California's Highway 49

For photos, see greatmirror.com

Transcript

Late last month–this was October, 2025–I flew to Fresno and rented a car.  I planned to return it to Sacramento, which is about 200 miles to the northwest,  and that’s what I did, but it took me ten days, and I drove a.thousand miles. 

No committed Californian would be such a slouch, but I left a long time ago.  I do remember once driving home almost a thousand miles in a single day from  Grand Junction, Colorado, and I remember on another day roaring downhill Feast of Sacramento on a new Interstate 80 at 100 miles an hour.  I did imagine what would happen if a tire blew, and I never drove that fast again, except once between Reno and Las Vegas, but for many years I continued to believe that Californians were the envy of the world, mostly because they were freer than everyone else.  It took me a long time to get over that nonsense, although there’s still a bit of residue.

Instead of going straight to Sacramento, which would have meant driving along the axis of the Central Valley,  I went east into the foothills of the Sierra and then north, a bit like following the curve of a capital letter D drawn with lots of curlicues.  Most of the curve was California’s State Route 49, sometimes called the Golden Chain Highway because it connects a dozen towns founded during the Gold Rush of 1849.  Foothills sound timid, but 49 crosses the canyons of the Yuba, the American, the Mokelumne, the Tuolumne, the Stanislaus, and the Merced, and those canyons are not timid.  

DAY ONE  I had landed in Fresno about nine in the evening.  I spent the night there and set out the next morning for Oakhurst, which is the southern terminus of 49.  The federal government classifies Oakhurst as a census-designated place, which is a polite way of saying that it’s not much of a town.  There’s an official population of about 5,000 people, but they’re scattered over 33 square miles of beautiful oak woodland.  That’s one person to four acres, or as I like to visualize it, one person to four football fields.  That’s great if you like elbow room, and I do, but on the drive up to Oakhurst I passed through an oak forest blackened by wildfire.  I asked a man if he was worried about fire taking his house.  His answer was no, and the reason was that he had made sure that nothing within 200 feet of his house would burn.  

I actually saw no house protected that way, and I understand why owners wouldn’t do this.  What’s the point of moving out to the country and then blading your own bit of paradise down to bare earth?  The answer is obvious, but I’m in no position to cast stones.  I’ve lived in Oklahoma for over 40 years, I don’t have a tornado shelter, and I don’t live in fear.  

Life up here still felt precarious to me, just not to the people here.  They were rooted enough that every town I passed through had a historical museum–that’s the staying power of the Gold Rush.  Often, they were excellent.  Oakhurst’s was called the Fresno Flats Historical Village.  It’s an odd name, but maybe the first settler came downhill from the High Sierra.  In any case, Oakhurst was called Fresno Flats until 1912.  

The museum was closed when I showed up, but it wasn’t fenced.  I particularly liked an old dogtrot house, two rooms separated by a roofed passage or breezeway.  The house was made of square-cut timbers,  eight inches by eight inches square or even larger, dovetailed at each of the house’s eight corners.  I imagine a house framer today coming by, putting down his nail gun, admiring this place, and even envying the people who built it.

Acorns dropped every few seconds, and the ground was littered with them, a California version of manna from heaven.  I texted my wife a picture of the house and asked why it was perfect.  I don’t remember her answer, but I decided right then on a quick trip 20 miles beyond Oakhurst on the same highway that had brought me from Fresno.  I wanted to go to Wawona, which is just inside the boundary of Yosemite National Park.  

I had read that the park now charges a $35 entrance fee, which I think is immoral.  You may say that my complaint is absurd, but I think there’s a fair chance that someday there will be a fee to step outside and look at the sky.  The worst part is that most people will pay it just as they pay to see Yosemite.

Lucky for me, the federal government was shut down.  I stopped at the park’s entrance station, saw that it was empty, and sailed on to the thing I wanted to see, which was the Wawona Hotel.  

So many years had passed since I had seen it that I couldn’t separate my memory of the place from my memory of photographs of the place, but there it was, nearly as simple as a rectangular, two-story wooden building can be.  Square columns supported the lower floor’s veranda and continued up to support the balcony around the upper floor.  There was little trim, and everything was painted a virginal white, which must have been a bugger to maintain.  

The place was deserted.  A sign explained that the hotel was closed while experts figured out what to do about some structural problems.   I wondered if the experts would finally decide to take the whole place down.  I think now of the guests who had stayed here since it opened in 1879.  Not just Teddy Roosevelt but John Ruskin and lots of others.  I wonder if there’s a ledger with their signatures.  Ten years from now, it might be one of the few things left of the place.  

It was a lovely day–I’d have nothing but perfect weather for these ten days–and I was soon diverted from the hotel and then captured by a few nearby ponderosa pines.  It was odd, but for some reason, on this sunny day their thick plates of orange bark made me think of the first four words God speaks in the Bible.  I had never before thought that they are exactly the right words to begin with.

Back in Oakhurst, and apart from the dogtrot, the most striking thing was a comical set of three large, almost identical buildings built in a line on a low bluff overlooking the highway.   I suppose some developer realized that lots of people visiting Yosemite collect points from Holiday Inn.  Others get points from Hilton and still others from Marriott.  The developer wanted to catch all of them, and so he built three identical hotels–it’s cheaper that way.  Then he put a different flag on each one.   

The receptionists at such places are meticulous in always thanking point-collectors for their loyalty.  They always use that word.  I wondered if the receptionist on this day understood that point-collectors are promiscuous.   I felt like telling her that I wasn’t really loyal and that I collected points from other chains, too, but I didn’t.  I don’t know at what age we learn to suppress honesty.  I suppose that’s an important thing to learn, because if I had told her what I was thinking she probably would have thought that she had caught a weird one.

The hotel charged $12 for parking.  It was the only parking fee I ran into on this trip, and in the following days I occasionally mentioned it.  The incredulous response was always: “In Oakhurst?”   The fee shows that there are people who consider Yosemite a resort.  There are lots of ways to describe such people, but for starters I’d say they are people who, in the name of advancing their careers, have buried their souls.  As for my guest room, the only thing I remember is that the translucent window shade was printed with a picture of trees.  They were pretty, but when I raised the shade I saw real trees.  They weren’t quite as pretty, but I left the shade up.  If I live another 50 years, I think I’ll be in big trouble, because lots of hotels won’t have windows.  Maybe they’ll have a screen with pretty pictures of Kilimanjaro or Diamond Head.  The good news is that I’m already past 80.

One more thing before we leave Oakhurst: I assumed that there had to be some sort of monument marking the southern terminus of 49.  I found one, a brass plaque on a squat pyramid built of stones from each of the 11 counties through which the highway passes.  That’s a nice touch, but the monument was awkwardly placed at the side of a driveway leading into Oakhurst’s shopping center, and I never would have found it if I hadn’t forgotten to pack a hat.  I mean that I stumbled onto the monument because I went to the shopping center to get one.  

I tried hard to find a hat without a logo.  Years ago, a salesman in a fancy store told me that he and his fellow workers referred to the polo player on their shirts as “the dog.”   He even told me that if I wanted a shirt without the dog, I’d have to pay more.  I did pay more but have never bought another shirt from that company.  Here, at Oakhurst, I would have paid more for a hat without a logo, but I could not find one.  I wound up with a green cloth cap with, on the front, the words Yosemite National Park superimposed on the park service’s arrowhead emblem.  The hat came from China and had been made by workers who almost certainly hadn’t the slightest idea what the words meant.  

People from time to time over the coming days asked me how I had liked Yosemite.  I replied that I hadn’t been there, and that I just couldn’t find a hat that wasn’t a billboard.  On the plus side, if I had to be a billboard, I’d sooner be one for Yosemite than for most of the alternatives.

DAY TWO The next morning I drove to Mariposa, 20 miles up 49. That’s where I stayed for the night, and that became the pattern: a different hotel every night. 

Mariposa is  Spanish for “butterfly,” but it sounds beautiful even if you don’t that.  With 1,200 residents, Mariposa is the seat of Mariposa County, which has 17,000, well below the median population of U.S. counties. The town’s highlight, by common consent, is the county courthouse.  It’s the oldest in the state, made of wood painted white like the Wawona Hotel, and as uptight as Puritan New England.  The builder was Augustus Shiver, of whom I know nothing, except that he also built a house for himself in Mariposa.  It still stands, but it’s been moved onto the grounds of the county’s museum.  The house is wood, white, and has a nicely trimmed porch.  It’s the kind of place where bread comes from an oven instead of a store.

I went into the courthouse, cleared the security check, and headed upstairs to the courtroom, which has a cast-iron stove smack in the middle.  I quietly took a picture with my phone and was gently reprimanded by the judge, who had probably said the same thing a hundred times to gawkers looking at a courtroom that, apart from two large video screens on the wall behind him, could have served as the set for Gary Cooper counting the minutes until High Noon. The building itself was as austere as Cooper, and its central corridor on the ground floor was barely wide enough for two people to pass.  One wall did have a proud display showing that the county once covered 30,000 square miles.  

Mariposa County today has been whittled down to 1,500.  It still includes Yosemite, but almost none of Yosemite’s four million annual visitors know this or care.  I don’t think this bothers the people in Mariposa.  I say this because I went into a coffee shop–Mariposa has one with all the usual choices–and got around to asking the three people working there if they had been born here.  It turned out that one was from Sacramento, one was from San Diego, and the third was from Mexico.   I kept asking this question in the following days, and even in Sierra City, near the north end of the highway, I found that people almost always had come from somewhere else, usually from one of California’s big cities.  I almost hooted in surprise when in San Andreas I found a woman who proudly said that her family had been here for six generations.  I told her she was the first person I had met who wasn’t a refugee.

Mariposa’s street pattern is a grid with four parallel streets about a mile long and crossed by a dozen short, numbered streets.  The four long streets are Jessie, Highway 49, Bullion, and Jones.  49, which is the town’s main street, used to be called Charles.  You’re wondering why I’m telling you this, but there is a reason.  Charles street takes its name from the middle name of John C. Fremont, Major General and later U.S. Senator.  Jessie Street is named for Fremont’s wife, Jessie Benton.  Bullion comes from “Old Bullion,” the nickname of Jessie’s father, the Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton.  That’s three of the four streets, and Jones gets its name from William Carey Jones, a lawyer who married another Benton daughter and who, as a federally appointed expert, worked successfully to help brother-in-law Charles secure ownership of a 44,000-acre Mexican land grant called the Rancho Las Mariposas.  

We should all be so lucky with our relatives, and it gets better because Fremont paid $3,000 for this empire and later sold it for $6 million.  That’s because it turned out to have gold, including at the Mariposa Mine.  This was California’s first deep gold mine, with a shaft reaching 1,500 feet underground.  I was told that there’s nothing left to see, and maybe that’s true.  The site is posted as private property.

The Fremonts never lived in Mariposa but did pay for an adobe office building for the mine’s administration.  It still stands at a prime location on Charles St., or Highway 49, though it’s now a club called the Gold Coin.  It’s across the street from the well-preserved Schlageter Hotel, built in 1867.  Like the Wawona Hotel, the Schlageter has a balcony running around the two sides of the hotel facing the corner of Charles, or 49, and Fifth Street.  It may have been a hotel as late as the 1940s, but now the downstairs is shared by a wine-tasting bar and a shop selling local crafts and art.  The upstairs appears empty.

Next door, there’s an old general store opened in 1896 by an immigrant from Genoa.  His name is up top on the bracketed cornice: John Trabucco.  His name also appears on a gravestone behind Mariposa’s Catholic church.  

The town now has a very good supermarket at the north end of town–it’s called the Pioneer–and Trabucco’s old general store has become The Mariposa Marketplace, basically an antiques emporium, the first of many, many I’d see.  I find these places claustrophobic, but I did admire this one’s heavy iron staircase, a straight flight of a dozen stairs shipped, as I read on a plaque, from the East Coast via Cape Horn.  

The Pioneer supermarket is up by Eleventh Street.  It’s next to Mariposa’s excellent historical museum, where I saw the Shiver house and where I went to ask about the Fremont house.  I had read that it was somewhere out of town and that nothing much was left of it.  The museum’s curator, dedicated and knowledgeable, knew only that it had been somewhere near the hamlet of Bear Valley, about 10 miles farther along 49.  

I went up to Bear Valley and stopped to admire some freestanding and exceedingly atmospheric walls made of flat bits of rock, like big dominoes stacked and mortared.  A woman came out from a mobile home and asked if I’d like my picture taken.  I declined, and she offered two or three more times before deciding I was serious.  

She had moved here a few years ago from the Midwest and said she intended to stay.  She also said that if I wanted to know about the Fremonts I should ask the woman in the old house kitty-corner to where we were standing.  She also told me to avoid the woman’s fenced front yard.  Even at the back door the old woman who came out was accompanied by a furiously yapping dog that thought the woman’s energetic kicks and curses were a game.  It never stopped, and it reminded me of George Booth’s cartoons in The New Yorker.

“Fremont’s maid lived in a house right there,” the woman said, pointing to an empty lot.  I suggested that this meant that the Fremont house must have been close, but she said no, it was up in the hills to the east and on private land near the cemetery, which was also on private land.  How do people get buried, I asked, if the cemetery is on private land, but she said the people in the community–there are about 150 of them–know each other and get along.   

If I had had more time, I might have tried getting permission to visit whatever’s left of the Fremont house.  Photographs show it to have been modest, and it burned down in 1866, several years after the Fremonts left, but I didn’t have time, and I was dissuaded from opening a gate at the road leading to the site by a sign saying that anyone found beyond this point without permission would be considered a target.  I didn’t take the sign entirely seriously, but I did take it to mean seriously that the owner, who I had been told was an old rancher, didn’t want to see strangers.

I can understand that, and so I returned to Mariposa and got something to eat at a small shop set up only a few years ago next to the antiques emporium. It was signed Charcuterie Supplies, which is the purest, most quintessential expression of modern California.  Mark Twain, who spent some time in these hills in the 1850s, would fall out of his rocking chair if he saw the food I was looking at, and it wasn’t just in Mariposa.  I found a store with ten varieties of Brie, or little rounds that looked like Brie. A week later, I found a grocery store selling #10-sized cans of baked beans: six pounds, six ounces.  That seemed right for an old mining town, even if the miners had been replaced by organized groups of backpackers, but across the road another store had a sign that read “Charcuterie.”  

What would Pat Brown, who as governor of California in the 1960s helped me get through college without a dime of debt, make of that word?  Did anyone in California use it back then?  At Loyalton, the very last town on Highway 49, I would pass a man leaving the town’s one grocery store.  He looked like Sam Eliott without the hair, and he was carrying a pint of Ben and Jerry’s.  No bag.  I said, “That’s good stuff.”  He smiled and said, “Cherry Garcia.”  I went inside and saw a freezer full of the stuff at $8 a pint.  I call that Gold Rush prices, but I admit that I think that the right price for a hot dog is 15 cents.

DAY THREE   The next day I went 50 miles beyond Mariposa to Sonora.  I made it a bit longer by getting off 49 for a few miles and tracing a westerly curlicue down to Hornitos, population 38.   

I’m glad I did.  49 is almost entirely two lanes, and the engineering and paving are excellent, but the road is so curvy that opportunities to pass are very limited.  I like driving at about 40 or 45 miles an hour.  That’s why I like driving in rural India, but driving 40 miles an hour in California is not a great idea.  I’d find a shoulder to let people pass, but in less than a minute somebody else would pop up behind me.  I’m grateful that nobody ever honked, and I didn’t see any arms sticking out of windows to tell me what to do to myself, but I’m sure I irritated people probably as much as they irritated me until, near the north end of the highway, the traffic disappeared.

That’s why I enjoyed the Hornitos Road, which twisted and writhed for 13 miles while losing about a thousand feet of elevation.  I passed a maintenance crew but otherwise had the road to myself.  

I stopped at a wall that was what remained of a Wells Fargo Express office that once served a community of 15,000 mostly Mexican miners.  The gold petered out, and the 20th century population of Hornitos peaked in 1950 at 126.  I saw an abandoned general store that might have been in business back then.  I say that because it had a gasoline pump in front of it.  The Mariposa Chamber of Commerce had put up a sign saying that the store had been built by Carlo Cavagnaro.   Another Italian, the better known Domenico Ghirardelli, had a store where he began making chocolate.  There was nothing left of it except fragmentary brick walls.  

The central feature of Hornitos is a small town plaza, built up on three sides.  The only building in use was a U.S. post office.  The door was unlocked, and I was surprised to see a face in the back.  “How many people get their mail here?” I asked.  A woman raised her head from a computer screen and said about 50.  That’s impossible, I said, but she explained that most of them lived some miles away.  Where do you shop for groceries? I asked.  She said she could go east an hour to Mariposa or west an hour to Merced, down in the Central Valley.  And yes, she said, Amazon delivered up here.  I was impressed by that.

I used a different road to get back to 49, and while on it I stopped for the silence and the hills, yellow this time of year.   I was able to make a video call to my wife, and she, even on her tiny phone screen, said without prompting that the place was beautiful.  “This is what I think of when I think of California,” she said, approximately.  In the 1960s she had spent some time in the Sierra, and she had very fond memories of the place.  Here she was looking at California before its demographic swamping.

I thought the next stop would be Coulterville, population 115, but after a very few miles back on 49 I found myself looking into a thousand-foot deep canyon of the Merced River.  I could see the highway winding below in wicked hairpins down through a ravine to a bridge.  The same road with the same hairpins appears on a USGS topo sheet from 1896.  The map gives the ravine a name: Hell Hollow.  Apple Maps has that name; Google Maps doesn’t.   

The water in the river wasn’t moving.  Thank the New Exchequer Dam, built in the 1960s.  The farmers downstream from the dam are presumably ready to fight to the death for the water the dam stores, but I thought the lake was a blight.  I mean, the Merced River runs through Yosemite Valley, and the murky water here had arrived after springing in a brilliant arc off one of  Yosemite’s waterfalls.

The lake level was low, exposing a wide bathtub ring. If I had been better prepared, I would have taken the opportunity to look for signs of John Fremont’s mill here, where he extracted gold from the rocks he mined near the top of the canyon.  I might also have examined the exposed lakebed for signs of the old Yosemite Valley Railroad.  For 40 years, until the end of World War II, trains ran from Merced through this canyon to El Portal, the classic entrance to Yosemite Valley.   Full-sized steam engines came puffing across the river on a steel-truss bridge just below where I crossed on a new post-and-beam bridge.  The old bridge was gone.  So was Fremont’s mill.   Easy come, easy go.  I tell myself to learn from the water in the Merced.

The highway took me back up the north side of the canyon without any histrionics, and in ten miles I was in Coulterville, named for a Mr. Coulter.  It’s still in Mariposa County, which has been both good and bad for Coulterville’s residents.  I mean that anyone in Coulterville with business in a county office or court would have had a much easier going north to Sonora, the seat of Tuolumne County.  On the other hand–there’s always another hand–perhaps the people in Coulterville didn’t mind being on another planet for officials in Mariposa County.  I should mention that, with one exception, all the counties along Highway 49 vote Republican.  The exception is Placer County, which reaches down into the Central Valley and includes some Sacramento suburbs.

At the T-junction between the highway and Coulterville’s main street, a three-story hotel from the 1870s stood permanently closed.  No balconies here, which suggests that the hotel had been built for miners, not civilized folk.  Facing the hotel, an abandoned general store had another defunct gas pump.  I’d see them in town after town, while operating gas stations were out on the edges of towns.  I didn’t notice at the time, but the nearest gas station to Coulterville is six miles away.

A dozen prisoners in orange jump suits had been cleaning the grounds of the town’s museum, but now they were on their lunch break.   I would have liked to chat with them but wasn’t sure how they or the guard would react.  Instead I went into the Coulter Cafe, friendly but far from fancy.   The menu board listed the specials as hamburgers for $18 and chicken-salad sandwiches for $17.  I remembered the 19-cent burgers at Tingo’s, on University Avenue in Berkeley, but that was in the late ’50s.  

I settled for a bottle of fruit juice.  I don’t like coins in my pockets, and so I paid with plastic even after I was told I’d have to pay a surcharge.  The woman behind the counter said something unkind about Visa and Mastercard, and she snorted when I mentioned the parking fee at Oakhurst.

Five miles beyond Coulterville, I didn’t even notice the summit of the very gentle divide separating Mariposa County from Tuolumne County. There was nothing to see except a small sign and an unusually large pullout that I suppose was a handy place to park equipment.  What I did notice ten miles later was the penstocks that carry Tuolumne River water down to a powerhouse.  I knew this place from many trips to Yosemite long ago, but this time I was surprised by the sound.  The hum of the turbines had never bothered me before, but now it seemed more sinister than the monoliths in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.  The sound track of that movie relied at least partly on human voices.  The powerhouse hum did not.  Perhaps the hum bothered me now because it suggested a world of unrelenting computers singing in impregnable data centers.  

Ten miles more on 49 and I saw a regional hospital, or what I thought was a regional hospital.  Flamboyant red accents on the two seven-story buildings made me look twice.  Then I saw the big sign reading Chicken Ranch Casino.  The name is odd but comes from the Chicken Ranch Band of Mi-wok Indians.  The casino, cruelly inserted into these green and golden hills, reminded me of  a day in the 1970s when I drove down to D.C. from Maine in one go.  I arrived on the 495 beltway, headed counterclockwise, and rubbed my eyes.  I was looking at the towers of Washington’s then-new Mormon Temple, which I bet over the years have caused a fair number of crashes.  

The Chicken Ranch Casino wasn’t that hallucinogenic, but it was a lot like one of those hilltop houses you sometimes see, where the owner has done everything possible to attract your attention.  I suppose the tribal elders would say in their defense that they now live in Rome and have to act like Romans.  

49 a few minutes ran through the center of Sonora, where it’s called Washington Street.  It has only two lanes, plus parallel parking on both sides.  The owner of the Sonora Inn had long ago revamped the facade to make it look Spanish.  If there had been planning boards back in 1930, he might have justified the change by pointing to the town’s name or to the Mexican miners who were the first settlers.  I infer that he was appealing to tourists who were a big part of his business even then.  

Off Washington Street, there were some very un-Mexican mansions.  The most eye-catching looked like a residence of the Addams family, but it was now a dentist’s office, which gave me pause.  Still, the most striking thing about Sonora was East Sonora, which is less than a mile from Washington Street.  I hadn’t expected to see a Walmart Supercenter, a Safeway, a Staples, a Petsmart, a Starbucks, a McDonald’s, a UPS store, and a Regal theater with 10 screens.   The whole of Tuolumne County has only 50,000 people, and I conclude that East Sonora owes a lot to transients like me.  

I think now of a conversation I had before I made this trip.  I had mentioned it to someone who, like me, had left the state long ago. He laughed and said the foothills weren’t what I remembered.  He might well have had East Sonora in mind, yet, for all our groaning and moaning, I got some stuff at the Safeway.  It’s contradictory, I know, but for a long time contradiction has been central to the human condition.  I’d say that in French if I knew how.

DAY FOUR.   Once, long ago, I visited Khiva, a ghost town in Uzbekistan that the Russians, back in the days of the Soviet Union, had made into a museum.  Everything was in mint condition but the place was deserted.  I climbed up the spiral staircases inside the minarets.  Maybe visitors can still do that.

A million years later, on my way out of Sonora I visited the nearby Columbia State Historic Park.  It was created about 1945 to preserve an intact mining camp.  The buildings were infinitely less exotic than those in Khiva, but they had been carefully restored.  As at Khiva, the only people were a few workers and, because this was late in the year, a smattering of visitors.  A short distance away, there was an old two-storied schoolhouse.  It was kitted out with seats–two kids sharing–along with a desk for a teacher who was probably both stricter and more literate than her successors.  

The town’s cemetery was next to the school.  There were lots of graves for men and women who had died in their 20s.  The stones listed names, dates, and frequently the place of birth, often a country in Europe, but they almost never included any descriptive information. This was true for all the cemeteries I would visit.   The most poignant exception was for a child who died at 15 months.  The stone included the words: “A Native of California.”  Maybe that’s trivial, but I read those words as parents comforting themselves with the knowledge that their child had at least been born in the promised land.  

The site of Columbia’s cemetery was hilly and dotted with oaks, and if Columbia was the only Gold Rush town whose main street survives I might have liked it more than I did, but it isn’t, and I liked it less than Mariposa or Hornitos or Coulterville or even Sonora.  If I ever go back to Khiva, I might like it less, too.  It’s funny that someone as averse to crowds as I have become should now want towns with people.  

There was a more interesting place about 10 miles east of Sonora.  The Tuolumne River Water Company had been created to bring water to miners. To do that, it had built an elaborate system of reservoirs and flumes.  Perhaps the most fascinating thing in Columbia was the wildly contorted limestone bedrock unearthed by miners who had used the Company’s water to wash away the surface.

By 1900 the mines were more or less done.  Along came a trio of investors who bought the water company’s 50,000 acres not for its water but for its timber.  The investors built a complex network of narrow-gauge railroad tracks that brought logs to a sawmill in what is now the town of Tuolumne but was then called Summersville.   Despite the intensely romantic sound of the name Tuolumne, I saw very little romance in Tuolumne.  It had never been a company town, so it wasn’t cookie-cutter, but few people had ever had money to spend.  Things got a lot worse when fires in the 1960s destroyed the mill.  It was not rebuilt.

The site of the mill was exceedingly photogenic, with a mill pond gradually filling in with reeds.  Flocks of ducks took off when I approached.  There were no buildings left on the site, but I knew where I was because of the old incinerator, a rusted sheetmetal cone maybe 30 feet high and capped by a spark-catching dome of wire-mesh.

The mill site was close to the town’s main street, which was so dead that it had even lost its coffee shop, which had ironically been called Revive but which was now deceased.  Two guys inside explained that they were roasting beans for shops in some other town.  

A 1950-ish shopping center had been built at one edge of town, but everything in it was closed except for some social-service offices run by the Tuolumne Band of Mi-wok Indians.  I asked someone working there if the town had an operating gas station, and he said there was a fancy new one up the road a mile at the Black Oak Casino, which was owned by the Tuolumne Band.  It wasn’t as garish as the Chicken Ranch Casino, but it still had a hotel maybe six stories high and a parking structure to match.    

I headed to Angels Camp, which is all of 15 miles past Sonora. Along the way I detoured just a bit to see the replica–the second replica, actually–of the cabin where Sam Clemens lived in the winter of 1864-65.  As a structure, it’s insignificant and spoiled by a protective iron fence, but it’s an important marker, because it was here that he wrote the short story that jumpstarted his career.  It’s hard to believe that people in the 19th century, including many educated Europeans, thought that “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was hilarious, but apparently they did.  It’s about stuffing a frog with buckshot so it’s too heavy to win a jumping race, but thanks to that story Sam Clemens, who was already writing as Mark Twain, never again lived in a one-room cabin.  

The detour to the cabin did offer a fine view northward over the valley of the Stanislaus River.  Angels Camp was on the other side.  That name Stanislaus, by the way, has nothing to do with a Russian who ran an acting school.  Instead, it’s the Romanized name of an Indian who escaped from a Spanish mission and settled in these hills before Mexican miners killed him.

I crossed the river, which I regret to say is actually another reservoir, checked in at an Angels Camp hotel, then went straight to the town’s museum, where I rather aggressively sounded out how much the two women working there knew about Twain and Bret Harte, who also lived here for a while.  For a time, he was more famous than Twain.  

The women had strong opinions, but fortunately we agreed that Twain’s story about frogs was tedious.  Still, it did provide a window into 19th century literary taste.  More than that, Twain noticed the many failed miners hanging on in post-Gold Rush California, with nothing to do and nowhere to go.  It does sound like that Eagles song, doesn’t it?  Twain also steers clear of the name Calaveras, which means “skulls” in Spanish and was applied here by Mexican miners who came across many Indian bones in the canyon of the Stanislaus.  

There was still enough light in the sky that I decided to make quick visit to the Calaveras Grove.   Once privately owned, the trees are now part of the Calaveras Big Trees State Park.  It closes at sundown and is about 20 miles east of Angel’s Camp, but this would be my only chance on this trip to see redwoods.  Besides,  the trees are at an elevation about 3,000 feet higher than Angel’s Camp, and I like thin air, up to a point.  

I zipped past Murphys, an old mining town, and entered the state park, where an automated pay station demanded a credit card..  Time was short, and I wanted to recalibrate my importance on this planet, not complain about the tyranny of plastic.  I also wanted to see if I could find something that I had seen when I was about seven years old.

I found it, a redwood stump about 25 feet in diameter.  When I had last seen it, I wasn’t old enough to be judgmental, except when it came to things like choosing an ice cream flavor.  The stump was just a stump.  My mother had told me that it had been cut down to make a dance floor, which did make enough of an impression that I’ve remembered it all these years.

There are old photos showing the stump when the grove was privately owned and operated as a resort.  One photo shows a domed, circular building or kiosk on top of the stump.  That round building was gone even when I was a boy, but the half-dozen stairs I had climbed up onto the stump were still in place.  There wasn’t any music these days, but visitors could still climb up and muse about the power human beings possess over dumb nature. 

I don’t recall Herman Melville condemning the slaughter of sperm whales, though the thought of what the men in that industry did is appalling today.  It’s also just about the way I felt now about the barbarian who chopped down this tree.  He was proud enough to boast that it had taken five men an entire week to bring it down.  A few minutes later I was standing at the foot of a surviving redwood that put me in my place without a single word.  

DAY FIVE.  I had hurried past Murphys in my rush to get to the redwoods before dark, so I went back early the next day.   It was early enough for the town to be deceptively quiet, but Murphys must often be crowded, because the main street is lined with wine-tasting bars and shops selling Gold Rush nostalgia. 

On the way up from Fresno to Oakhurst, I had looked around Tesoro Viejo, where a developer was putting the finishing touches on starter homes built on what had been farmland.  Three hundred thousand dollars bought a house with 1,600 square feet on a tiny lot within 10 miles of Fresno.   

Murphys had new residential developments, too.  One, called Fieldstone, offered duplexes about the same size as those near Fresno, but here the price was closer to $500,000.   There are almost no jobs in Murphys that would pay enough to buy one of these duplexes, so buyers, I guess, come mostly from the Bay Area or Sacramento.  Maybe they had come looking for a refuge during COVID-19, but now, unless retired, they were here only occasionally.  They liked Murphys for what realtors would call its curated amenities.

There weren’t many curated amenities back in Angels Camp.  The one historic downtown block runs through a gully.  The slopes above have mostly old houses on streets sometimes so steep that they have been permanently blocked. The layout makes the town adventurous in ways unknown to people living on the plains, but there’s no room in Angel’s Camp for the stores where people here want to shop.  Help comes a mile to the north, where is enough flat land for a Save Mart supermarket, a Rite-Aid Pharmacy and parking galore.  There’s also a ramen bar.  No surprise: the day before I had seen a Thai restaurant in Sonora.   

I had to cover 28 miles this day but before landing in Jackson I wanted to stop at San Andreas, with another historic district, again one long block.  The eye-catcher here was the old Calaveras County courthouse, built of brick with rusticated stone around the edges of the facade and around the arched main entrance.  After a hundred years of service, the building had become the county museum.  The county’s first post office had been reassembled here with the same camphor-wood lumber that in 1849 had arrived in 101 bundles from China.  Apparently nobody in California that year was willing to work in a sawmill.   San Andreas was where I met that young woman whose family had been here for six generations.  Her work partner was a young Australian woman married to an American.

Mokelumne Hill, ten miles farther, had another balcony-fronted hotel.  I went in and saw that the stairs to the second floor had no landing.  Instead, there was a single flight of 15 steps without a break.  The original owner of the hotel had been German, and I found him in Mokelumne’s hilltop cemetery.  He had died in 1879 in his sixties, and his tombstone was written in English.  His wife, Louise, had died decades earlier at 27.  Her stone was in German, I’m guessing because her husband wasn’t yet ready to abandon their shared language.  

The flow of immigrants has never stopped.  In Mokelumne Hill, Moke Hill for short, I ordered a coffee from a Japanese barista who said she had been here for twenty years.  Her English was fluent, except for those pesky L’s in “college.”  That’s where she had met her husband.  

It was mid-afternoon when I crossed from Calaveras County into Amador.  (The name Amador may suggest love but comes from Jose Maria Amador, an early miner.)  The line separating the two counties follows the North Fork of the Mokelumne River.  There is a dam downstream–Pardee Dam–built in the 1920s to catch water for Oakland, but it doesn’t back up this far, and the river here was deep enough and fast enough that I watched with concern as a dog, told to fetch by its owner, jumped into the river and struggled to get back.   Did I notice that this was the first free-flowing river I had seen?  I did not.  

Five miles beyond the river, I stopped for the night in Jackson, a town of roughly 5,000 people.  It’s the home of the former Kennedy Mine, a deep mine whose headrig survives.  So do the remnants of four waterwheels, each about 30 feet in diameter.  Odd as it sounds, the waterwheels were not powered by water.  They were powered by electric motors and had been built to lift liquid mine waste over a ridge and into a holding pond.  Three of the wheels were a shambles, but one was intact and protected now in a glass-walled building.  The mine was between Jackson proper and the neighboring commercial center of Martell, so everyone in town had seen the headrig many, many times.  I bet a fair number knew that this was the deepest mine in the United States in the 1940s.  Fewer perhaps remembered the 48 miners who died in 1922 in the adjoining Argonaut Mine.   

The National Hotel, at the south end of Jackson’s Main Street, was proudly dated 1852 on its facade but a decade ago had joined Hilton’s Tapestry brand.  The rooms were still small, but they had been completely redecorated, the bathroom fixtures were entirely new, and central heat and air had somehow been squeezed in.  The desk clerk had been here a long time and was deeply attached to the place.  I wondered how she managed the stairs–just a long, straight shot, same as at Moke Hill–but then I noticed that the hotel now had an elevator.

The view up Main Street was several blocks long, and the buildings were tidy.  Most were old but in good shape.  Some targeted visitors but there was also a dry cleaners, a savings bank, and an insurance office.  Still, there was also that modern shopping district at Martell, just beyond the Kennedy Mine.  It had a Safeway, a Lowe’s Home Improvement store, and an AT&T store that I appreciated because I had dropped my phone and cracked a little protective gizmo.  Down on mainstreet there were several independent restaurants, but up here there was a McDonald’s, a Carls Jr, a Round Table Pizza, a Jamba Juice, and of course a Starbucks.  

They weren’t the only new buildings in town.  I poked around Jackson View Estates, where prices started once again in the 500s.  Some of the houses were on steep slopes and had treacherous driveways.  Others enjoyed a view of the Jackson Business Park.  The developers for these places were in Sacramento and neighboring Roseville.  The buyers might have come from there, too.

DAY SIX.   Yesterday had been Angels Camp, San Andreas, Mokelumne and Jackson.  Today, starting in Jackson I’d visit Volcano, then return to 49 and continue north to Sutter Creek and Amador City.  

Volcano’s classic hotel had been built to serve a Gold Rush town of 10,000 people, but Volcano was down now to 100.  The hotel was closed, with a notice stating that the owners hoped to relaunch after a deep clean and renovation, but the notice had been posted in a front window for three years and counting.  There was a functioning inn on Consolation Street, a name I take to be a bit of Gold Rush humor, and I suspect it relied on the town’s live theaters, which included a conventional building but also, across the street and outdoors, an amphitheater with a series of shallow grass-covered terraces hidden from the street by the stone-block facade of a building that no longer existed but which once had been divided between a carpentry shop and a saloon.   Volcano had a couple of very nice houses, and there was an active bakery.  Bakeries do well in California, a lot better than in some other parts of the country.  I recall an essay by Henry Miller attacking the fluff that American grocers call bread.   Miller lived in California, of course.  

I went back to 49 and,  just three miles past Jackson’s commercial center at Martell, found myself in the most photogenic of all the historic towns on this trip, with several blocks lined on both sides with old buildings, often with balconies.  I had to hunt for a parking space, and when I found one a sign invited me to a nearby art gallery, a salon, a spa, and an inn.  I passed a Sotheby’s real-estate office and a wine-tasting bar.  I went into one shop to ask the indelicate question of whether there really was a second floor behind the balcony.  I suspected I knew the answer, because the roof immediately behind the balcony was peaked.  A hint of a cloud crossed the storekeeper’s face, as he admitted that there was not.   I don’t know why this fakery bothered me.  You’d think I’d be inured to it, but perhaps I was annoyed precisely because we’re surrounded by so much commercial, not to mention political, dishonesty.  It brings us back to the appeal of that dogtrot in Oakhurst.

It was only two miles more to Amador City, with 200 people rather than Sutter Creek’s 2,000. There was a classic hotel with another intimidating staircase, and there was a bakery closed since COVID-19.  I was told that the staff had up and quit after the owner told them to disregard public-health orders.  It had never reopened.  There was a museum, too, with a friendly and not too busy host.  She herself didn’t live here.  She commuted from a gated community a dozen miles to the west.  It was called Rancho Murrieta, after Joaquin Murrieta, a possibly real but possibly mythical Gold Rush bandit.  There were 5,000 people living in Rancho Murrieta, which was wrapped in chain link fencing.  I take this to mean that buyers here were concerned about their security, even as they enjoyed the frisson that came with living in a place named for a famous desperado. 

I still had another 25 miles before I’d  stop for the night at Placerville, which has 10,000 people and is the biggest town I had seen since leaving Fresno.  Placerville’s size is no mystery, because the town is on U.S. Route 50, which continues east 3,000 miles to the Atlantic coast.  It’s not a controlled-access freeway–it even has three signals as it passes through Placerville–but the road is four-laned and intense enough that there’s a pedestrian overpass.  It’s used, too, because the highway separates the town’s old commercial center from half the town’s residential area.   Robert Moses couldn’t have done it better.

It happened to be Halloween, and the classic Cary House hotel on Main Street was one of many places where kids, mostly with parents in tow, were collecting candy.  The city proudly announces that it was the western terminus of the Pony Express, which only operated for a year but has managed to remain famous ever since.  A plaque on the side of one building recalled Emigrant Jane, who “drove a band of horses across the plains and from the proceeds of their sale… erected this building in 1861.”  The building was a narrow, two-story structure next to Placerville’s old city hall, whose facade carried the word Confidence, which I take to be a bit of Gold Rush morale boosting.

Placerville’s downtown wasn’t oriented to tourists, but like Sonora and Jackson, Placerville also had a modern shopping center, with a Safeway, Target, TJ Maxx, Ross Dress for Less, Chipotle,and Starbucks, all in a bunch three miles west of town. Come to think of it, it had another shopping center on the east side with a Save-Mart and a Rite-Aid and a McDonald’s.  Visitors from anywhere in the country could come and instantly feel at home.  I have a close relative who would insist on stopping to check out Placerville’s Harbor Freight.  

DAY SEVEN.   It was only eight miles on 49 from Placerville to Coloma, where, probably to his lasting regret, James W. Marshall in January, 1848, found gold in the tailrace of a sawmill he had just built.  There was no scrum of reporters to relay the news, and nothing much happened for almost a year until President James Polk in December of that year delivered his State of the Union.  Turning to California, Polk said: “The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service.”  Those words were like the shot from a starter’s pistol.

Marshall’s mill is long gone, but there’s a replica.  It shows how Marshall diverted a stream of water from the South Fork of the American River and ran it under a waterwheel whose axle was connected at one end to a very simple crank that raised and lowered a serrated blade.  The blade must have moved slowly enough to seem leisurely, with the sound of the rasping blade accompanied by the occasional sounds of logs jostling into place, and planks slapping down when cut.

The river  was beautiful when I saw it early in the  morning, with sunlight glinting off ripples.  A mile from the millsite and on a suitably commanding hilltop, there’s an impressive monument with a statue of Marshall standing on a plinth so high and thin that I’d be scared stiff if I was put on top of it.  The monument was built a few years after Marshall’s death in 1885.  He had never gotten rich from gold or anything else, and he died destitute.  I bet he’d have preferred a pension.  We might try asking him: he’s buried there, under the monument that amounts to his tombstone.

Coloma probably peaked at a few thousand people, and by 1900 it was down to 500.  Since then it’s risen to almost 700, but it’s mostly the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park.  The reconstructed sawmill is interesting, and the Marshall statue is interesting, but for me the most interesting place was the pioneer cemetery.  I parked and ignored a sign reading “Park Fees Due; Pay at Museum.”  Later I went down to the museum and gently harangued the clerk about the travesty of charging admission to a cemetery.  She was brilliant, and she disarmed me by calmly explaining the procedure to get free admission to all the state’s parks.  I’ve forgotten what it was, but it cheered me up, as did her telling me to forget the museum’s fee.  

The South Fork of the American River that flows past Coloma joins the North Fork about 15 miles west in a reservoir called Folsom lake, which is indeed close to the prison that Johnny Cash made famous, but if you continue north on 49 you eventually come to that North Fork well above the confluence.  Once again I was looking at a free-flowing river, but what commanded my attention was California’s highest bridge, the Foresthill Bridge, whose two concrete piers rise in the North Fork’s canyon to support a bridge half a mile long and 700 feet above the bubbling river.  

It’s odd in a way, because this isn’t Japan, and the bridge only serves the 2,000 people of Foresthill, who for a century or more have taken a longer way with a lower bridge to get home.  I should have guessed what was going on, but I didn’t.  Later, in another damned museum, I was told by a resident of Foresthill that the high bridge had been built in anticipation of a giant dam, the Auburn Dam, which would have flooded the canyon almost up to the ironwork of the high bridge.  Work got under way but stopped after an earthquake in 1975.  So far, it hasn’t started again, but you never can tell.  You can see on Google or Apple maps where the dam was going to be built.  The location is about two miles downstream from the high bridge and at a spot labelled Auburn Whitewater Park.  I wonder if environmentalists chose that name to poke the development bear.  

Highway 49 took me up the north wall of the canyon and brought me to Auburn.  Signs called it the “Capital of the World,” a reference to some sporting event.  Auburn has a small historic district and a courthouse posed imperiously on a hilltop, but I think of the town as a transport node.  I mean that the transcontinental railroad came through here in the 1860s.  Then, in the 1920s, U.S. 40 was posted as a two-lane road passing through the center of town.  In the late 40s the highway was rerouted, bypassing Auburn’s

historic center.  The road was also upgraded to a four-lane highway, but in the 1960s Interstate 80 came along, following the alignment of the four-lane highway but adding interchanges with overpasses, underpasses, and clover leafs.  The ideal postcard would show the railroad crossing the interstate in a cantilevered bridge painted a symbolically rich black.   49 slips unobtrsively under the freeway and continues to Auburn’s main shopping area with a rich blend of Safeway, Target, and AutoZone.

Instead of following 49 twenty miles to the next town, Grass Valley, I went east on the Interstate 15 miles to Colfax.  Does anyone remember him?  Schuyler Colfax was vice president under Ulysses S. Grant, and he used the new transcontinental railroad to visit California in 1869.  Auburn already had a name, and so this station 15 miles east or uphill  took Colfax’s.

Colfax has one passenger train daily each way, plus lots of freight trains.  The passenger trains stop on request at Colfax, population 2,000, but the old Colfax depot is now a historical museum next to an old barn of a hotel, no balcony but a big gambrel roof.  I walked into the museum, saw three people hanging around the desk, and out of the blue volunteered that back in 1960 I had been on a Greyhound bus that stopped at that hotel for lunch.  The three stared.  I enjoyed my moment of superior knowledge–they really didn’t know that Greyhounds had stopped here–but I left out the good part about how I took the bus to Truckee, hitchhiked north to Yuba Pass, and then hiked to a summer camp where I had a girlfriend.  I was 15 at the time, and my parents never objected.  Today they’d be charged with child neglect.

A quiet road runs from Colfax to Grass Valley, and it passes another state historic park.  There was no talking my way past the gatekeeper this time, and I wanted to see the Empire Mine, owned for most of its long life by William Bowers Bourn II. 

The Bourn family had a mansion here at the edge of the mine. They called it “the cottage,” though it has seven bedrooms and over 4,000 square feet.  It’s a lovely place, brick and stone on the outside and with redwood sheathing on the inside.  There are lovely gardens, too, but I doubt that anyone stayed long for fun.  That’s because a couple of hundred yards away the hammers of a stamp mill smashed rock 24/7, as people didn’t use to say.  Someone in Grass Valley told me that the fire-proof iron doors on old buildings there were kept closed at night in an effort to shut out the noise.  

I doubt this, but I am bothered by the contrast between Mr. Bourn and his workers.  Bourn usually stayed at his mansion in San Francisco or at a splendid country place down the Peninsula.  I don’t know where his employees at the Empire Mine lived, but at the start of their shifts, they climbed into a rail car that lowered them down a 30-degree grade for two miles to a depth of about 4,000 feet below the surface.  I looked down the inclined shaft and said, “Not for me.”   

In 1929, Bourn sold the mine to Newmont, which closed the mine after a strike in 1952.   Once the mine’s pumps were turned off, the mine flooded.  Twenty-odd years later, the state took over the site and made it into a park.  I don’t know if William Bourn ever rode the rail car down into the depths of his mine, but Newmont, to whom he had sold the property, is today the world’s biggest gold producer, with interests in Australia and Ghana and Peru and New Guinea, not to mention Nevada.  A supermarket clerk told me just the other day, as we were discussing the finer points of barcodes, that just because we can’t stop progress doesn’t mean we have to like it.  

DAY EIGHT.  Grass Valley and Nevada City are five miles apart.  Between them, 49 effloresces into a majestic four-lane freeway.  I pretty much hate freeways, but at least I didn’t have to look for shoulders.

The two towns are very different.  Nevada City packs its downtown into three blocks along Broad Street, which isn’t.  It’s barely wide enough, curb to curb, for two lanes with parallel parking on both sides.  Broad Street is tight another way, too, because each block is about 300 feet long and manages to squeeze in 10 buildings on each side of every block.  Count both sides of the street, and you’ve got 20 shops for every block.  This is living death for most of the businesses where Americans want to shop today, but it is fun for browsers, and Nevada City attracts lots of them, which is why, once again, I had to hunt for a parking spot.  I walked up to three bikers who were wasting a perfectly good afternoon and asked one of them, “Is it always so damned crowded?”  “Sure,” he said.  “It’s always crowded and, besides, the holidays are coming.”  I looked closely at him: bikers aren’t supposed to love Christmas.

Broad Street has a famous old hotel, the National Exchange, which is brick, three stories and has double-stacked balconies, the upper one incomplete.  The hotel must be pretty nice, because the menu in the window included ribeye steaks for $68.  I also saw three nearby sushi restaurants, a Thai restaurant, and Fred’s Szechuan.  The old assay office, famous for having discovered the richness of the silver ore in the Comstock, is now a studio with a sign advertising Resources for Yoga, Meditation, and a Spiritual Life.  

Broad Street does run uphill into a residential district with many fine old Victorian homes in good shape, but if the people want to shop in person for normal stuff–and  you know approximately what I’m going to say–they drive two or three miles down the freeway to a spot between Nevada City and Grass Valley.  A Safeway there is joined by CVS and Walgreens, AutoZone and Bubba’s Bagels, which, far, far from the shtetl, is owned and staffed by Cambodians and Guatemalans.  I’m still processing this.  Over on the south side of Grass Valley, and just before 49 is choked back to two lanes, there’s another shopping center, this one with a Target and that dinosaur of department stores, JC Penneys.  

Grass Valley lacks Nevada City’s charm, mainly because its streets are wider.  That sounds odd, but the appeal of Nevada City is in its compression, and while Grass Valley’s Main Street is still two lanes with parallel parking on both sides, the lanes are wider, so traffic moves faster.  When the COVID epidemic hit in 2020, one busy commercial street in Grass Valley was closed to vehicles.  Somebody must have decided it was nice, because the closure was made permanent, and the street was resurfaced in brick and spotted with benches and a bit of greenery.   People are still trying to decide whether to call it the Mill Street Plaza or go upscale and call it the Mill Street Promenade.

I knew Nevada City and Grass Valley from years earlier, when I was returning from visiting my girlfriend.  I could not get a ride from Grass Valley back to Auburn, and in a fine display of fifteen-year-old maturity, I actually phoned the Highway Patrol and asked if they’d give me a ride.  They didn’t, but they didn’t laugh, either.  Actually, the guy was nice about it and told me I was a bad corner.  I followed his suggestion and got to Auburn.  

What I wanted to see this time, and where I had never been before, was the Malakoff Diggins State Historical Park. (There’s no “G’ in the word “diggins.”)  The park is about 12 miles northeast of Nevada City, and it’s the site of California’s biggest hydraulic mine, an operation that tore up the valley of the South Yuba river until it shut down by a brave federal judge in 1884.

The park includes the ghost town of North Bloomfield.  Everything was shut tight–the general store, the barbershop, the saloon–but that was OK.  I liked the quiet, and I liked North Bloomfield better than Columbia because the buildings were of wood, not brick, they were spaced, not packed, and they were surrounded by forest.  There was also a decrepit church, a semi-restored one-room school, and a cemetery with the grave of a Canadian who had refused to obey an eviction notice for a house on land owned by the North Bloomfield Mining Company.  The sheriff had come from Nevada City to evict him, but the man had sworn he’d kill the first person who tried to move him, and the sheriff could not raise a local posse.  Eventually, somehow, the man did move, but he didn’t go far, and eighteen years later he took up permanent residence in this cemetery. 

North Bloomfield had a monitor on display, basically an oversized firehose with a nozzle diameter of about 10 inches.  Monitors like this had moved slowly across the countryside, peeling off a thick surficial layer of compacted gravel, which then was screened for gold before being released into the South Yuba River.  

As work advanced, the hoses moved forward, gradually lowering the ground surface by perhaps twenty or thirty feet.  A few miles from the state park I stopped at Jackass Flat Road to see a surface that looked as though a thousand dump trucks had dumped loads of gravel that had over the years smoothed out a bit, while Mother Nature struggled to get something green growing.  The Malakoff Mine is more photogenic, because visitors look at the cliff wall where the monitors were working when Judge Lorenzo Sawyer told them to stop.  It looks a lot like Bryce Canyon, which is amusing because we admire Bryce Canyon yet deplore hydraulic mining.  

I have to add that the name Malakoff comes from the Battle of Malakoff, which is not a household name in the United States today but was the decisive battle in the Crimean War.  Add it to our list of foreigners coming to these foothills from Canada and Guatemala and Cambodia, from Australia and Japan and Germany and Mexico, because the Malakoff Mine was developed by French investors who were celebrating their nation’s victory over Russia.

I crossed the South Yuba a few miles south of the old mine and expected the streambed to be choked with debris.  It wasn’t.   The rocks were clean and as bright as the cliffs of Yosemite.  No wonder John Muir called the Sierra the Range of Light.  It’s an amazing contrast with photos from 1900, because the rivers downstream from those mines look in those old photos like satiated pythons. 

If  you want to see where some of the gravel finally settled, go to Google Maps and search Marigold, California.  The name is incongruous, because you’re looking at a  gravel desert riddled, it seems, with worm tunnels, the work of floating dredges that began eating their way through the waste about 1900 to find gold that the old miners had missed.   

DAY NINE.   Like all of us, I was running out of time, and on this day I had to drive 150 miles to Truckee, from where I’d head back to Sacramento.  Of that 150 miles, 100 were on the final stretch of 49–the best stretch–even though the road ends unceremoniously at a desert junction. 

The high point for me on that last 100 miles was Downieville, population 300 and county seat of Sierra County, population 3,000.  I think of Downieville along with its sister city, Sierra City sticks close to that river, with 200 people a dozen miles farther up 49, which hugs the North Fork of the Yuba.  Sierra City stays close to that river, but Downieville also hugs Downie Creek, which comes in from the north.  The town has cafes along the creek with simple patios where you  can enjoy the quiet.

Both towns are beyond the penumbra of civilization.  They have no traffic lights, no big-box stores, no wine-tasting,  no half-million-dollar duplexes.   I should add that neither town has a doctor, though until his retirement in 2024 a nurse practitioner had maintained a clinic in Downieville for many years.   This was a problem, made worse because the county’s median annual household income is about half the California median of $100,000.  You can go down to Grass Valley, but without a car you need to get on the scheduled private van service, which charges $50 for a return trip.

Downieville does have a grocery store, and it was here that I had seen those six-pound cans of beans.  The man behind the counter was Indian–and I don’t mean Native American.  I wish I had asked him where he was from.  “Uttar Pradesh?”   I imagine him replying, “No, I’m from Oakland.”  Serves me right.  

Across the street, there was that charcuterie.  I didn’t go in.  There were those cafes along the creek.  One offered burritos for $17.  The other had chicken-salad sandwiches for $15.50. I don’t suppose many locals bought them, not at those prices.   Besides, the median age here is in the late 50s, so I’m not sure that residents know any more about burritos than I do.

The salient fact about Downieville is that people here used to generate their own electricity with tiny Pelton Wheels, turbines that can be spun by a stream of water coming downhill in a one-inch pipe.  Nowadays, Pacific Gas and Electric supplies the town’s power, but there’s still a little Pelton Wheel on display as a reminder of the town’s historic self-reliance, which might alternatively be called cussed independence.  

Downieville’s St. Charles Hotel had burned down once too often and been replaced by a hardware store, but, across the street, the Craycroft Building from 1850 wasn’t going anywhere.  It was a brick barn almost wanton in its disregard of architectural esthetics.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a building so plain and so prominent and so ready to ask quizzical passersby if they wanted to make something of it.

I talked to a couple who had moved up here 40 years ago.  Once again I asked my favorite question: where do you shop when you need more than beans or charcuterie supplies.  The answer was Truckee or Grass Valley, except in the winter, when snow could block Yuba Pass and make Truckee inaccessible. 

We were standing next to a mobile clinic that had come up from Loyalton, 35 miles to the east.  It’s Sierra County’s biggest town, with almost 800 people.  The nurse asked if I wanted a flu shot for $2.  Others were $10, but she did not have COVID boosters.  Somebody waiting in line said that the omission was political; someone else said it was the result of reimbursement policies, which is another way of saying political.  Someone said that with federal budget cuts the van would probably not be returning. 

Yuba Pass is ten miles beyond Sierra City.  I had been up there in that summer when, too young for a driver’s licence, I hitchhiked to see a girlfriend.  Over the decades I had wanted to get back.  The Pass had become, for me,  the apotheosis of Sierra freedom.  I imagined getting out of my car and just walking to fresh air, trees, crags, and space.  

I once knew a woman who had grown up in British India but who had no wish to see it again.  “It’s not the same place,” she said.  Smart lady, smarter than me, because the first thing I saw at Yuba Pass was a sign demanding payment and warning that cars not displaying a permit would be cited.

It got worse, too, because the U.S. Forest Service had been conducting  timber sales up here, and the forest was pockmarked with clearcuts.  No selective logging here, not even clean clearcuts.  Just stumps and piles of  trash over bare ground chewed up by heavy equipment.  It was a disgrace, and I say that as someone who respects the traditions of the U.S. Forest Service.  Somebody from the Office and Management and Budget had taken over.

The one attractive sight at Yuba Pass was the long view east toward Sierra Valley,  a dead-level ancient lakebed bigger than Tahoe and now cattle paradise.  There was a vista point on the highway.  I pulled off and found two bikers taking a break.  With the carte blanche that comes with age, I walked over and told them that President Trump had assured me I would have this place to myself.  

The bikers were trying to size me up, so I said I’d take one of their bikes in trade for my car.  The car was an econobox, and one of the bikers laughed.  The car might be more comfortable, he admitted, but the point of the exercise was speed.  That’s why they had come up from Reno, where they lived.  I don’t remember if they were wearing helmets.  I told the one who hadn’t laughed that his friend was a damned fool.  I said it amicably, but I was serious.

I continued down into the Valley and drove the 20 miles over to Loyalton past pastures, center-pivot sprinklers, sideroll sprinklers, a few barns, some haysheds, and a sprinkling of black cattle.  I drove through Loyalton and stopped only long enough to pass the Sam Elliot lookalike holding a pint of  Cherry Garcia.  The countryside turned much drier, with grass turning to the sagebrush that would continue east into Utah.

I passed under the Western Pacific Railroad, which came across Sierra Valley in 1906 to offer some competition to the old crossing, the one taken by Schuyler Colfax.  Both the Western Pacific and the Southern Pacific now belong to the Union Pacific,  which seems to run most of the traffic over the older route.  Amtrak runs passenger trains that way, too, and has the nerve to call its train the California Zephyr, which was the name of the train that the Western Pacific used to run on this northern line.   

There’s a hamlet here called Vinton.  Most of its residents are sleeping in the cemetery, which has at least a hundred graves, none, so far as I could see, except Italians.  Perhaps they came as ranchers or ranchhands, or as loggers in a vanished mill, or as workers on the Western Pacific.

Highway 49 came to an end here.  No monument, just a sign with the word “end.”  It was bolted above a spade-shaped sign, this one stamped 49.  The spade shape is a nice touch, but it’s used on all of California’s state-numbered highways, and I doubt that most people make the connection to a shovel, so they miss the allusion to the Gold Rush.

I drove east 10 miles to the junction with U.S. 395, then turned right and drove south to Reno.  One of the bikers had teased the other about living in Reno’s North Valley and I saw why he had laughed as soon as I looked over a suburb that could have been in Houston.  The street names were ludicrous: Monterey Shores Drive, Key Largo Dr, Mariner Cove Drive.  The developer was hypnotizing buyers into thinking that they were someplace else, anywhere else, that wasn’t a desert.  And if I’m not quite serious, I’m not quite joking.

I got through Reno with only a five-minute hiccup at a freeway junction where I missed a turn.  An hour later, on Interstate 80, I was in Truckee and feeling almost requalified as a Californian.

Truckee had a shopping center too new to show up on Google Maps.  The traffic leading into it was astonishing, but the cutest place in town was an Engel+Volkers real-estate office in a repurposed gas station.  The pumps had been dry for decades, but they had been meticulously restored, with the price set to 34.9 and the sale set to zero.  When I came by, a dozen or more people inside were discussing how to sell a vanished world that doesn’t come cheap.

DAY TEN.  For over a week now, I had run without a schedule.  Yes, I was aware that hotels didn’t want me checking in before three, which was annoying, and I had dashed up to the redwoods before they closed at dark, or before I was told they closed at dark.  It turned out that there was no gate, so the only spur was my reluctance to drive at night.  

Now, however, I stopped at the Emigrant Gap vista point, 30 miles west of Truckee on Interstate 80.  There’s a fine view north over a long valley once used by lumbering pioneer wagons.  I saw no signs of their path, but Interstate 80 was right behind me, and it had an extremely helpful dynamic-message sign telling me that Colfax was 46 minutes ahead.  I’m not sure who the sign was for.  I mean that I saw three Walmart semis cruising past at whatever the speed limit was, but I’m willing to bet that they had their internal devices to keep them on time.  I remember a postman who told me many years ago that he couldn’t stop to chat for more than three minutes, or something like that, because he was required to carry some kind of tracker that would report him misbehaving.  I have not looked into this matter, but technologies like this do not go away.

A few minutes later, I left the highway for a few minutes and dropped 700 feet along a quiet road that led to Blue Canyon, a famous spot on the old transcontinental railroad.  Well, “famous” in certain elite circles.  Before engineers developed steam-powered rotary snow plows, push plows did the work.  There was too much snow at Donner Pass for them to manage, so trains ran for about 30 miles through wooden snow sheds that, from a passenger’s perspective, seemed like tunnels.  The western end of the sheds was in a valley that got very smoky, so passengers coming into daylight saw instead a blue haze.  

The sheds at Blue Canyon are long gone, but names are sticky.  There used to be a railroad maintenance base here, but it’s gone, replaced by maybe a dozen houses straddling the track.  More properly, tracks, since the line was doubled about 1900.  Trains go slowly even if they’re heading downhill, because there’s an S-curve here, and trains make two 180-degree curves, each in the space of about 1,200 feet.

I go into these gory details because nothing had changed since I last saw Blue Canyon in the 1960s except that automatic crossing gates had been installed.  You know how highway engineers sometimes install stop signs at stupid places and how signals sometimes hold a dozen vehicles for 20 seconds while absolutely nobody is crossing in front of them.  Similarly, these crossing gates were colossally superfluous.   Nobody living here was oblivious of trains, and anybody so drunk that they wouldn’t hear an approaching train would also be too drunk to stop for a piece of wood.  Still, like the 46-minutes-to-Colfax sign up on the freeway, the crossing gates had been installed here because of some policy specified in some manual and implemented by people following orders.  It was a very long way from the pioneer wagons in Emigrant Gap

Back in Colfax, where I had bragged about my teenage adventure, I learned that the old hotel with the Greyhound lunch stop was being renovated and would open again.  The owner was also renovating an old hotel at Dutch Flat, which is about a dozen miles farther east or uphill on the railroad.  It’s also less than 10 miles west or downhill of  Blue Canyon, so I got off the interstate again.  

I found the hotel, three floors on the front side, tapering to two floors and then just one at the back.  There were balconies on the front side, and they were accessed by hellacious stairs climbing the side of the building with at least thirty steps divided in two by a pitiful excuse for a landing.

The hotel was locked tight.  I peeked through a window and saw a lounge, with a bar on one side, a massive stone fireplace on the other, and leather furniture.  The floor was wood, and the ceiling was supported on timbers that measured about eight by twelve inches.  The walls were freshly papered with a patterned bordello red.  There were antlers around the fireplace, and a blackboard above the bar listed wines from which I couldn’t possibly choose but, forced, would pick Merlot because it sounds nice. 

Across the road there was another old post office.  I don’t know how these places survive.  I chatted for a few minutes with the postmistress behind her window.  People drifted in, opened their mailboxes, chatted wth the postmistress, and were curious but not suspicious of the stranger from Oklahoma.  I didn’t ask where they shopped or whether Amazon delivered up here.  The only complaint they had was the trailbikers who played around in some old nearby placer diggings.   

I would have liked to visit Sacramento’s historic city cemetery.  I probably would have tried to find the grave of William S. Hamilton, remembered today chiefly if not solely because his father was Alexander.  William hadn’t been a young man when he joined the Gold Rush in 1849, and he died in the next year when a cholera epidemic swept through Sacramento.  I suppose he, like almost everybody else, had come out here lured by greed, the fever stoked by President Polk’s speech.  I don’t suppose he came searching for freedom, mainly because the men and women who came out here had plenty of that to start with, but it is their freedom that attracts us, that makes us stare at historic streets lined with buildings that nobody would call beautiful but which appeal to us because they remind us of the life, the freedom, lived back then.  I’ve already forgotten what flight I took home and what seat I was in.  I had my digital boarding pass.  I was in boarding group 2, which is pretty good.  In boarding group 2 you have enough room for your carry-on in the overhead.