Tahoe National Forest; For Sale?

It seems that Tahoe National Forest is up for sale ... see

http://www.fs.fed.us/land/staff/spd.html

for a list of parcels (warning: web page takes a while to load).

I've been writing another letter, about our old trails, to Governor Schwarzenegger, Senators Feinstein and Boxer, Congressman Doolittle, and the Supervisors of Placer and El Dorado counties. It is one of those too-long letters I mistakenly imagine will help inform my representatives.

So many subjects arise: the history of the trails; the history of Tahoe National Forest (TNF); "Gion vs. the City of Santa Cruz," and the whole body of case law and common law which tells us that, yes, these same old trails are in fact "public" trails, whether crossing public, or private, lands; and more.

The capstone to this legal issue is that TNF took the time and trouble (1946-50) to secure deeded easements on the very historic trails they would abandon to the logging bulldozers a few years later.

But how can I properly tell the Governor and others, that current TNF employees have not only never set foot on these trails, they likely have not even heard of them?

Hence when Placer County decided to allow residential uses on a 40-acre parcel directly above Iron Point and the Euchre Bar Trail, which parcel had enjoyed a special non-residential "Forest Production" zoning, and thus lower taxes, for decades, and which parcel is surrounded on three sides by TNF lands, I thought to myself, "Tahoe National Forest should take a stand on this; TNF should object, in writing, to the Placer County Supervisors."

A noble thought. The truth, tho, is that just then a new District Ranger had been put in charge of the Nevada City Ranger District. Her name was Vivian Kee. I called her up and tried to describe the situation to her; but I failed. Vivian Kee had never set foot on the Euchre Bar Trail, never heard of it, in fact, and she had never seen the North Fork American River, for District Ranger Kee came to TNF from outside the area.

This is quite common. The people in charge of our pubic lands often have no personal knowledge of those lands. They execute their "Forest Plan" according to a certain body of environmental law. Their job requires much tedious sitting-in-front-of-computers. This shows they are professionals; this, and their cozy, benefit-laden salaries.

When you call a TNF employee on the telephone, and speak with them at length, as I have many many times, you will likely think, "Here is a hard-working and intelligent person."

You will think kindly of the TNF employee. You may even imagine that your unique knowledge, acquired through four decades of Sierran exploration and study, can be of use to TNF.

For instance, when TNF changed its Ranger Districts recently, and the Foresthill District took over some of the old Nevada City District, to the north, I was pleased. My experience was that the TNF people over in Foresthill knew the local area better than most TNF employees. I think kindly of TNF folk at Foresthill.

A year ago, while trying to talk with a TNF employee at Foresthill about some issue, but finding as so often happens, that she was out of the office, I asked what had taken her out in "the field" that day, and learned she was over here in my area, visiting TNF lands near Dutch Flat and Alta.

Now, I have been trying to talk to TNF about their lands and trails near Dutch Flat and Alta, since about 1978.

In 1984 I met with TNF employees concerning the freshly-closed Smarts Crossing Road, a historic road leading down to and once, across, Bear River, where an exceptional cliff-bound pool has offered swimming and diving to generations of locals. There are parcels of TNF land scattered here and there in that area, and I wanted TNF to take a stand, and declare that the road was a public road leading to public lands, and could not be closed.

Well. I found that TNF had decided not to ever protect the public's right to any road or trail. There was one exception; they helped Bohemia Lumber Company keep an old road open, back behind Anderson Peak.

The exception which proves the rule?

At any rate, last year, when I found that a TNF employee was actually visiting these lands-near-Dutch-Flat, I was pleased and intrigued

I called back, and offered to guide her around that area. How many times I have offered to show TNF employees this or that trail, or beautiful place, or archeological site! But they usually refuse, and she refused me this time, too.

Parenthetically, I had also called up and talked with TNF employees about the nearby Mule Springs area, over on Lowell Hill Ridge, in Nevada County, back in the 1980s and 1990s. I had expressed my concern for the area, and its unusual historical and archeological resources, being on the line of that prehistoric trans-Sierran trail we now know as the Donner Trail. The wet meadow, with its archeological importance, was being rutted and ruined by OHVs.

I found that TNF "cared about" historic Mule Springs, but "didn't have enough money" to protect the site.

Now, it looks as though Tahoe National Forest has decided to sell off these very same lands, to help fund the so-called Secure Rural Schools program, intended to disburse revenues to those counties which once enjoyed revenue streams from Forest timber harvests.

These lands include a parcel directly on the old road to Lost Camp and the China Trail, where I have urged TNF for many years to purchase the private lands at the trailhead.

I wrote them and called them and as usual, asked them to come take a look at the China Trail, at Lost Camp, and so on.

They never did. It's been about ten years, now. I guess I shouldn't hold my breath?

Last year, I spoke with new American River District Ranger Jan Cutts about the China Trail and Lost Camp and the Rawhide Mine and Sawtooth Ridge and so on, and she assured me that she wished to get out and hike around and get to know her new District; for like Ranger Kee, Ranger Cutts had no personal knowledge of this area, the area she is entrusted with.

Well, it's only been a year with Cutts, maybe I really *should* hold my breath.

I like Jan Cutts.

I remember when I met her out at Iron Point last year; I had complained that the complete lack of TNF maintenance on the Euchre Bar Trail had led to much erosion, as the "water bars" which divert runoff from the trail, were all broken.

I brought my gloves, my mattock, my shovel, and loppers, for I wish to popularize a new notion: just get the job done, baby.

I showed my tools to Ranger Cutts, thanked her for her interest in the Euchre Bar Trail, and suggested we walk on down the trail and fix it, right then and there.

Of course, she refused. One does not go to college and prepare oneself to sit in front of a computer and be "professional," just to dirty one's hands.

Supposedly, in a week or so, there will be maps on the main Forest Service website, showing these TNF parcels proposed for sale. However, I was able to identify them all easily enough using their already-published legal descriptions, of the sort, "T16N R10E Section 26," etc. etc.

The couple-dozen parcels in question are disjunct from the main mass of TNF lands, interfingering with private lands and sometimes, BLM lands. They are up to about 320 acres in size, but most are much smaller.

In a way, these parcels are on the cutting edge; they are in those western Forest boundary areas, just exactly where we've been discovering, to our horror, that what we had always thought was The Commons, is often actually private property. This is exactly where we ought to hold the line and fight the good fight against further suburbanization; this is where TNF should be trying to purchase the private lands to protect the Commons, not auctioning public lands so as to further hurt and reduce the Commons.

It seems that some kind of public comment period on the TNF land sale will open, soon.

I will keep you informed.

The Quintessential Ford of Canyon Creek

Such amazingly warm weather demands descent into a happy and impossible dream, a land of high waterfalls and deep and darkly-echoing chasms, of mossy cliffs kissed by the sun into an early bloom of many flowers, and rainbows glowing in feathered sheets of spray, and then, miraculously, tremendously, the 2500-feet-deep American River Canyon itself, and Giant Gap.

It is Placer County's Yosemite.

Strangely, to visit Canyon Creek, near Gold Run, and to hike the Canyon Creek Trail (CCT), is to trespass; there is a long narrow mining claim, the Canyon Creek Placer Mine, seventy-two acres and a mile long, and it contains about 90% of the CCT.

It is all within the special "Gold Run Addition" to the North Fork American Wild & Scenic River (W&SR), as enacted by Congress in 1978; and within the very text of the legislation, the Department of the Interior is directed to acquire the private inholdings, within this very, very special Gold Run Addition.

For most of the lands in this northward extension of the W&SR "corridor" (ordinarily only a quarter-mile to either side of the river) are owned by the Bureau of Land Management, or rather, by We the People, and the BLM administers the W&SR program in this part of the North Fork, and manages rather large holdings, in the general area.

So. Most of the lands in the Addition were already BLM, in 1978; but there were some critical private inholdings, as for instance, the Canyon Creek Placer Mine.

To this day none of the inholdings have been acquired.

I can't go in to all this now. Whenever I trespass my way in across the private inholdings and down the trail, I am stricken with dread at the thought it could all so easily be utterly closed off, gated every which way, "no trespassing" signs everywhere, even houses built atop Indiana Hill, or in Potato Ravine, near the trailhead.

I can't refrain from sharing one last little detail about this almost-abortive Gold Run Addition to the North Fork American W&SR: the Addition came into being, I was told, because some wealthy landowners in the upper North Fork canyon, called The Cedars, did not want W&SR designation on the couple-few miles of river which cross their lands. The Cedars had already closed the historic public trail from Old Soda Springs, down the North Fork to Heath Springs, and points west. They wanted a purely private paradise.

So an alternative was conceived, in which We the People would trade away W&SR designation on that precious reach above Heath Falls, but We the People would be compensated for our loss, by the Gold Run Addition.

The Addition would become a "portal" to the North Fork American W&SR. For after all, what good is a Wild & Scenic River if no one can see it or get to it?

Three different historic trails dropped to the North Fork from the Addition: the Canyon Creek Trail, the Pickering Bar Trail, and the Fords Bar Trail. Their status is as follows:

1. CCT: quasi-open, not signed, not on the maps, but one must trespass to reach the trailhead or use the trail itself.

2. Pickering Bar Trail: open, not signed, parking area not signed, not on the maps. Is being abused by OHV use in its upper quarter-mile.

3. Ford Bar Trail: gated closed with fences and "no trespassing" signs in 1985, Placer County approved a subdivision at the trailhead, which in turn led to the closure (2005) of another public trail, the Paleobotanist Trail.

The bottom line is that the Gold Run Addition has yet to become any kind of "portal" to the North Fork; instead, public access has been degraded or lost in the decades since W&SR designation, not enhanced. Not only that, but to confine our acquisition objectives to those portions of the 800 acres within the boundaries of the Addition, would leave access to the Canyon Creek Trail at the mercy of whoever ended up owning the rest of the 800 acres; so I have always considered, now more than ever, that the entire 800 acres, with its two miles of Canyon Creek, and its dozens of historic hydraulic mines, should become public property, and be administered as open space, as a primitive area, entirely closed to OHV use, but open to equestrian, bicycle, and foot uses, wherever appropriate.

Yeek. I could go on and on. It is such a complex issue. There is mercury contamination in Canyon Creek and in the Diggings. There is looting of scarce petrified wood and of archeological sites on BLM lands and private lands in the Diggings. There is, suddenly, much increased OHV use. Oh dear what a mess!

But on such a warm and sunny day as February 9th, 2006, all this must be set aside for a visit to Canyon Creek. There was no bridge, not since December 31st, 2005. So Catherine O'Riley and I hoped to just jump the damn thing.

Well. No chance of that. Canyon Creek was in a fine frenzy of surging white water and thundering falls and cascades. It would be quite hazardous to fall into one of the frothing narrows, trying to jump from, and then land upon, wet sloping rocks.

At the bridge site we futzed around in the bright sunshine, considering this bad place to jump, that bad place to jump, this bad place to ford, then that, and even looking at the sluice iron and wondering, if some strangely twisted piece of it could be wedged across the creek, so that, so that, ... .

But no.

So we wandered downstream, not so easy a thing, as a kind of gorge pinches in, and one must climb above. But we found an old trail, choked with brush, and forced our way along a couple hundred yards, and then over some impressive sloping ledges, and finally, as tho planned, we were led right down to the creek, at the one, and the only, easy ford.

It so happens we were only yards above the first big waterfall met, as one goes down Canyon Creek, about forty feet high, and often split into multiple parallel falls when the water is high. There is a strange little side-fall we call The Leaper, which jets from a secret channel up and across a narrow chasm, slapping loudly against the cliff. It was nice to tiptoe carefully over the fantastical water-polished metavolcanics at the top of the falls, over a breadth of brink of perhaps fifteen yards.

We then waded across the creek, knee-deep in fast water, and found the little track which climbs up to the CCT, and finally, finally, were on our way again.

At this point we were still a thousand feet above the North Fork. Below, the trail steepens and is often cut directly into cliffs, an ancient trail, with much in the way of dry-laid stone walls, now so over-knit by moss, that one can scarcely imagine they were built by humans. We began to see Biscuit Root, and Brewer's Rock Cress, in bloom, and soon many California Milkmaids, and Waterfall False Buttercups, and another lovely little early-bloomer whose name slips my mind every single year, but eventually, I remember it.

Give me a few days, I'll think of it.

Yeek! Growing old!

Dropping down a cross-country route through a cliffy area, we reached the base of the Big Waterfall, putting on a spectacular show, whipping up curtains of mist, and spawning a great rainbow. It is about 150 feet high. The cliffs overhang drastically all around this waterfall, and it is quite a hazardous spot, as one often sees giant razor-sharp shards of smashed metavolcanic rock, littering the massive water-polished bedrock along the creek, having fallen down the cliffs above.

And the CCT is directly above, a few hundred feet up. Any rock dislodged along that part of the trail could kill someone down by the Big Waterfall.

There are many hazards in Canyon Creek.

Another old trail leads away from the Big Waterfall, a tiny thread wandering along sun-blasted mossy cliffs, with a sinfully deep chasm just a step to one side; and down at The Terraces, where the miners who worked the giant sluice boxes and undercurrents of Canyon Creek lived and cooked, we had our lunch, grateful for the shade of stunted Canyon Live Oaks.

It must have been over seventy degrees.

What with a late start, and all the confusion of crossing the creek, our original idea, to streak away east on the High Old Upriver Trail or HOUT (rhymes with "shout"), into Giant Gap, was abandoned in favor of a simple trip to the river itself. So on down the trail we marched, with wonderful views, now, into the North Fork Canyon, and the Pinnacles, up in Giant Gap, and of course blade-like Diving Board Ridge, looming over us, to the west, and then, some last waterfalls, thundering, misty, awesome in themselves, and at last there it was.

There is a *ton* of water in the North Fork right now, running high, fast, clear except for very much white water, and about bank-to-bank. There is really no chance to follow along the banks of the river. It would be too dangerous. It would be deadly to fall in.

There are vestiges of glacial outwash sediments across the North Fork from the confluence of Canyon Creek, clinging to the canyon wall just above the scour-line of our modern "Holocene" (last 10,000 years) flood events, said scour-line recently refreshed, when on January 1, 2006, the North Fork came up over 50,000 cubic feet per second, at Auburn.

We admired it all thoroughly and then took a tour on the Low Upriver Trail, which offers views of Lovers Leap and then The Pinnacles, in turn. Retracing our steps, we climbed up the CCT a little ways, and then cut away to get a view of a certain waterfall.

Here we passed some bedrock outcrops which had been rounded and drilled with potholes over 100,000 years ago, at a guess, since we were fully 100 feet above creek level. This amounts to saying that Canyon Creek has incised its bed here at a rate of one foot per one thousand years. This should be about right, since we know that, in the main North Fork, at Sawtooth Ridge, the river has incised ~2500 feet in 3.82 million years (ridge-crest basalt dated in 2004 at U. Reno), which works out to about eight inches per one thousand years.

And we should imagine that Canyon Creek is cutting down more quickly than the North Fork, because its gradient is so very much steeper. Clearly other variables are at work, such as sediment load, and flow volume, as well as gradient. But "100,000 years" seems like an adequate first approximation to the age of these relict potholes, so high above Canyon Creek.

They may be older.

We found and explored a number of little side trails in that area, so scenic by virtue of the rather tall and classically-formed waterfall close by, at the head of a broad valley-gorge, dominated by large sloping planar areas of bedrock. We found an old miners' camping-terrace, which unfortunately had been used some years ago, and there are some backpack loads of garbage which need hauling, up and out; we filled our packs with what we could.

An amazing spot, that terrace-of-the-garbage. It is really Waterfall Terrace, because of the view of the "classic" waterfall, nearby. That is a great swimming-hole, at the base of that fall, I can tell you.

On an oddly warm winter day in Canyon Creek, what with a trail which tends towards steepness, there is a certain subtlety of timing. Diving Board Ridge, to the west, casts its afternoon shadow over the east canyon wall of south-flowing Canyon Creek; and as the afternoon wanes, the shadow climbs higher.

So if one climbs up and out too soon one is in direct sun the whole way.

But if one waits a little, one can stay just within the shadow the whole way up the trail, only rarely breaking free into direct sun.

We waited. At just the right time we continued our climb.

I had related to Catherine, a month or two ago, the remarkable myth found at the very end of Plato's "Republic," in which one learns, among many other things, of the Music of the Spheres.

It so happens that very much of my life in recent decades has been devoted to geometry. Yet, living in the hinterlands, I have no one with whom to discuss this geometry. Alway, tho, I seek ways to trick the conversation onto my subject. It occurred to me that Plato himself could serve that purpose, now.

"In Plato's 'Timaeus'," I began, "Socrates and Timaeus and others are, you know, having a dialogue--"

"About what?" she queried, with eagle eye.

"I don't know, about the Nature of Things. And Timaeus represented the Pythagorean philosophy. And he began talking about the old idea, of the Four Elements, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Right?"

"Yes; the Four Elements."

"OK. And then Timaeus started talking about these certain right triangles--and how they could be fused together to build up equilateral triangles, or squares. Right?

"OK."

And I went on to describe how Timaeus constructs those certain things, those polyhedra, which, due to this very dialogue, have ever since been called the Five Platonic Solids: the Cube, Octahedron, Tetrahedron, and Icosahedron.

The Cube is bounded by squares, and the others, by equilateral triangles.

Oh yeah, and the fifth one, the Pentagonal Dodecahedron, which is bounded by twelve regular pentagons.

And Timaeus said that there were the four Elements, yes, but that each Element had an "essence" which was its ideal form, as it were.

Four Elements, four Essences.

To the four Elements, Timaeus assigned four of the five Platonic Solids, as follows:

1. Earth->Cube.
2. Air->Octahedron.
3. Fire->Tetrahedron.
4. Water->Icosahedron.

These ideal forms, then, the only convex regular polyhedra, corresponded, as Timaeus would have it, to the four ideal Essences.

But wait. What about the fifth Platonic Solid, the Pentagonal Dodecahedron?

Since there is no fifth Element, it must correspond, says Timaeus, to The Universe, and to the Sphere of the Fixed Stars. Or if there were a fifth Element, it would be "ether," hence our word, ethereal.

So the Pentagonal Dodecahedron has a very, very special status. And to its ideal form, there corresponds an ideal essence.

It is the Fifth Essence.

The "quintessence."

So if you have ever wondered about the etymology of "quintessence," well, it's all Plato's fault!

For more see

http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath096.htm

Meadow Lake

Away north of Cisco Grove, north of Red Mountain, north of Fordyce Creek, northeast of Old Man Mountain, is Meadow Lake, where a town exploded into existence in the 1860s, seven thousand feet above the sea. The Sierra crest is a few miles east, with Mt. Lola the highest point, while a few miles west are the nearly-as-high peaks of metamorphic rock, such as Grouse Ridge, and the Black Buttes.

I shall let Stephen Powers describe Meadow Lake and environs, below, in his 1874 article, "The City of a Day," from Bret Harte's "Overland Monthly." First, however, I will provide a diffuse and somewhat tangential introduction.

I like Stephen Powers. He is most famous for his 1877 book, "Tribes of California," commissioned by John Wesley Powell, after reading Powers' articles in the Overland Monthly. 'Tribes' first appeared as Volume Three of "Contributions to North American Ethnology," published by the Government Printing Office. Now, if you are any kind of student of California history, you *must* read 'Tribes'; there is no getting around it; you could collate the remarks from Gold Rush diaries and newspapers and gather every last little thing written about the native Californians, and still not come close to equaling 'Tribes'.

Not until Alfred Kroeber, at UC Berkeley, in the early 20th century, was another serious attempt at a statewide ethnology made. By that time very many of the California Indians had died. But in 1877, a quarter of the pre-Gold-Rush population, perhaps, remained.

In the preface to his "Handbook of the California Indians," Kroeber wrote,

"I should not close without expressing my sincere appreciation of my one predecessor in this field, the late Stephen Powers, well known for his classic 'Tribes of California,' one of the most remarkable reports ever printed by any government. Powers was a journalist by profession and it is true that his ethnology is often of the crudest. Probably the majority of his statements are inaccurate, many are misleading, and a very fair proportion are without any foundation or positively erroneous. He possessed, however, an astoundingly quick and vivid sympathy, a power of observation as keen as it was untrained, and an invariably spirited gift of portrayal that rises at times into the realm of the sheerly fascinating. Anthropologically his great service lies in the fact that with all the looseness of his data and method he was able to a greater degree than anyone before or after him to seize and fix the salient qualities of the mentality of the people he described. The ethnologist may therefore by turns writhe and smile as he fingers Powers's pages, but for the broad outlines of the culture of the California Indian, for its values with all their high lights and shadows, he can still do no better than consult the book. With all its flimsy texture and slovenly edges, it will always remain the best introduction to the subject."


So, by all means, read "Tribes of California." Interestingly, Powers gathered various myths from the tribes, and even transcribed some of their songs, and arranged them for guitar.

I know very little about Powers the man, save that he was born in 1840, died in 1904, attended university in Germany, and made his living as a journalist. I only became aware of his other writings recently. I have read, for instance, his interesting essay about the history of the German school fraternities. He seems to have been quite the hiker; he walked across the United States from coast to coast, in 1868.

He lived among the California Indians in 1871 and 1872.

It seems likely that Powers and John Muir were acquainted, but despite having read all the major biographies of Muir (more than thirty years ago), I can't recall whether he knew Powers. They both arrived in California in 1868. They both fell under its spell.

Think of Johnny Muir, back in Wisconsin, his Calvinist father sitting comfortably in the parlor, studying his Bible, while ten-year-old Johnny was staggering along behind a yoke of oxen, plowing the south forty. The child loved machines. He carved alarm clocks out of wood! He loved to read, but his father regarded anything but the Bible a waste of time. Johnny had too many chores to allow him to go to school. The chores began at five a.m. and ended after dark. He asked if he could get up early, to read. His father reluctantly consented. So Johhny Muir used his wooden alarm clocks to wake himself at two in the morning. And he read and read and read.

Later, the far-flung neighbors of the Muirs assembled en masse, and confronted the Bible-loving father. They insisted that Muir be allowed to go away to college. They offered to pay for it all. The father reluctantly consented, and off went Muir to university, with his latest wooden alarm clock attached to a hand-carved bed and a hand-carved desk, so that the bed would spring up and flip him onto his feet at five a.m., and a particular book would be drawn down from the desk's shelf, and opened on the desk's surface, so his studies could begin.

Muir came to California, Muir fell under California's powerful spell. But he was one of so many! Powers was another; but consider the case of one Ellsworth Burr Boust, of Virginia.

He was born about 1830. Having completed preparatory school, his wealthy parents gave him a year-long tour, by yacht, of the Mediterranean. Upon his return, he enlisted as a teenager in the U.S. Army and fought in the Mexican war, receiving honors. When gold was discovered, he set out from Alabama for California via the Santa Fe Trail.

That is, by the time he was eighteen years old, Boust was a war veteran and a 49er.

He is found in the special 1852 census at Auburn, occupation, gambler. But soon he would be a Placer County deputy sheriff, and then began a long career in journalism, publishing newspapers at Yankee Jims, Iowa Hill, Dutch Flat, Meadow Lake, and Santa Barbara.

Boust married one Martha Elizabeth Ferguson, in Iowa Hill, 1859. He printed up their marriage announcements on his own press, and sprinkled gold dust over the paper, so that it was pressed into the very fabric of the paper, forever.

I should know, because I've talked with the woman who inherited one of those marriage announcements. Her name is Wadyne Lindbergh, and she is a granddaughter of Ellsworth and Martha. It is very unusual for a grandchild of a 49er to be alive today. Wadyne is fairly old. Her mother was unusually old when Wadyne was born, and her mother was also the youngest of Martha Elizabeth Boust's eight children.

Martha was quite an extraordinary woman, like Ellsworth, a 49er, although she was but seven years old then, as she crouched in the perpetual rain in the jungles of Panama, while her father slowly, slowly died. It took several weeks. You can find many articles, and some poems, written by Martha Elizabeth Boust in the pages of the Dutch Flat Enquirer. She was passionate and intelligent and a very good writer.

The Bousts were friends with Mark Twain, and entertained him on several occasions in their Dutch Flat home, on Sacramento Street. Supposedly Martha would not tolerate Twain's cigars inside the house, and would always rebuke him for putting his feet up on her furniture.

When the great fever of a brand new gold rush struck at Meadow Lake, and a town was a-buildin', Boust moved an extra press from Dutch Flat up to Meadow Lake and began publishing the "Meadow Lake Sun." It is one of my unachieved goals to read through every issue of the Sun, which can be found on microfilm at the State Library, in Sacramento.

Also involved with the Sun was one W.B. Lyon, who married one of Martha's sisters. I regard it as likely that Lyon Peak, on the upper Foresthill Divide, above Old Soda Springs, was named for this man, who, after Meadow Lake, seems to have owned a hotel at Lake Tahoe.

Working for Boust and Lyon on the Meadow Lake Sun was one G.A. Brier, reporter, and certainly an acquaintance of Stephen Powers. His house at Meadow Lake had a "seedy appearance traditional to Bohemians."

What are Bohemians? Well, of course, there is such a thing as Bohemia, itself, in Europe; but we should begin, perhaps, by considering, what is a hippy, and what is a beatnik, and then ask ourselves, what did they call hippies, and beatniks, in olden times?

They called them Bohemians.

California had its fair share of Bohemians. I would count Powers as one of them. Think of his truest successor, or spiritual heir, in Indian studies, Jaime de Angulo. Now there is a California Bohemian! Jaime de Angulo, who "rolled in ditches drunk, with shamans." Jaime de Angulo, who had a ranch in Big Sur on 1905. Who spoke many a California Indian language, and taught at Berkeley so many years. Who was took part in the maiden broadcast of KPFA in 1948.

And so also was poet Joaquin Miller a Bohemian, living like a lord at his hilltop ranch above Oakland, now and then visiting London and throwing the literary elite into a massive tizzy withs his red shirts and high rough boots. He loved to play the California Gold Miner.

Now, hippies used drugs; beatniks uses drugs; Bohemians also used drugs, and one of the strange little twists of California history is that, if you were a teenager, say, in the 1860s, or 1870s, 1880s, 1890s--a teenager, I say, and thus inclined to engage in a rebellion of the sons against the fathers, as Freud describes--you would adventure into the heart of this or that Chinatown, it hardly mattered which, but the bigger the better, and frequent their stores, their gambling halls, their brothels, their opium dens.

And, of course, one would smoke the opium.

Old newspaper articles describe all this. I find it fascinating. The hide-bound conservatives of old Dutch Flat watched in utter horror, as their teenaged children hung out in Chinatown day after day, drinking cheap liquor, smoking cheap cigars, and one could only guess at whatever other horrors took place.

I do not say that Stephen Powers was this kind of Bohemian, but I do believe I detect a resonance.

Powers has a vast vocabulary and is not at all above coining words at need, or constructing adjectives no one else ever imagined, like "vealy," meaning, like veal, in other words, immature. I am fairly sure that some confusion will arise. A dictionary could be useful. Then there are the antiquated usages, like calling skis, snow-shoes. What we would call snowshoes were called Canadian snowshoes, and what we would call skis were called Norwegian snowshoes, away back when.

One can drive to the site of Meadow Lake in the summer or early fall, coming down from the north, from the old Henness Pass road (itself best reached by driving north from Truckee on Highway 89). The lake is there, the granite dam Powers describes, is there, but of the town there is nothing. Near the townsite are ancient Indian petroglyphs. Out in the glaciated rocky terrain are the mines, sometimes marked by masses of reddish ore.

Without further ado, then, here is Stephen Powers article about Meadow Lake.


*******
A City of a Day.

Meadow Lake is one of the strangest cities of America-one of the strangest in the world. It is the Californian Pompeii, the years of whose antiquity one can reckon on the fingers of one's hands; whose entombing lava is the summit snow-storm, which sometimes buries it twenty-five feet deep on the level; and whose annual exhumation is wrought by the summer sun. Of all the eloquent and melancholy monuments of the "Dead-work" with which California and Nevada are so thickly strewed-work consecrated with human toil, human heroism and suffering, on which money, talent, and dauntless energy were so prodigally expended, and which all went for nothing-this is the most striking. This abandoned and desolate city, standing in the far solitudes of the summits of the Sierra Nevada, presents a spectacle sadder than Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," because not redeemed liked that by the softening touch of tender associations, or mellow, pensive landscapes.

The proper and perhaps more appropriate name for this elevated locality is Excelsior, probably so called in allusion to Longfellow's well-known poem. Until 1858, nothing had been done in the way of prospecting the region, or of turning it to account in developing the mineral riches in the mountains lower down. Now and then a traveler or a solitary tourist, more adventurous than others, had passed over the Donner Lake or Henness Pass road, and brought to the dwellers in the sweltering lowlands of the Sacramento Valley almost incredible accounts of the rich natural meadows near the summit; of the vast forests of gigantic trees, the sparkling, ice-cold streams, and the awful desolation which reigned unbroken amid the bare, bristling crags of syenite and granite. But men were content to remain below to long as no more brilliant inducements allured them, for in their minds this region was inseparably associated with a winter of almost polar rigor, stretching through seven or eight months of the year. Nor did they forget that somewhere thereabout occurred the fearful tragedy of Donner Lake, in 1846, when eighty-two immigrants were snow-bound at Starvation Camp, and remained a greater portion of the winter, until they were reduced to the awful extremity of cannibalism, and thirty-six died the most horrible of deaths.

Who but the California prospector, braving the wrath of the elements in his insatiable thirst for the precious metal, would ever have penetrated this fatal region? Yet even he did not come seeking gold directly, but only the water wherewith to extract it from placers lower down in the mountains. In 1858, the great South Yuba Canal Company constructed a dam 1,150 feet long, forty-two feet high, and at the apex fifteen feet wide, across a small stream tributary to Yuba River. This immense structure is built entirely of solid granite, without a particle of wood or cement entering into its composition. Thus was created an artificial lake or reservoir two miles long north and south, from 300 yards to three-quarters of a mile wide, and from ten to thirty feet in depth. This is Meadow Lake, from which this city of a day derives its appellation. In this reservoir, 7,000 feet above the sea, and a number of others in the vicinity, there accumulates a vast quantity of clear, cold water, which is conveyed down in flumes and ditches to a hundred towns and mining-camps, cheering the hearts of the dwellers in the thirsty, sweltering foot-hills, and washing out every year, many hundreds of thousands of dollars in gold. True, those lakes destroyed a beautiful and fertile body of grass, which flourished thick as a fleece, affording a grateful refuge to the flocks and herds coming up here in summer from the arid plains below; but the gold washed out is worth more than the cattle on many hills.

But the making of these great constructions, although it required the presence for many months of scores of men practiced in gold-hunting, resulted in no discoveries. Unconscious and unsuspecting, they trod hither and thither, they worked, they slept, they lived for years directly over ledges which have since been proved to contain fabulous riches. One reason for this was the fact that, unlike auriferous ledges elsewhere in the State, those of Meadow Lake do not crop out above the surface conspicuously; another was, that a great portion of the country-rock is granite, and it had been hitherto a favorite theory of Californians that gold never occurs in granite. And the theorists were as obstinate in their beliefs as was that old Cornishman of Grass Valley who persisted in declaring "Gold never cut grass-gold never cut grass," even after they had shown him the richest ledges, studded with free gold, protruding above the surface. So it fell out that, after all these wise doctors, these surveyors, engineers, and experts had come, and seen, and gone, it was reserved for a man as little learned in the arcana of geology as Marshall was in 1848 to stumble upon the great revelation.

In the year 1860, one Henry Hartley, an Englishman, with a hereditary tendency to consumption, and the love of bold adventure so characteristic of his nation, wandered into these savage upper solitudes of the Sierra. He came simply in pursuit of health, and to trap the game which abounds here, when the snows of winter begin to prevail. That he had no thought of gold-hunting is shown by the fact that he abode here for three years, an absolute hermits, before he chanced upon any indications. Whenever not cooped up in his cabin, he trapped and skinned the fur-bearing animals, gliding about from one of his traps to another on his snow-shoes; and in the spring he descended into the Sacramento Valley with his hoard of peltries, sold them, lingered through the summer, and returned with supplies to his mountain fastness upon the approach of the November snow-storms. In 1863, in the month of June, when the earth was uncovered-perhaps he may never have seen it bared before-he noticed several ledges about a half-mile distant from the present site of Meadow Lake. He stooped down in surprise, almost incredulous, and beating with one stone upon another he hammered several to fragments, and shelled out a number of small, bright, yellow chispas. In the ensuing August, he returned to the spot in company with two acquaintances, to whom he had imparted his discovery, and they satisfied themselves abundantly of the richness of the find. In September they formed a company called the Excelsior Company, and staked off 2,000 feet on each of two parallel lodes, which they named Union No. 1 and No. 2.

The quartz which they found was stained on the surface a dark reddish-brown or chocolate, resulting from the decomposed pyrites with which it was highly charged. In many places the disintegrated sulphurets of the vein were resplendent with free gold, rich and yellow. These three men pounded up the stones and rudely assayed them with pan and horn spoon-the prospector's vade mecum-until the richness of their discovery grew in their minds to a great and splendid certainty.

Yet progress was slow at first. The Excelsior Company was the only one organized in 1863; then came on the long, dreary winter, during which nothing was done or attempted. In the summer of 1864 the California Company was organized, staked off 1,700 feet on each of four ledges, and named them California, Knickerbocker, Indian Boy, and Indian Queen. But it was not until the summer of 1865 that the few adventurous spirits succeeded in attracting public attention to the new Dorado. The great war was over in the East, and men's minds felt relieved. The first impulse proceeded from Virginia City, Nevada. Wonderful rumors began to reach that city, of ledges which towered aloft in mid-air on the summit of the Sierra Nevada, and bloomed with golden blossoms like a cactus. Eight thousand feet above the sea, in a region where flowers failed the eye, Mother Earth had tricked out the granite with yellow posies more beautiful than any ever compassed by Parisian art. The imaginations of men were fired. The seed fell on ready soil, for the great Comstock Lode of Virginia City, richer than gorgeous Mexico, was then thought to be a failure; rich Montana was far away; many-ca–oned Idaho was cursed with arctic cold; Humboldt, and Reese River, and Esmeralda were proved and branded frauds. Here, then, was a new and most timely outlet to the multitude of impecunious and adventurous souls, so long cabined, cribbed, confined to worked-out diggings. Surely, good Dame Fortune had heard their prayers, and granted them this new world to conquer.

From June until Autumn they came. By hundreds and hundreds they were thronging over the arid alkaline roads from Washoe to Meadow Lake; some with a piece of bacon a-shoulder, and more with none. Miners old and grizzly of hair, who should have known better, with pick, pan, and horn; miners young and foolish, with sixty pounds of blankets and grub a-lugging. Israelites with packs of pins and needles, sardines, tobacco, and pipes. Coaches packed within and without with eager, excited men. Painted courtesans with the rest, refusing no bottle or cigar when offered by "the boys." Traders with wagons full of cheap goods; pale-faced, exquisite gentlemen-knights of the strap and the pasteboard; adventurers without a dollar; discounting the future for a breakfast, which they always contrived to get.

At first this had been supposed to lie within the boundary of Nevada, but a survey showed it to be in California. In July, 1865, a public meeting was called-the first ever held on top of the mountains-the mining laws of Nevada County, California, were adopted by proclamation, the county recorder's office designated as the proper place for the entry of titles, transfers, etc., and the name Meadow Lake formally given to the town, previously called Excelsior and Summit City. Then, with a cheer for everybody, these swift legislators hastened away over the hills and mountains to locate their claims and record the same. In a few weeks there grew up a perfect forest of stakes, like a newly-planted vineyard, containing notices written with a remarkable and very impartial variety of orthographies. Everything was claimed, staked, and recorded-bowlders, ledges of poor granite, hillocks, hills, gulches. An acquaintance of mine who was there soon afterward and explored this rare field of botany, culling a specimen or two of the blossoms, preserved this:

"NOTIS.-we the Undersigned Clame this Ground and intend to wirk it
JIM
SQEEDUNC"

It is said that during the summer of 1865 alone about 1,200 locations were made and recorded, covering in the aggregate more than 1,200,000 feet of the supposed auriferous ledges. They were registered on the books under glittering names, as Shooting Star, Montreal, Mohawk, Mayflower, Golden Eagle, Potosi, Phoenix, etc. Meadow Lake was surveyed and laid out as a town, covering a plat of 160 acres. It contained spacious streets, eighty feet wide, with the blocks divided into lots of sixty feet frontage and eighty feet in depth; and midway through the blocks ran broad, healthy alley-ways, sixteen feet wide. These streets were so designated, as so often in California and Nevada, where the people have no time to think of names, A, B, C one way, and 1, 2, 3 the other. In the northern portion of this mushroom city was reserved a fine piece of ground for that indispensable requisite of every California city, the plaza.

In consideration of the extreme youth of the city, lots were held reasonably; the California Company offered them "for the small consideration of $25 gold coin of the United States," on condition that the same should be inclosed and improved. With the close of the fall of 1865 the new city contained about 150 houses completed, and a number of others in course of construction. Among these were three commodious hotels, crowded day and night to repletion; stores, wholesale and retail, in numbers; butcher-shops, green-stores, saloons, and gambling-hells innumerable. It is supposed that over 3,000 people visited the place between June and October of that year, which months indicate pretty nearly the limits of the business season in that elevated locality. This was a very large number, considering the altitude and remoteness of the region.

There came now a temporary lull, as the autumn drew on apace. After all the locations had been made, the names all handsomely written down in the recorder's books, and the fees paid therefore; after all the speeches had been made and the bumpers drained; after all the singing and dancing was done and overdone, then the people began to try to think what to do next. Some of them hammered out specimens from their ledges, collected quills and bottles full of dust, and compared notes. Of course, there were no mills erected yet. In order to extract gold in the old pioneer fashion of California, one must have water which he can bring to bear upon it; but there they were on the top of the world. They were up too high; there was where the water started from. They began to look a little blank. To occupy their leisure time before the snows should begin to fall, they would go out and move their stakes a little, then come in and talk the matter over again. There were no capitalists among them yet to erect mills. They said to one another, "Well, what's going to be done up here?" Besides that, the question of supplies was getting urgent. It is an expensive business for 2,000 or 3,000 men to go up on a mountain and bring up provisions to eat there. It would be a great deal more economical to eat them at the bottom. They began to look a little foolish. One by one they quietly stole away, after performing the little work required to hold their claims under the liberal mining laws of California, and went back down to Virginia City, to Sacramento, to San Francisco, to spend the winter among the cautious capitalists of those wealthy cities, in presenting the merits of their discoveries and securing funds with which to develop them. Before the November snow-storms set in on the mountains the throngs of restless adventurers had gone like summer birds, seeking a more genial clime. Only about 200 persons, including several families, remained behind, determined to spend the winter in watching their claims against intruders, and be ready to take the tide of fortune at its flood in the ensuing spring.

The winter of 1865-6 was one of unusual duration and severity. The first snow fell on September 24th. Then all was quiet until November, when those violent winds from the south-west, which are always the storm-winds of California, came moaning up over the mountains, bringing vast masses of dun and wooly clouds, the sure precursors of rain on the plains and snow on the mountains-for the clouds do not trifle in this land of the sun, but mean business when they do come. All through the long month of November, with scarcely the cessation of a day, the "beautiful snow" sifted down on Meadow Lake. On the summit the falling snow fills all the wide chambers of the air like frozen fog, so that a man cannot see a rod before him. From New Year's Day on, as often happens in the Pacific Coast climate, the sky was comparatively clear and calm-the interval between the early and the latter rains-and the thermometer, which seldom ranged low, sometimes for days together kept so well up that fire was unnecessary during the daytime. It is well known that the climate on the western slope of the Sierra is milder than that on the eastern slope at an equal altitude, for the soft mild winds blowing off the great Japanese warm stream in the Pacific, and flying high over the Coast Range and the Sacramento Valley, touch the tips of the mountains with balmy influences. But March came in with a leonine roar like November, and all through March, April, and May, with few intermissions, the snow came down again and again; the narrow mountain trails were obliterated, and only the unintermitting passage of horses and oxen to and fro kept open the highways, treading down the snow. From the 20th of May until the 1st of June there was one incessant snow-storm, day and night. The wide plains and the beautiful valleys below, lying rich and mellow in the sun, were in the full verdure of spring by the middle of March; but how different here, where the great pines and larches, with their heads lifted among the clouds, shook their glittering panoply of icicles and sleet-drops as an Indian girl her beadery. On the mountains of California, winter yields his dominion almost in a week to summer, and it seemed as if, before handing over his sceptre now, he determined to assert himself in one last great effort to retain his empire.

Early in May, despite the snow-storms, the second rush set in strongly toward Excelsior, and it seemed as though there was a good probability that some aspiring youth might even yet justify the original name. In two months, May and June, over 4,000 people arrived! Every sleeping-place was full even to overflowing. Twenty, thirty, forty persons were sometimes crowded together in a vile room, very appropriately called a "corral." Men who happened to be belated walked the streets all night, or lay on benches as if they were able to resist a low temperature; in the morning paid $1 for a biscuit, a cup of muddy coffee, and a leathery mustang steak; then perhaps slept an hour or two on the sunny side of a house. For a lot sixty by eighty feet on any of the principal streets, $1,500 to $2,500 was asked, and not infrequently paid, in gold coin. A small structure on C Street, eighteen by twenty-four feet, rented for $200 a month. The possessor of a few corner lots counted himself a millionaire, and condescendingly hobnobbed with the San Franciscan who owned only a few blocks of brick buildings within a stone's-throw of the Bank of California.

Four saw-mills had been running at the top of their capacity all the spring, and as soon as the weather permitted some 400 or 500 buildings were knocked together with amazing rapidity, making about 650 in all in the city. A thin shell of boards, with "rustic" outside, paper inside, and a ceiling of "white domestic"-it is astonishing how little it takes to make a comfortable house in California.

But it is more astonishing how great and complete was the infatuation of the people. A young acquaintance of mine who was there explained thus: "I never should have gone into the thing if I had not seen the oldest and best merchants in the State of Nevada-men in whose judgement I had perfect confidence, who had often been in the forefront of excitements like this, and who ought to have been able to judge whether the town had any substance to it or not-going up in to their ears, investing for all they were worth. When I saw such men putting all their capital to the touch, I thought it was safe enough for me to follow."

In June, 1866, a stock board of thirty-nine members was established! In view of the fact that there was not a solitary mine which had yet a more substantial existence than the name engrossed on the recorder's books-not even a ledge sunk upon and its proportions developed-this transaction was as refreshing to men's heated brows as a Sierra breeze. Day after day, with countenances as solemn and as placid as a ham of bacon, these valuable members of society assembled together, and the secretary sonorously called "U.S. Grant," "Comet," Confidence," "Mohawk and Montreal," "Enterprise," and the rest of the long list, and not a soul responded. Except for the pompous braying of that official, there reigned the silence of the grave. Like Cicero's priests of Rome, when they were behind the curtain, they looked in one another's faces and laughed. This stock board was the laughing-stock-which was the only actual stock dealt in-of the whole district. It was regarded by everybody in Meadow Lake as a very broad and attenuated farce. A few sober and sensible men of the town regretted these proceedings of unmitigated fatuity, for they knew well, what the others could hardly have been ignorant of, that they would bring the new district into contempt, and confirm even greenhorns in the belief that the whole matter was intended for a swindle. It is difficult to explain or understand this thing, except as a piece of that reckless gayety and bravado with which Californians seek to smooth over a rough place and escape from a bad situation. For even this early it is highly probable that there had begun t dawn on many souls a great and bright light, and that they were beginning already to meditate on the sweet uses of adversity. For a graceful and masterly retreat from an "almighty sell," commend me of all men to a Californian.

And what was the trouble? Simply this: there was plenty of gold there, but they couldn't get it out. There seems to be some substance, unknown to metallurgists, which is so combined with the sulphurets that it is impossible to separate it and reduce the precious metal to a form of availability. I repeat, that the amount of gold known to exist in the Meadow Lake district is very large, rendering its quartz almost unprecedentedly rich; but it is all as yet effectually locked up from the hand of man. The sulphurets show a value of about sixty dollars a ton, which is a good average. Then there is free gold besides. It would be vain and useless to enumerate all the tests and processes which the eager and disappointed gold-hunters have tried in vain. The ordinary amalgamation process with quicksilver was defeated by the unknown substance above mentioned. The Plattner chlorination process, so successful in the great quartz-mines of Grass Valley, is here of no avail. All European methods tried have failed utterly, which is one illustration of the uselessness of attempting to apply old-world rules here in general. And in their despair the baffled miners even tried a process which some charlatan or old wife had invented in a dream, and which was known as the Burns process; but that was as useless as the others. After all these ways had been tried over and over, to no purpose, there were cavilers who sneered at science and said there was no gold in the rocks. But it is generally agreed that there is gold there, plenty of it; only, as Mr. Pickwick would say, it is not gold as gold.

And so all the dreams and the black art, the science, the metallurgy, and the blow-pipe, were set at naught. One after another, as they abandoned hope, the discomfited gold-seekers abandoned Meadow Lake and went down the mountain. More than $2,000,000 had been poured into that bottomless abyss of California known as "dead-work," to pay for mills, roads, buildings, mining, etc., not including those intangible and unknowable expenses inevitably connected with such a scheme as this-say $3,000,000 in all. Eight quartz-mills had been constructed, carrying in the aggregate seventy-two stamps; and of all these only the U.S. Grant had yielded anything-about $100,000-or say one dollar for every thirty expended.

What a world of work was here done in vain! Besides this town of 650 houses, which was more handsome and substantial than is the wont of mountain mining towns; and the eight quartz-mills, with their ponderous machinery, there were built the neighboring villages of Ossaville, Carlyle, Paris, and Mendoza, all of which together contained about a hundred houses more. Nearly a hundred miles of stage roads were constructed; stations and stables built along them at regular intervals; wells dug; four saw-mills erected; forests leveled widely around and converted into lumber; lines of stages established; caravans of huge mountain freight-wagons set in motion; and all the thousand-and-one appliances of civilized life provided. All this and ten thousand other things, done in one brief summit summer, give us an idea of the prodigious energy of the gold-hunter, which goes a long way toward covering up his follies and his crimes.

As the winter of 1866-67 drew on, there was a greater hegira than the winter before, and it was final. All the miserable riff-raff, the indolent, worthless, and profligate adventurers, who have no capital, no industry, no brains, and who expect to make their living by fleecing honest men; all the gamblers and the harlots; the old prospectors, weather-beaten and grizzled; the young greenhorns, out at the elbows, out at the purse, without the means to procure a meal of victuals; all the lily-livered counter-jumpers, measurers of tape and wearers of cheap jewelry; all the sutlers, thieves, pickpockets, and roughs, were gone. There was a mighty purging and cleaning of the mountain tops before they were given back as clean and wholesome granite to the pure embrace of the snow. There lingered behind only a few hard-headed and obstinate men, who clung desperately to the last straw of hope; or men of sensitive minds, who dreaded to go back to be "gaffed" by the ridicule of skeptical capitalists of San Francisco, whose money-bags they sought in vain to open for their schemes. The great and soothing solitude of nature fell like a balm upon some wounded spirits, in which bitterly rankled the memory of defeat.

As was befitting this brief act of melodrama, the winter of 1866-67 surpassed even the preceding in the severity and continuance of its tempestuous storms. Fiercely the snow whirled in the howling winds for weeks and weeks together, until it heaped up a depth of twenty-five feet on a level, burying the unsightly and abortionate works of man out of view.

Of late, a considerable portion of the city has been burned down, but when I was there in the summer of 1872 it was comparatively perfect-not as a ruin, but as a deserted city, a standing monument of human folly; and I prefer to speak of it as it was then. In the summer of 1873, for a time there were ten inhabitants, but the only population that can be counted upon as permanent is Henry Hartley, the eccentric and adventurous Englishman who brought the place first before the public eye. In the season succeeding my visit, a resident of Grass Valley had the curiosity to visit the place in the dead of winter, a feat which he could accomplish only with snow-shoes. On these great runners, twelve or fifteen feet long, he scaled the savage summits of the Sierra, descending into the valley where lies Meadow Lake. glided through the empty streets on a level with the second-story windows, and hove-to before one of the commodious hotels. Peering through the chamber windows, he beheld sleeping apartments comfortably furnished: chairs, wash-stands, mirrors, and beds smoothed down with clean linen and heavy comforters, pillows nicely tucked and puffed by the chambermaid's hands for the guests that never came-all inviting to luxurious repose. He was tempted to go in and take a cozy sleep after his hard climb over the mountains, but the sepulchral solitude chilled his heart and blood. It was like the things beheld by divers who go down into the waters of the sea, and look through port-holes of sunken argosies into luxuriously upholstered rooms, where the green waters flow undisturbed, and the sea-weed creeps through the eyeless sockets of the skeletons. Not a living soul did he behold.

Here, just across the street from the room of the stock board above mentioned, is the handsomely furnished office of a stock-broker. If his vaults were plethoric with coin-and it is extremely doubtful if they ever were-they could scarcely be safer in the whole world, for old Boreas locks them fast and sure with snow. No burglars need be dreaded here. How strange and sad it seems, as we walk along these silent streets, to see the signs swing and hear them mournfully creak in the breeze. But all the trades-people are gone, all, all, gone. And here is the office of the Meadow Lake Sun book and job printing establishment. On the bulletin-board facing the street we read, in display-type, "Briefs and transcripts executed neatly, promptly, and handsomely, in accordance with the new rules of the Supreme Court, at the most reasonable rates. Stock-books furnished to order." A melancholy sarcasm in that last sentence-melancholy because he writers of it were in first-rate earnest, whatever others may have been. The Meadow Lake Sun shines no more; doubtless it would shine, but there are none to illuminate. And here, on C Street, was the residence of G.A. Brier, reporter of the Sun, a building with the dilapidated and seedy appearance traditional to Bohemians. Here was the wholesale liquor-store of M. Flood & Co., on B Street between First and Second.

A great many of the flimsy roofs of great superficies are utterly broken down to the ground by the enormous masses of snow, which falls in this region to the aggregate depth of thirty or forty feet a year. In the town of Truckee, the roofs are sloped up sharp, like that ancient gothic of nature, the yellow pine; but here that precaution appears to have been neglected. Notwithstanding that, and notwithstanding their frailness, many have stood stoutly up through all the storms. Here, by the edge of the lake, the timbers and boards of the snow-crushed houses lie sprawling in the water, which gently laps and wimples among them. Now and then a sudden flow of wind flaps the end of some loosened weather-board, which clacks to and fro against the house with a mournful and desolate sound, more blood-chilling than the silence. All through the heart of the deserted city broods the stillness of the tomb.

The one solitary inhabitant, Hartley, in his long winter sojourn, can move about only on his snow-shoes or Norwegian skates, so common in this alpine portion of the State, consisting of two narrow boards about fifteen feet in length, and slightly turned up at the ends. With his guiding-pole poised in his hands, striking first on this side, then on that, he attains a speed incredible to the dwellers in the valleys. His flight down the mountain side is like the eagle's when it stoops upon the hare. The straggling squads of trees on the slope appear to be flying in his face. They flee by him, like frightened deer, in long, black lines. Before him there is a point where they seem to open ranks to let him pass; behind him they leap together as the waters close over the diver. While the minute-hand of a watch creeps over a single space, he has sped from the mountain top to the valley, shoots like a falling star through the silent street of Meadow Lake, and slims across the lake. Swifter than the wild mountain sheep is this hunter, and he disputes its reign over solitude.

Two miles away to the south, the Old Man lifts his granite face, and looks down with sad and solemn mien on the swift mutations of human fortune. Pinnacles, chimneys, needles of splintered syenite, racked and battered crags, yawning abysses, shattered precipices, all tell their story of the vast forces of the earth so wildly and wantonly expended; beneath them, and all around, the abandoned ruins speak eloquently of the Cyclopean energy of man, so sadly and so prodigally wasted. The grayish coloring of the Sierra summits imparts to the scenery an aspect of hoary and ancient desolation, and thus redeems these mushroom wrecks with an appearance of being the remains of some by-gone age.
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New York Canyon

Check out my friend Tom McGuire's write-up of our visit to New York Canyon last June, with some nice photos of the 500-foot waterfall there, at

http://gambolinman.blogspot.com/2005/06/north-fork-american-river-intrepid.html

Visit to Canyon Creek

Late this morning, on impulse, I threw some things in my pack and drove to the Canyon Creek Trail in the Gold Run Diggings. The little bridge across the creek is gone, ripped away in the flood event of the beginning of the year. It should be replaced, and The Inimitable Julie, as well as Catherine O'Riley, have advocated immediate action.

So, one of the things in my pack was my 25-foot tape measure. I recalled the old bridge as about twelve feet long; but my recollections have become suspect, and it seemed good to measure the chasm once again.

When building a bridge one seeks a narrow crossing-point. Then the bridge will be as short as possible. Hence, in terrain like this, one seeks an "inner gorge," a place of exposed bedrock where the channel has narrowed.

This is just the case at the Canyon Creek bridge site. Except during floods, the creek is confined within rock walls six feet apart.

However, the old bridge, built in 1998, was not twelve, but a little less than fourteen feet long, I determined once I arrived. It had been made using two 2X6 joists, with 2X6 blocking a foot long nailed between them every 32 inches, and a deck of three 2X6s laid lengthwise, parallel to the joists, attached to both blocking and joists using deck screws. One end was trapped rigidly within a gap in the bedrock, the other end rested on sloping smooth rock; gravity held it in place; had it been anchored, there is a chance it might have survived this last flood. For it was a sturdy little thing. No railing; that lack spooked a number of people.

It was a glorious day, incredibly warm. Canyon Creek was loud, boisterous, surging clear green water with long stretches of frothing white rapids. I had hoped to jump the creek and continue down the trail, but no, it is still too high.

So I walked around and looked at the bridge site from many angles. Of course one wants a bridge which stands high enough not to be ripped out every ten years. But the higher one places the bridge deck, the longer the bridge becomes.

I determined that by raising the level of the bridge about five to six feet, its length would grow to slightly over 20 feet.

Some homemade, arched, glue-laminated beams might serve. Then, blocking as before, and a bridge deck as before. But now the bridge would stand fifteen feet above the creek, not eight feet, and a railing would become essential, and the bridge deck must be widened to at least two feet.

I saw that bobcats, or a bobcat, had been frequenting the area, pooping here there and everywhere on the water-carved and polished bedrock. Only the most prominent and conspicuous spots will do.

The rock here seems to be some metamorphosed volcanic mudflows and ashflows (perhaps; it would take a real petrologist with a microscope to be sure). It is mapped as part of the late Paleozoic Calaveras Complex. The original strata are now tipped up near vertical. The rock seems quite siliceous and takes a high polish; it is various light colors, greys and tans, and makes a kind of fairyland of sculptured rock blades, rounded under the grinding impacts of a thousand floods. There are gigantic bolts and iron pins sprouting from the rocks, which once anchored the broad sluice boxes of the Canyon Creek Placer Mine, in the 1870s and early 1880s.

Broad? Eight feet broad. And the "undercurrents," a special type of sluice box used much in Canyon Creek, were fifteen or twenty feet wide.

The wooden sluice boxes were lined with narrow-gauge railroad track running lengthwise, and many pieces of this "sluice iron" are now embedded in the boulder-bars along the creek. Some have been bent into giant horseshoes six feet across, by some rending flood of years gone by. Some have been worn into slender threads of iron--or could it be steel?--during their time in the sluice boxes.

So the sluice iron itself is rather sculptural in character. Only rarely are the pieces of worn railroad track straight. Only rarely can one tell that they are in fact pieces of railroad track.

I have always thought that a bridge, or at least its structural members, might be made from this sluice iron. I have all kinds of ideas about making trusses and so on. A welding torch, a drill, some half-inch bolts and so on, and voila!

But my "ideas" usually involve long pieces of almost-straight sluice iron, which I would bend into slight curves or tight zig-zags (then the curves would bound the zig-zag, welded or bolted at points of contact). Twenty feet long, say. And there really aren't any of those. There are quite a few, though, over ten feet in length.

After an hour or so I strolled back up the trail. What a beautiful creek, what a beautiful day.

Visit to Green Valley

I have written so many times about Green Valley, that I hesitate to repeat myself, in order to develop context for remarks about the geologic history there.

Briefly, then, Green Valley is a wider-than-usual reach of the North Fork canyon, where it crosses, at about a right angle, the weak serpentine of the Melones Fault Zone. To the west, the soaring cliffs and pinnacles of Giant Gap (a different and stronger kind of rock, there) seem to shut off Green Valley from the world at large: how often the storms stall over the high country, while lower in the foothills, the sun has breached the clouds: so brooding showers and storm-wrack hover over Green Valley, while in Giant Gap, the fog glows gold and shafts of light from a westering sun burnish the dark cliffs.

It happens that Pleistocene-age sediments, glacial outwash deposits, are abundant in Green Valley, and were vigorously mined. The sediment load of the North Fork would climb well above the river's ability to transport it, during times of glacial maxima, of which there have been many, even within the last hundred thousand years.

Many?

Sediment cores from Owens Lake, at the south end of the Owens Valley, east of the High Sierra, which during glacial maxima, overflowed south through a systems of rivers and lakes, into Death Valley--sediment cores reveal no fewer than sixteen episodes of glacial maxima, within the last 52,000 years.

Yet we only have a name for the last few maxima, from about 25,000 to 10,000 years ago: we call it the Tioga glaciation; and we treat these several maxima as one episode.

Many of the outwash deposits in Green Valley are pre-Tioga, but none have been dated with certainty. Some might be what are called Tahoe I, others, Tahoe II, in age, respectively, about 120,000 and 60,000 years ago. Some might be Sherwin in age, about 750,000 years.

It so happens, too, that many relict channels exist to either side of the present river. Some of these were worked by ground sluicing, others by full-on hydraulic mining, and some could only be reached by tunnels. For in these channels is gold.

Imagine that during a glacial episode, the North Fork's sediment load is so extreme that the canyon fills to a depth of 200 feet above the "natural" river level, with boulders and sand etc. washed down from the North Fork glacier, miles up the canyon.

A flood plain exists within Green Valley, a mile long and half a mile wide. The North Fork meanders back and forth across this plain. At any one time, it follows some particular sinuous course. If we had a time-lapse movie spanning a thousand years, or better yet, a few thousand years, we'd see the course of the river, over the Green Valley glacial outwash floodplain, whip back and forth like a snake.

From study of existing temperate-latitude glaciers we deduce that the North Fork carried much more water, then, than it does today. Yet even those raging flows of glacial meltwater could not strip the sediments out of Green Valley.

However, it is natural to imagine that, while the sediments might have been 200 feet deep over the previous bed of the river, to either side, the bedrock floor of Green Valley would rise, until it intersected the floodplain surface, along the northern and southern edges of the plain.

So towards these edges the sediments were not "200 feet" deep; they were, let's say, less than fifty feet deep.

Under such conditions the raging flood-like flows of meltwater might well transiently mobilize the floodplain sediment, near the river, all the way down to bedrock; and if that mass of boulders and sand moves across that bedrock, it carves a channel.

So, considering that over the long term, the course of the river whips back and forth across the floodplain like a snake, we should expect to find many relict channels in Green Valley.

And we do.

We also find many "strath terraces." These are level or gently-sloping areas of bedrock standing fifty feet or more above the present level of the river. For, consider this subtlety of the snake-like, whipping-back-and-forth, glacial-maximum North Fork: imagine again that the extreme flood-stage-like flows have mobilized the sediment column of boulders, sand, cobbles, mud, whatever, down to bedrock.

If the transient channel of the river on the floodplain, mobilizing these sediments, *is itself moving laterally at the same time*, the sediments do not act to carve a distinct bedrock channel, but instead merely plane off the high spots in the bedrock, which project up into the maelstrom of boulders and sand.

Now suppose that the glaciers melted away, so the sediment load returned to modern levels, and the North Fork has rapidly incised through this Green Valley glacial outwash floodplain, and re-occupied, perhaps, its pre-glacial bedrock channel.

This "rapid" incision has likely taken a thousand years or more. During that time the floodplain has been lowered vertically and has shrunk horizontally. The river continues to whip back and forth across its narrower and narrower width. It is a freak of fate if any portion of the original floodplain surface remains intact. But it does happen. And as the river whips back and forth, it strips the outwash down, and exposes strath terraces as it does so.

In some places these strath terraces are quite easy to see. Elsewhere they remain buried under a thin veneer of outwash sediments.

If one were to try to characterize the shape of the bedrock underlying the often-thin veneer of glacial outwash sediments in Green Valley; that is, if one were to draw an idealized cross-section, cutting the canyon walls, and the North Fork, at right angles, by a vertical plane, striking north-south, one would at first glance see that the canyon is symmetrical about the axis of the river: it is about the same to the north as to the south. At second glance one would notice that, above the line of the glacial outwash floodplain, the bedrock canyon walls are steeper, but below that line, the bedrock is at a relative shallow angle.

Then when we examine this region of the profile--the shallow-angled bedrock beneath the outwash plain--we see that, in detail, there is a succession of sloping or level strath terraces and channels, until, flanking the river to either side, there is a lowest last symmetrical pair of strath terraces, about fifty feet above river level.

These are the most recent, Tioga-age, "recessional" strath terraces, cut, one expects, as the floodplain shrank to a narrow band, just before the North Fork re-occupied its pre-glacial channel.

That the North Fork has indeed re-occupied its own pre-Tioga bedrock channel is evidenced by outcrops of a very peculiar type of conglomerate found in Green Valley, always where the outwash sediments were in direct contact with the serpentine bedrock. Some cementing agent, perhaps magnesium, bound the bouldery mass into an amazingly solid rock. These masses of very young conglomerate are found, sporadically, at river level or sometimes well above river level, from the east end of Green Valley, to the west end. And there is one unequivocally true inference we may draw from the river-level position of these conglomerates, which, incidentally, were often so very rich in gold it was like a raisin pudding, except the "raisins" were nuggets of gold--the one almost idiotically true statement we can make about these mysterious conglomerates, is that the North Fork must have already incised to their level, if not below their level, at the time of their deposition.

They are absolutely typical in composition, these conglomerates, so far as the boulders and rocks which comprise most of their volume: they are boulders of granite, of Shoo Fly Complex metasediments, of the Sailor Canyon Formation and Tuttle Lake Formation and a few other metamorphic rock formations, of the North Fork basin upstream from Green Valley.

And add to these a certain proportion of often angular chunks of serpentine from local sources.

At any rate: the idiotically true inference--we were not there to witness this, first hand, hence we infer--is that the North Fork must have cut into the serpentine bedrock to at least the depth of the conglomerate deposits, before they were deposited.

Else how could they exist?

So if we find them at river level, and see them extending under water in places, we know that at the time they were deposited, the river's bedrock channel must have been at much the same level as it is now.

We can safely dismiss the notion that the conglomerates are brand new. Today and for the last ten thousand years they have been steadily eroded away, not deposited. Everything about them shows that.

No, they are old, but on the other hand, they can't be all *that* old. We know that the North Fork has cut about 2500 feet down in 4 million years. This works out to an average rate of incision of more than six inches per one thousand years. This helps us set an upper bound for the age of the conglomerate; but the issues surrounding this are too complex to go into very much, here.

Nowhere do we see the serpentine bedrock floor of the current channel in Green Valley. It is always masked by bouldery sediments. From conversations with gold dredgers in Green Valley, back in the 1970s, I learned that the actual bedrock floor of the channel is sometimes more than fifty feet below the river's surface.

But let us say that it is in fact "fifty feet" below the water level. So if we were to take the "six inches per thousand years" at face value, and were to ask, 'How long ago was the bedrock floor of the channel, where the water surface is, now?', we would deduce at once that the answer would be, 100,000 years.

My own instinct is that the current bedrock channel of the North Fork, in Green Valley, is much the same as it was in Tahoe II times, 65,000 years ago. Between Tahoe II and Tioga glaciations, a warmer and drier interval allowed the Tahoe II outwash plain to be eroded away, and the North Fork established a course through the serpentine bedrock.

Then along came Tioga glaciation, and the outwash plain built up again. The Tahoe II bedrock channel was just exactly where the floodplain was "200 feet" deep. Hence there the sediment column could *not* be mobilized, all the way to bedrock, despite the high, flood-like flows of meltwater. Hence the deepest sediments, near the serpentine bedrock channel floor and walls, were held fixed for many thousands of years, during which time, some kind of serpentine "tea" permeated these deeply buried sediments, and they became cemented into conglomerate.

Then the Tioga ended, the outwash plain was dissected and largely washed away, and these deeply-buried conglomerates were at last exposed.

They are quite curious and can be found in other canyons crossed by the Melones Fault Zone serpentine, as well. Someone should do their doctoral thesis in sedimentology about these very young, yet very tough, gold-bearing conglomerates. Date them, study them, map them.



I set out rather late today, around one in the afternoon, to see what the North Fork looked like, after the flood even of a month ago. I found that the lack of water bars on the Green Valley Trail had led to some moderate erosion along long reaches of the trail, and that several large Digger Pines had fallen on or near the trail, and need to be cut away.

The 1800-foot contour crosses the North Fork in Green Valley. The uplands nearby run about 4100 to 4400 feet in elevation. At about the 2200-foot contour, Ponderosa Pines begin to dominate the forest, along with Douglas Fir; this change in forest type represents the transition from the serpentine bedrock into the glacial outwash deposits; for serpentine is poisonous to Ponderosa Pines and Black Oaks.

The fork between the East and West trails is met not long after reaching the Outwash Ponderosas. I took the East Trail and dropped past Joe Steiner's grave down to the Hotel Site, where a brief rain shower pattered down, and then followed along east to a large mass of white rock rising beside the river. A deep pool is formed there, and, as with many such pools, a large mass of boulders and sand has formed just downstream, where the current slows.

All these near-river-level gravel bars had been reshaped by the flood event of a month ago. They were objects of almost mathematical perfection. If a boulder has any degree of "flatness" to it, and many of our metamorphic rocks will make fine, flat boulders, the river will leave them shingled, the upstream boulders overlapping the downstream boulders, and the flat surfaces tilted so as to face upstream.

In January 1997 a flood event had scoured all small trees and many large trees from the sides of the channel, and from the gravel bars. It was interesting to watch the gravel bars become populated with willows and alders, over the past nine years. Now they have been partly ripped out again, and those which remain are now leaning downstream, and have had their bark scoured away, and seem ghostly skeletons. Everything is raw and primeval, as it was after the January 1997 event. The shingling of the boulders was quite striking and I wondered whether, in the course of a few months even, if animals and people walking these boulder bars will tip one boulder this way, another that way, and the shingling effect will be softened.

So. I was at White Rocks, just upstream from the Hotel Site. The waters of Moonshine Ravine flared out into a powerful waterfall, bursting from a cliff a few yards away, through a drain tunnel from one of the old mines. Casa Loma Ravine enters the North Fork right at the base of White Rocks.

These rocks are some kind of wild card embedded in the serpentine; they may represent a patch of serpentine which was replaced by siliceous rock, molecule by molecule, after the manner or petrified wood. Various boulders from this outcrop are scattered downstream to a distance of hundreds of yards and more; they are often boulders so large as to be well beyond the present North Fork's ability to move them; yet move they did, while within the matrix of bouldery glacial outwash.

The White Rocks are coarsely granular in texture, mimicking granite, but are composed entirely by light-colored minerals, which I take to be predominantly quartz.

Here and there along the margins of the shingled boulder bars were patches of grey sand. I saw the footprints of deer and bobcats and foxes and one small bear.

I wandered about, examining the imprint of the flood. Moving down the river, I came to an area below the Hotel Site, with its fine and quite massive dry-laid stone wall, made from boulders of glacial outwash perched on the hotel's strath terrace. The wall merely expanded the terrace.

Large springs issue forth all along the edge of the terrace. I know of a certainty that several relict channels exits upslope. These become supercharged with groundwater during major rain events and take weeks and months to drain down, and actually, never do drain down, entirely; there are perennial springs, major perennial springs, near the hotel site, for instance.

Such springs form indications that a buried river channel exists. One sees the same pattern in the Tertiary gravels, high on the divides between the canyons: again and again, if a channel nears the existing ground surface, one will see springs. In fact, there is reason to believe that the miners would drive tunnels into the mountainsides, when they found such springs, because they are so closely linked to the ancient Eocene channels.

The same strategy may have been followed in Green Valley. One of the principal tunnels driven through the serpentine into a relict channel is yards west of the Hotel Site and its springs.

The whole day had been cloudy, but around three in the afternoon, or four, the sky west began to glow, and very briefly something like sunlight entered Green Valley. Then the clouds knitted back together and darkness increased.

I continued west and downstream until a cliff stopped further progress, and climbed a couple hundred feet into the Outwash Ponderosa Forest, here dominated by Douglas Fir. I struck a major (but overgrown) trail through the woods which had often caught my eye in years past, but which I have never followed from end to end. Ignoring it, I made my way north and entered Ginseng Ravine, picked up the high mining ditch, and took the Low West Trail steeply up to the West Trail and the fork I had passed a few hours before.

Climbing above the Outwash Ponderosa Forest, I saw that a large flat-bottomed mass of fog hung over the south canyon rim in Giant Gap, the base being at about the 3900' contour.

Such fog masses are quite common during and right after storms in the North Fork. When they have flat bases, it shows that the air has stratified, and that not much wind can be mixing the atmosphere; for the flat base represents the dew point, the air below being too warm to form fog, but the air above, cold enough.

For any given humidity the dew point is found at a certain temperature, and conversely, for any given temperature, the dew point is reached at a certain humidity.

That is, the dew point represents saturation of the gaseous water in the atmosphere: it is forced to condense into droplets, ergo, fog, clouds, and so on.

This fog bank was of what I call the "lee slope" type.

When a wind passes over a ridge at right angles, it will often create a partial vacuum on the lee side, and air rushes up from below to fill this partial vacuum (like an airplane wing). This "air from below" is warmer, and therefore moister, than the air it is replacing. If conditions are right, fog will form as the warmer air uplifted on the lee slope crosses the dew point.

Here a very weak southerly wind (the "wind aloft") was causing lee-slope uplift in Giant Gap, and much more weakly, in Green Valley. Hence a very respectable fog-mass had formed in Giant Gap, while only a thread of fog at the 3900-foot level showed that lee-slope uplift was happening in Green Valley too.

Both were flat-bottomed, showing strong stratification and weak mixing of the atmosphere.

Only the south canyon rim was affected; the north canyon rim was on the windward slope, and was untouched by fog.

Here is a subtlety: although above the canyon rim a southerly wind was causing the lee-slope uplift and thus the fog, down inside the canyon the flow was from the southwest; one could see the fog moving slowly to the left, to the east, up the canyon. But as it entered Giant Gap Ravine, the lee-slope uplift diminished, and the fog trailed away into a narrow point, and evaporated altogether.

One often sees this in the canyon: a fog bank forming at one end, and disappearing at the other.

Not far from the Giant Gap fog mass is a spot about 500 feet below the canyon rim, on the principal spur ridge descending to the river from Giant Gap Ridge, where the spur ridge levels out briefly. It is almost a pass. It so happens that a branch from the western side of the Melones Fault crosses the ridge at this quasi-pass, and a grove of Kelloggs Black Oak grow in the fault shattered rocks of the pass, where soils have developed to a greater depth and a richer yield.

When conditions are right, an arch of fog drape across the spur ridge, right over the pass, right over the Black Oaks of the Fault Zone, and one can watch it come into being on one side, and evaporate into clear air again on the far side.

It can flow in either direction, this fault-zone fog arch. It spans a couple-few hundred yards. Sometimes it is the only patch of fog in the canyon!

It is caused by the entrainment of up- or down-canyon flow of air; all things being equal, if a spur ridge lies athwart the wind, and has a straight, uniform profile, air should move across it more or less smoothly and at the same speed. There should be the usual lee-side uplift.

But let that ridge be interrupted by a quasi-pass, and suddenly the air is able to move more swiftly, across the pass, than higher or lower on the spur ridge.

This can lead to warmer and therefore moister air rising into the pass-entrained winds from the windward side of the spur ridge. And so--let the temperature and humidity be suitable--a fog arch forms.

As I climbed up the trail, moving more rapidly than normal since I realized that the general gloom was deepening and sunset was near, I watched while the global temperature declined. The result was that the flat bottom of the Giant Gap fog bank lowered; it had been at 3900 feet, now it was 3800, 3700 feet, and suddenly the thin thread over the south canyon rim in Green Valley was a large and continuous mass in its own right; it hooked up with the Giant Gap mass, and with other masses rapidly forming from this same lee-slope function, farther up the canyon; the air was astoundingly stratified, and within minutes I was looking at a flat-bottomed fog bank extending east into Humbug Canyon and beyond, and still lowering!

Looking above me, I saw that the dew point had finally lowered enough for fog to begin to form on the north canyon rim, in isolated small patches.

When I finally reached the top of the trail, I was in the fog, and the last light of the day was dwindling into dark.

Such was another fine day in the North Fork.

A New Old Trail

Tuesday morning Ron Gould and I drove into Burnt Flat east of Colfax, and took a tour down the Stevens Trail. It was my first time, since the wildfire of 2004.

The day was sunny and clear, verging upon warm.

The Stevens Trail connected Colfax to Iowa Hill, crossing the North Fork American on a bridge near Secret Ravine. The bridge is long gone, but the Stevens is one of the most popular trails in all Placer County. From the Colfax exit on I-80 one proceeds east on the frontage road, Canyon Way, to the parking area. It is about four miles to the bridge site; and there is an idea at large, I hear, to build some kind of bridge there, again.

One can also walk the Stevens from Iowa Hill, west.

All this part of the North Fork is a Wild & Scenic River.

We aimed to explore an old trail beyond Secret Ravine, on the north canyon wall but low to the river, being about 200 feet above. I know I have this trail on at least one of my old maps, but an external hard disk has gone silent, and I can't find it. The Stevens Trail is the fifty-sixth trail described in the abortive 1953 Placer County Trails Ordinance, and its description mirrors an error in mapmaking itself, an error propagated across more than one map, namely, the mislabeling of Secret Ravine as Robbers Ravine.

I had made a few explorations beyond Secret Ravine in years past, and picked up traces of the old trail, without ever reaching the "good part" so plainly visible from the Stevens Trail on the southern, Iowa Hill side of the river. A maze of game trails on steep terrain had made me scout high and low and every which way, finding only scattered remnants of dry-laid stone walls, at what seemed the right elevation, around 200 feet above the river.

It was interesting to see the effects of the 2004 wildfire. It had burned hot near Robbers Ravine, with its pretty waterfalls, and nearly all the trees had been killed, conifers and live oaks alike. But the root systems of the angiosperms were vigorously stump-sprouting, especially notable in the Bay Laurel, with clumps of a dozen or more sprouts spearing six feet high already.

Crossing Robbers Ravine (one is tempted to ascribe the name to the botched 1881 train robbery at Cape Horn, high on the cliffs directly above, but a check of the diary of Steven Allen Curry, a CPRR surveyor, reveals it already had its name in 1865), we broke out onto the sunny open cliffs, with such fine views down the canyon to Mineral Bar and the Iowa Hill Road.

To my horror, a large house has appeared on a ridge crest above Mineral Bar, a house which, like too many others, at Lovers Leap and Bogus Point and Iron Point and Lime Point and above Ponderosa Way, should never, ever, ever have been built. Sensible societies do not sacrifice the best of their scenic heritage to the whims of a few egomaniacs.

This is just what noted educator David Starr Jordan meant, when he suggested a "hilltop ordinance" was needed in Auburn, to protect the scenery. He made the suggestion around 1904!

But this is Placer County, a name fated to suffer anagramation into the word, "parcel," so that I often bitterly ask myself and The World, during one of my interminable internal private rants, "So, which is it going to be? Placer County, or Parcel County?"

And unfortunately, the answer always is, "Parcel County." Supposedly our Republican Supervisors have such a strong belief in private property, they will sacrifice any trail, any swimming hole, any breathtaking canyon view, to the short-term interests of any individual. The sanctity of these private property rights is such that a kind of religion, based, one expects, upon a foundation of shopping malls and subdivisions, holds our Supervisors in its loving thrall.

Oddly, quite strangely, when I pause to think of the thing, these same Republicans cease crowing about the inviolable sanctity of private property, just about the time one asks how legal title to Placer County lands was obtained from its original inhabitants, the Southern Maidu, and the Washoe.

For no legal title was ever obtained, away back when; a few Euro-Californians with consciences made certain that treaties were negotiated with each tribe, exchanging large reservations for a quit claim to their title on all remaining lands. The Indians duly made their marks, and the generals and bigwigs signed the treaties too, and off to Congress they were sent, in 1852.

It was the last chance to put a decent face upon the theft of California from the Indians.

But when the treaties reached our Senate, in far-away Washington, strange to say--who could have guessed such a thing might happen?--the treaties, with their scratchy little marks and squiggles, made by Chief Weimar and so many others, were placed in a sealed secret archive, not to be unlocked for fifty years.

My friend Jay Shuttleworth, who represents the very best spirit of volunteerism in his long-sustained efforts on behalf of the Stevens Trail, my poor poor friend--how it will hurt, when he sees this new house on the hill. Here is scenery celebrated, admired, gasped over, by every person who ever walked that trail. And now Lord Smith has crowned himself King of the Hill and no person who walks the good old Stevens Trail can walk it, now, without paying a perverse kind of homage to this Lord Smith: you avert your eyes.

It is just like going down the old trail to Green Valley, or walking around in Green Valley: one learns not to raise one's head the wrong way, not to lift one's eyes to Moody Ridge, for the Vulture Houses on Lovers Leap Road will strike one dead in one's tracks.

Well, not quite dead. What is hurt is one's faith in human nature, and one's hope that the best and most beautiful places we love, will remain for our children and their children, to love as well. To be caught in the Medusa glare of the Vulture Houses, as they lord it over the Giant Gap of Thomas Moran, and force themselves upon that quintessential scene of all Placer County scenery, is have one's living hoping trusting heart frozen, into an ugly little rock smelling of ashes.

But this is Parcel County.

Again and again the horrible new house reappeared, as we followed the winding Stevens Trail south and east up the American River Canyon.

We were quite struck by the record the recent flood event left; patches of grey sand twenty feet above normal river level, driftwood stuck on cliffs, willows and alders flailed prostrate and skinned of their bark, under the boiling storm of sand and mud and cobbles and boulders. It was very impressive and I recommend a hike on the Stevens if only for that reason, to see the marks of the rarely high water of a few weeks past.

A few flowers were in early bloom here and there, notably, Houndstongue, with its pretty forget-me-not, blue and white blossoms.

At Secret Ravine, about three miles in from where we left Ron's truck, we found a faint fog hovering over the shadowed creek, and frost on the fresh flood sands. There were some thousands upon thousands of ladybugs clinging to tree trunks and so on, in nearly frozen, motionless masses of shiny red hemispheres.

The 2004 wildfire had not crossed Secret Ravine, at least, here at river level.

Soon enough we were repeating the same old exercise: following various roughly level game trails across steep slopes, alert for signs of lopping, or old rock work, or anything to show the line of the trail. Eventually, in somewhat more than a quarter-mile, I should say, we reached the intact portion of the trail. Suddenly we saw signs of lopping, and guessed our compatriots, Evan Jones and Co., had been at work, by the looks of it, two or three years ago. It was quite easy going on a nearly level line in the full sun with incredible views and all I can say is that it is one of the very nicest trails in the North Fork--yet--yet it is reduced to a ghost of a ghost of a trail for that first quarter-mile east of Secret Ravine.

We fully expected to find and follow the main line of the trail back to Secret, on our return, but such was not at all the case. This trail is very seriously disrupted, over a fairly long distance.

There are indications that this old trail--I shall call it, here, the Meta Secret Trail (for it leads up the canyon, beyond Secret Ravine)--was a mining ditch, originally. It is often very suspiciously level. If true, this may supply the answer as to why the trail is so faint, near Secret Ravine itself: that whole section might have been a wooden flume, thus, no very large bench cut was needed, just a few bits of rock wall here and there to bolster the flume.

Then, let a few wildfires come through, and burn the wooden flumes into oblivion, and one has a somewhat discontinuous trail.

That's the good old Meta Secret Trail.

Across the river one sees the Stevens Trail, with huge stone walls, crossing a mossy cliff. It is quite a lovely view.

Unfortunately another Vulture House came into view, away west in the fire area; clearly the firefighters had made noble and successful efforts to save it, despite its perilous position on the canyon rim. Good for the Vulture Family, bad for the North Fork and the rest of us. As a result of the fire and the firefighting, all screening vegetation was gone, and it is just as though a brand new house had been plopped down on the canyon rim.

I became nauseous thinking about the two Vulture Houses lording it over the North Fork and the Stevens Trail.

Also across the river I observed a large bluff-like mass of glacial outwash, forming a terrace about 100 feet high. The whole face looked fresh and raw and recently eroded, and clearly, the North Fork had chewed at the base of the steep gravel bluff, during the recent flood event. However, I was almost certain that that raw steep face had been left by mining, either ground sluicing or hydraulicing, a century and some ago. It is even possible that the Meta Secret Trail began as the very ditch which served that particular mine; in which case, a flume would have crossed the river.

An old tunnel, possibly dating to the Gold Rush itself, had been exposed by the flood. It was driven into the glacial outwash low down towards the bedrock underneath. Probably many tunnels had been driven into the base of that bluff. They have since collapsed or been buried by cave-ins around their entrances. The coarse gold was found on the bedrock at the bases of such glacial outwash terraces, more commonly known as "bars" or "gravel bars."

But these gravel bars are artifacts of the high flows and high sediment loads of the glacial periods; current flood events do little more than nick the bases of such terraces.

We reached an unnamed ravine, with a pretty stream, crossed, and found an old mining ditch trail on the far side, at a slightly lower level. The Meta Secret continued!

After a time, the Meta Secret dropped down to river level, and we saw sunshine just upstream, and worked our ways up to the place, at a sharp bend on the river. We had lunch and, scouting the area, found some miners' camps with much in the way of garbage strewn around, five-gallon buckets and sleeping bags and tarps and just plain garbage. I grabbed an aluminum frying pan and returned to the river.

Wresting clumps of moss from boulders near the water, I washed them into my frying pan and panned the sediments down to black sand. Swirling, some respectable flakes of gold appeared. So Ron and I washed a few more clumps of moss into the pan and found, I don't know, about fifty or a hundred "colors" of gold, among them, some pieces almost big enough to just reach in and pick up. So, it was a little exciting to see all that gold. Probably at least a dollar's worth!

The winter sun, never high, was clearly lowering, we were over a mile east of Secret Ravine, and had another three miles beyond that, to reach the truck. It was time to go, past time, really, and I ended up forty minutes late, picking up my kids at their school bus stop, in Alta.

On our return we followed a higher line at first, following a faint trail climbing west from some ancient cabin terraces. At times this tiny thread of a trail seemed to disappear, but we held the course and found large cairns of slaty slabs where it crossed a rocky spur, and then other ducks and cairns along the way, and found ourselves back on the main Meta Secret just where it had seemed to drop down to river level, on our way in, a couple hours before. So there is actually a fork, at that point, and a steep climb to the left, as one is going in, will make the safest route on to that sunny bend, where Ron and I found so very much gold.

But this left-hand upper trail is extremely hard to see, from the fork. That is, the fork does not by any means look like a fork. It is just the spot, it seems, where the trail suddenly drops to river level.

This last bit of high trail, and the ancient cabin terraces near Gold Strike Bend, may date to the Gold Rush itself, and likely were also in use later, by the Chinese, in the 1860s.

Such was another nice day in the North Fork. I learned some new lessons, too, about how to avert my eyes properly, while walking the Stevens Trail. With a little practice, I may one day walk the Stevens Trail, and find it as beautiful as I did, way back in 2004.

Perhaps if I cup my hands around my eyes, to reduce my field of view?