sudden sale of the old railroad lands which triggered the harvests which destroyed the trails.
The trail history in this area is complicated. Somehow we've arrived at today, in which most of the old trails, the historic Tahoe National Forest trails, have been ruined by logging or closed off to the public in some way. So. Here we are. And just a few decades ago, the trails were intact. Or mostly so ... by the late 1930s a sawmill was erected back by Snow Mountain at Huntley Mill Lake. So roads had penetrated as far as the lake, seven decades ago. This road paralleled, and sometimes coincided with, the historic Snow Mountain Trail.
Various trails linked to the Snow Mountain Trail; the Long Valley Trail connected down to the Palisade Creek Trail, east of Huntley Mill Lake; the Big Bend-Devils Peak Trail intersected near the north end of Devils Peak, as did the Palisade-Devils Peak Trail, which Gay and I followed. So. All four of these trails have either been ruined by logging, or have been abandoned, or have become roads. The final indignity was the construction of a house at Huntley Mill Lake.
I wish the house would be torn down and every vestige of its existence removed, and the whole region around Devils Peak, Snow Mountain, Cherry Point and Sugar Pine Point and the Loch Levens, etc., be managed for the preservation of wilderness and open space and non-motorized recreation. To do this will require much land acquisition. But it is worth it.
I had dreaded visiting Snow Mountain for fear of this one house. But there has been another dread. With Ed Pandolfino and Terry Davis, seven or eight years ago, I was involved with a group trying to identify areas in Placer County suitable for Wilderness designation. The North Fork American River Roadless Area was our largest potential Wilderness. We were unsure whether to include Section 13 of T16N R13E, up on Snow Mountain, within the potential Wilderness boundaries, for fear that timber harvests might have marred the area; and I was supposed to hike in and see for myself. But I never did. I dreaded to see the ancient giants of Snow Mountain's north slopes reduced to stumps.
These two dreads have kept me away from Snow Mountain, never an easy destination in any circumstances, for those four or five miles one sees on the map somehow propagate into, well, almost any number of miles.
So. Gay and I hit the logged forest in the pass and just blundered through stumps and slash, and skirted wet meadows and alder thickets, westbound, until we reached the Devils Peak road, and turned south.
Devils Peak is a funny edge-up axe blade of a mountain, made of columnar basalts from two separate flows. I was pleased, on this hike, to scan the mountain carefully enough to distinguish between the two flows, a discernment always beyond me in times past. But from the west the two flows are fairly easily seen. The upper, younger flow makes up both of the two main summits and almost the entirety of the summit ridge to the north as well, but as the axe blade falls away to the north, the lower, older flow takes over. It makes a kind of secondary, lower summit at the north end of Devils Peak. The lower flow is characterized by long thin columns, mostly vertical, and a darker, browner color. The upper flow is also columnar, but the columns are larger and blockier and less regular, and are also of a slighter lighter and grayer color.
A ridge a few miles long connects Devils Peak and Snow Mountain. In this area, the shallow upper South Yuba basin could not by any means contain its ice-fields, during glacial maxima, and ice a thousand feet thick overflowed south into the much deeper North Fork American. This tremendous escape of ice from the Yuba into the American occurred over at least ten miles of the dividing ridge. Devils Peak, however, split the flow; a more easterly lobe of ice in Palisade Creek, a more westerly lobe in Big Granite Creek. Only the upper few hundred feet of Devils Peak protruded above the ice.
A sedimentary feature sometimes observed in glaciated regions is the so-called "crag and tail." A mass of resistant bedrock, forming a knoll or peak, is flowed over by a glacier. On the up-ice side the knoll or crag is abraded, and to either side it is steepened; but on the down-ice side, a mass of bouldery till may extend quite ways, protected by the crag. This is the "tail."
Devils Peak presents the case of a crag-and tail where the peak itself is the crag, of course, and the ridge of andesitic mudflow extending south to the bedrock high of Snow Mountain is the "tail." But the Devils Peak tail was not detritus deposited by the ice, merely mudflow protected from deep-scouring erosion by the crag of Devils Peak.
The height or depth of the ice surrounding Devils Peak is marked by the many glacial erratics, nearly white granite boulders up to twenty feet in diameter, quarried from the higher terrain to the north and east, towards Castle Peak and the Sierra crest. These granite boulders can be found right up to the summit axe blade of Devils Peak. It is not impossible that the entire mountain was under ice, but the erratics, fresh, unweathered granite boulders, can only be found up to about 7500', and the summit of Devils is at 7704'.
We marched along under partly cloudy skies, joking that, since we'd elected to leave the tent at home, we were now bound to get rained on. Immediately west of the main summit of Devils we left the main road to Huntley Mill Lake for the "high" road on the left, which, although somewhat longer, keeps one away from the horrible house at the lake.
At a second fork we kept to the lower of two roads, and watched Snow Mountain slowly grow near, and soon found ourselves on the old Snow Mountain Trail, with numerous blazes marking the large Red Fir and Western White Pine along the way.
Someone has been outlining the blazes in blue spray paint. Most of the blazes are not standard "small i" Forest Service blazes, but simple squares about four to six inches on a side. An unusual blaze began to appear, peculiar, one imagines, to this one old trail: a large "X" cut with a saw, each diagonal about eighteen inches or two feet long.
At about this time we entered Section 13, where I found what I had feared, stumps. However, thank God for small favors, the missing trees looked to have been all yarded with helicopters, not bulldozers, so if the slash and stumps were burned, the terrain would appear as wild as it ever was.
The Snow Mountain Trail climbed through rocky and meadowy terrain, with more and more of the X-blazes appearing, and fewer of the other types of blaze, until at last we reached the crest of the summit ridge, near point 7680', one of the West Summits.
We paused to explore, and found awesome views, north to the Sierra Buttes, south to the Crystal Range, with some excellent looks west into the North Fork canyon. All the terrain around the Loch Leven Lakes was in view, as was Big Valley, Castle Peak, Devils Peak, and even Mt. Rose.
Most all of Snow Mountain is made of the Tuttle Lake Formation, a series of volcaniclastic sediments, thousands of feet in overall thickness, now tipped up on edge, beds of sandstone made of volcanic ash, let us say, interlayered with beds of mudflows, and debris flows, and all these disparate types themselves intruded by coeval mafic magmas, of andesitic mineral composition, some of these intrusive igneous rocks cooling slowly, and becoming something like a diorite, and elsewhere, lenses and sills and pipes of andesite, which andesitic magma, at times, intruded soft wet sediments (it was coeval--remember?), and interacted explosively, producing a bizarre rock called peperite.
These Tuttle Lake Fm. rocks were deposited, and formed, in an ocean basin, near a line of volcanos. How they ended up here in the Sierra Nevada is not especially well understood. They are about the uppermost rocks in a quasi-stratigraphic column whose base is the (early Paleozoic) Shoo Fly Complex, separated by an unconformity from the overlying (middle-late Paleozoic) Taylorsville Sequence, over this are thin beds of Triassic conglomerate and limestone, separated by an unconformity with the (Middle Jurassic) Sailor Canyon Fm., and over this last somewhat conformably lies the (Middle Jurassic) Tuttle Lake Fm.; the whole ball of wax seems to have been rotated ninety degrees east and welded to the edge of North America, 145 million years ago.
There are spectacular glaciated exposures of these interesting metamorphic rocks all over Snow Mountain. The Tuttle Lake Fm. is only slightly younger than the Sailor Canyon Formation underlying it, to the west, about Middle Jurassic, say, 160 million years ago.
We had considered camping up among the West Summits, but there was no water, save a tiny tarn, almost evaporated, so we decided to keep with the original plan and follow the jeep trail down to the big flat at 7000', to the south. However, the trail had faded away to nothing at the crest. Scouting in the likely direction yielded no more blazes. We set off down the hill, hoping to find the jeep trail at some point.
We had fairly easy going, although big brushfields made us swerve drastically off-course several times. Finally we reached the flat. We were more than ready for a rest; most of the day had been given over to marching, and the sun was sagging into late afternoon, and we wished only to sag into a total recline. We stirred a bear from his afternoon siesta, fifty yards away at the base of a Red Fir, and the dark brown big-fellow went loping away through a brushy patch of woods, raising a tremendous clamor of breaking twigs and branches. The sound slowly faded as our scaredy-bear got farther and farther away.
These big flats, call it the Flat, making a couple hundred acres in TNF's Section 14, are a mixture of wet meadows, dry meadows, forests, and thickets of Mountain Alder. Lee DeBusk, an Alta man who has hiked all these old trails, beginning in his childhood in the 1940s, had told me that the "jeep trail" led to "old Doc what-his-name's camp," at a spring. Doc was a shepherd. A cattle man maybe. The thickets of alder and the wet meadows showed there was plenty of water in the Flat; but where was old Doc's camp, where was the spring, where was the jeep trail?
After a short break we started scouting and, after ten minutes or so, we felt drawn to some huge Red Firs near a certain alder thicket. We found a blaze on a large Lodgepole Pine, and this blaze was outlined in orange paint. Suppose this was the jeep trail? I forged through the alder thicket near the blaze, and soon popped free beside another grove of tall firs, some quite large and ancient. A pair of giants stood a few feet away, and between them, a Lodgepole scarred with many bear claw scratches. I walked over for a closer look, and right behind the bear claw tree, a well-beaten trail led into the thicket.
"Ah ha!" thought I, and followed the trail to a pool of open water, with a slow flow down the thicket.
I should say that the bear-claw tree was quite amazing. It looked as though it had been climbed many many times, by bears, frisky bears delighting in their ability to leave deep scratches in the thin bark. The claw marks were thick for the first twenty feet above ground, and continued up to forty feet.
OK. We had water. But where was Doc's camp? A wide search turned up nothing. We determined to camp along the fringes of a huge open dry meadow, a hundred yards away. There were no more distant views than the stars themselves, which was enough, and we felt lucky to camp in such an obscure and recondite place.
This area forms the headwaters basin, as it were, for West Snow Mountain Falls, which Tom McGuire and I saw this spring, and are about 600 feet high. The Flat is both hemmed in by a terminal moraine and dotted with vestiges of other moraines. Often the slightly higher moraine crests are of the "drained-down" type, so porous they cannot retain ground water, hence cannot grow trees, hence are bouldery quasi-meadows threaded through a million times over by gopher tunnels. In places the moraine vestiges are just beds of raw talus, scattered at random, no cliff or outcrop visible as a source.
We explored that Flat rather throughly that evening and the next morning, and found that we were quite close to Section 23 to the south, which as I understand it is owned by Croman Lumber Company; I have long advocated that this Section 23 should be acquired by Tahoe National Forest; but nothing has ever happened in that way, and yesterday, I found "Timber Harvest Boundary" flagging, near the section line.
In fact, it began to seem that the one blaze I had found in the Flat had only to do with the section line, for I found more blazes of that type, a few hundred yards west.
I found and explored two different possible alignments for the seemingly mythical jeep trail, but was unable to settle on one over the other. We followed the one which ran along level in the Flat for quite a ways before climbing steeply out to the northeast. But we were unable to follow it all the way up. Once on the ridge crest, we made for Point 7680 and took a prolonged break, eating lunch and sketching and exploring the various summits. I took a serious peek at my map and deduced that the jeep trail ought to be scarcely more than a couple hundred yards away, and when we walked over there, sure enough, we found a blazed tree, the blazes outlined in blue paint, and were able to follow the jeep trail down a little ways. The thing is almost completely formless, now, and has been overgrown in many places; not even an old cut branch is to be seen, showing that it had ever been cleared. There are no ruts or anything like ruts. In fact, over the dry meadows, the gophers stir up the dirt so well, that no trace whatsoever would be visible.
It is quite possible that the jeep trail has more than one alignment. We found two X-blazes high on the West Summit ridge, which are difficult to reconcile with the map.
So we had some gratification at discovering at least one small part of the west-side jeep trail. It was time to start back out to civilization, a hike of several hours, which we enjoyed, taking it slow. We stopped for a few minutes while Gay swam at Long Lake.
It was quite a nice camp-out in North Fork country.
Monday, August 28, 2006
The Crocker Museum
Yesterday the M.C. Escher "Art of Illusion" exhibit drew me to the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, and after savoring the works of the master I wandered freely through other exhibits, including the Early California section, where two huge paintings by Charles Nahl flank the pair of curving stairs, on the second floor.
The inner sanctum at this second level contains, presently, among many other paintings, a huge Thomas Hill of Yosemite, as seen from Inspiration Point, perhaps, and beside it, a rather smaller painting of the Old Soda Springs on the Upper North Fork American, up around six thousand feet in elevation. Mark Hopkins, one of California's Big Four, acquired land there late in the 1860s, and, possibly in partnership with Leland Stanford, opened a hotel near the springs.
The current town of Soda Springs is merely where visitors to the North Fork's Soda Springs would get off the train, to ride in a stage coach the rest of the way, over eight miles of dusty road.
The painting is by one Norton Bush, and dates from 1868. Anderson Peak and Tinkers Knob loom in the background, both somewhat exaggerated in size and shape, and in the foreground is a meadow flanked by a waterfall on the left. In the meadow is the Hopkins Cabin, but no hotel; the hotel would not appear until 1870, as I recall. And near the cabin are two people, one a man with a gun.
The text accompanying the Bush painting calls this neat, rectangular, gabled, squared-log cabin the "Mary Hopkins" cabin.
At any rate, the painting makes an interesting record, within the history of the upper North Fork. I hadn't been aware that this painting existed. I have a newspaper record of a "blockhouse" soon to be a-building, near or at the soda springs, around 1864, for gold mining purposes, and I have always wondered whether the Hopkins Cabin, which still stands, might have been this very blockhouse.
The M.C. Escher exhibit only stays until September 3, and I wouldn't know how long the Bush painting will stay up, in the Early California section. I have the Crocker at 216 O St. Sacramento.
The inner sanctum at this second level contains, presently, among many other paintings, a huge Thomas Hill of Yosemite, as seen from Inspiration Point, perhaps, and beside it, a rather smaller painting of the Old Soda Springs on the Upper North Fork American, up around six thousand feet in elevation. Mark Hopkins, one of California's Big Four, acquired land there late in the 1860s, and, possibly in partnership with Leland Stanford, opened a hotel near the springs.
The current town of Soda Springs is merely where visitors to the North Fork's Soda Springs would get off the train, to ride in a stage coach the rest of the way, over eight miles of dusty road.
The painting is by one Norton Bush, and dates from 1868. Anderson Peak and Tinkers Knob loom in the background, both somewhat exaggerated in size and shape, and in the foreground is a meadow flanked by a waterfall on the left. In the meadow is the Hopkins Cabin, but no hotel; the hotel would not appear until 1870, as I recall. And near the cabin are two people, one a man with a gun.
The text accompanying the Bush painting calls this neat, rectangular, gabled, squared-log cabin the "Mary Hopkins" cabin.
At any rate, the painting makes an interesting record, within the history of the upper North Fork. I hadn't been aware that this painting existed. I have a newspaper record of a "blockhouse" soon to be a-building, near or at the soda springs, around 1864, for gold mining purposes, and I have always wondered whether the Hopkins Cabin, which still stands, might have been this very blockhouse.
The M.C. Escher exhibit only stays until September 3, and I wouldn't know how long the Bush painting will stay up, in the Early California section. I have the Crocker at 216 O St. Sacramento.
Monday, August 14, 2006
More on the South Yuba's Canyon Creek
Retired Tahoe National Forest Supervisor John Skinner writes:
*******
Russ,
I enjoyed your historic and geologic view of our SF Yuba Canyon Creek. I
hadn't spent much time looking so I was glad youse guys applied your logic.
Will you be back to explore more of the trail? I'm guessing you'll run into
SPI logging in Sec 25, but I'm just guessing. You're right, the Canyon is
seldom visited.
You didn't mention the concrete building at the end of a lower miner's road
just below the narrowing of the canyon. There was a ditch coming next to the
building; so I suspected it was a power generator. Did you see it too? What
do you say it did?
I was surprised when you first passed by the terminus of the old Ridge Trail
right in that sprinkling of old P Pines on the ridgetop between S Yuba and
Canyon Cr. I had left the sign remnants leaning against one of them when I
was in there last fall. An old wildfire had taken out much of the trail's
blazed trees. The previous year I followed that historic trail as it
swithchbacked up the western nose to the ridgetop where volunteers had
rebuilt the trail connecting to Camp 19 by the Bowman Lake Road. The trail
had been surveyed and staked by the FS to let a contract to rebuild the
trail on the old route. Your story about abandoning it in favor of one
without the R/W problem is probably correct. I hiked the new version until
it quit for lack of funds. I hope it gets completed; it's a good location
and this link is scheduled to become another link of the South Yuba National
Historic Trail.
Can't remember if I mentioned one on other historic trail in that same
system? The Doolittle Trail was a pack trail to the Ridge Trail. Its lower
end is about 0.5 mile up the old, easy 4WD road up the river above the
Golden Quartz Picnic Site. This used to be gated above the Picnic Site but
the last two times I was there, the gated was open. There is the last house
up the river just above the campground. You'll hear the dog, but not seen
the house. This 4WD road easily follows the river up for 3.2 miles to still
another placer mine site that has a Glory Hole where they rerouted the river
to drain the hole. At this point the South Yuba necks down to nothing but
stark canyon until 4 miles above it tops out to Langs Crossing on the Bowman
Lake Road. Just above and left of the mine site is the mouth of Falls Creek.
Anglers find their way to here for the last of accessible hiking in this
stretch of canyon. Above the Glory Hole the old historic road crossed the S
Yuba and climbed up the south side of the river to the old townsite of
Keliher.
Meanwhile, back to the Doolittle Trail. The trail begins to the left side of
the 4WD road as you go up. No signs, but there is a round shiny marker
nailed to a tree on the right side of the road. As I remember it, the 100'
road to the left to the TH is about the only spur that takes off to the left
above Golden Quartz. This trail has all of the historic look left including
rock work and at least one water trough. It's pretty good grade and has
about seven switchbacks just before it connects to the Ridge Trail.
John
*******
*******
Russ,
I enjoyed your historic and geologic view of our SF Yuba Canyon Creek. I
hadn't spent much time looking so I was glad youse guys applied your logic.
Will you be back to explore more of the trail? I'm guessing you'll run into
SPI logging in Sec 25, but I'm just guessing. You're right, the Canyon is
seldom visited.
You didn't mention the concrete building at the end of a lower miner's road
just below the narrowing of the canyon. There was a ditch coming next to the
building; so I suspected it was a power generator. Did you see it too? What
do you say it did?
I was surprised when you first passed by the terminus of the old Ridge Trail
right in that sprinkling of old P Pines on the ridgetop between S Yuba and
Canyon Cr. I had left the sign remnants leaning against one of them when I
was in there last fall. An old wildfire had taken out much of the trail's
blazed trees. The previous year I followed that historic trail as it
swithchbacked up the western nose to the ridgetop where volunteers had
rebuilt the trail connecting to Camp 19 by the Bowman Lake Road. The trail
had been surveyed and staked by the FS to let a contract to rebuild the
trail on the old route. Your story about abandoning it in favor of one
without the R/W problem is probably correct. I hiked the new version until
it quit for lack of funds. I hope it gets completed; it's a good location
and this link is scheduled to become another link of the South Yuba National
Historic Trail.
Can't remember if I mentioned one on other historic trail in that same
system? The Doolittle Trail was a pack trail to the Ridge Trail. Its lower
end is about 0.5 mile up the old, easy 4WD road up the river above the
Golden Quartz Picnic Site. This used to be gated above the Picnic Site but
the last two times I was there, the gated was open. There is the last house
up the river just above the campground. You'll hear the dog, but not seen
the house. This 4WD road easily follows the river up for 3.2 miles to still
another placer mine site that has a Glory Hole where they rerouted the river
to drain the hole. At this point the South Yuba necks down to nothing but
stark canyon until 4 miles above it tops out to Langs Crossing on the Bowman
Lake Road. Just above and left of the mine site is the mouth of Falls Creek.
Anglers find their way to here for the last of accessible hiking in this
stretch of canyon. Above the Glory Hole the old historic road crossed the S
Yuba and climbed up the south side of the river to the old townsite of
Keliher.
Meanwhile, back to the Doolittle Trail. The trail begins to the left side of
the 4WD road as you go up. No signs, but there is a round shiny marker
nailed to a tree on the right side of the road. As I remember it, the 100'
road to the left to the TH is about the only spur that takes off to the left
above Golden Quartz. This trail has all of the historic look left including
rock work and at least one water trough. It's pretty good grade and has
about seven switchbacks just before it connects to the Ridge Trail.
John
*******
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