The San Joaquin, the Sierra, and Beyond
Introduction
The Valley
Sacramento
Cruising Down the River on a Sunday Morning and Afternoon
Riding the Rails at Rio Vista Junction—and Elsewhere
Stockton and Vicinity: Highlighting Micke Grove
Modesto/Stanislaus County: Of Almonds, Chocolate, and a Covered Bridge
Atwater and Merced: Especially Airplanes
San Luis National Wildlife Refuge
Fresno: Love That Zoo and . . .
Selma/Kingsburg: Celebrating the Long Ago and Far Away
Hanford: A Three-Century City
Bakersfield/Kern County: Proud Center of the Southern San Joaquin Valley
Venturing West
Shadow Cliffs Lake - Del Valle Lake, Alameda
County
San Joaquin Valley National Cemetery
Los Banos Creek
Pinnacles National Monument
From I-5 to I-5 via Highway 25: Beef, Oil, Fruit, and Water
Venturing East to the
Foothills
Indian Grinding Rocks, Daffodils, and Other
Delights
California Caverns
Riding Rafts on Rampaging Rivers
Hetch Hetchy
Mariposa: Mining and Minerals
Fun by Some Dam Sites
Ranging the Sierra
Nevada
Grover Hot Springs State Park
Triple Play:
Columbia Historic State
Park
A Choice of Caverns
Calaveras Big Trees
State Park
Highway 108 Country/Summit District of Stanislaus National Forest
A Day in Yosemite Valley
Tenaya Creek and Snow Creek Falls
Taft Point and the Fissures
The Panorama Trail
Tenaya Lake and the Tuolumne Grove
May Lake and Mt. Hoffmann
Indian Ridge and Its Natural Arch
Fresno Dome * Nelder Grove * Corlieu Falls
Sierra Vista Scenic Byway
Huntington Lake and Environs
Kings Canyon
Sequoia National Park
Mineral King
Beyond the Sierra
The Far Side: June Lake, Mono Lake, and Bodie
Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest
Introduction
I have lived in the great central valley of California most of my life—in Oroville, Stockton, Kingsburg, and, since 1980, in Atwater. I'm a valley booster. I admit we sometimes manage a bit of heat-surplus on certain summer days, and there are some winter days with fog when I'd rather be in Hawaii. Despite those considerations, I like living here, and I love to visit valley destinations as a sightseer. I also like the valley as a launching pad. It's a great starting point for one- and two-day forays into the foothills and the higher mountains beyond. You will see the exciting possibilities as you turn these pages.
True Central California
This book reveals for San Joaquin Valley residents and visitors alike 40 one-day and two-day trips and tells you where to go for some very rewarding experiences. I want your outings to be fun. I don't want you to be cooped up in your car all day pounding pavement over mega-mileages. Therefore, I've settled on a circle of limitation with a radius of 100 miles, a distance which keeps day trips “do-able.”
Would you mind spending a moment with your California road map? Put your finger on the spot that you'd guess to be the center of the state. Where did your finger land? On Merced, Madera, Fresno? Actually, you're fairly close; however, authorities place it a bit farther east than perhaps you expected. They say that California's center lies on a hillside between the community of North Fork and the San Joaquin River.
I have chosen to cut myself a little slack and make the operative center point for these trips a tad to teh north, at the community of Oakhurst, located on Highway 41 between Fresno and Yosemite. Swing a 100-mile radius circle around Oakhurst and you embrace nearly all the destinations detailed in this book (with the exception of a few trips which require going just a little further afield). You include along the Highway 99 north-south axis the territory from the Stockton area right on down through Manteca, Modesto, Turlock, Nerced, Madera, Fresno, to below Visalia and Tulare. You include also the territory from the east slope of the Diablo Range clear across to the east side of the Sierra.
There you have "true central California" defined: all that part of the state situated within a hundred miles of Oakhurst. And what extraordinary richness and diversity you include! My circle embraces all or most of eleven counties with a total population exceeding two million. I want this book to be a helpful, practical guide for all those residents, and for the many additional folks who will come into the Valley area from further afield.
Trips in Strips
The table of contents will help you picture this book's organization. Think in terms of strips. First we have a strip along Highway 99, down the center of the Valley, Sacramento to Bakersfield. Then we have a strip of trips down the west side of the Valley, along the eastward facing side of the Diablo Range. Next we list trips down the east side of the Valley, generally through the Mother Lode region. Then I trace trips in the Sierra Nevada that entail going to elevations exceeding 4,000 feet. (Let this be a word of caution to folks who experience health problems at high elevations.) Last of all, I write about two trips on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. In every strip the listings run north to south.
The Chapters' Format
I begin
each chapter describing a one- or two-day trip.
Next, I suggest further explorations. In many cases, there are
interesting things to do in a given vicinity that won't fit easily in the day trip as I
have outlined it. On the chance that you may want to stay around a second day or return on
another occasion, I have listed some other things you can see and do as you follow your
own interests and inclinations.
Thirdly, and usually very briefly, I comment on the best time to go. Some trips—those in the high Sierra—can only be made (by most of us) when the roads are snow-free. Some trips can be made throughout the years; however, there may still be good reasons for preferring a certain season. You would be ill-advised to take a blossom tour when there are no blossoms.
Next to last I've put some nuts 'n' bolts. Here I comment on routes, distances, time allowances—some practical considerations you'll want to review when you're getting ready to actually take the trip.
Finally, there's a sub-heading for key contacts. Here you'll find the name and address of one or more places where you can write or call for additional information. The phone numbers may be particularly useful in the event that you want to get up-to-the-minute details on the days and hours a certain place is open and what the admission charges are.
Admission charges are so subject to change and often so variable (a certain amount for adults, another amount for children and seniors, maybe no charge under a certain age) that I've made a conscious decision not to list entrance costs here. By and large, it's wise to have some dollars in your pocket. If knowing exact amounts in advance is important to you, do call ahead. But where there are admission fees, the central California sites mentioned in this guide are generally inexpensive--another good reason to spend some time here.
To Your Enjoyment
Whatever your destination, I think you may expect to relish the 40 favorite outings I've detailed for you here. Climbing Mt. Hoffmann may not be everyone's cup of tea, but, in general, I believe you will have good and memorable days doing any of these trips. You will find yourself commending them to your friends. In many cases, you will want to repeat them. I'm finding happiness simply contemplating all the enjoyment you're going to have as you get out and get going. Have a great time!
Cordially, your guide to true
central California.
Bill Sanford
Ghost Towns of the Santa Cruz Mountains
Preface
Introduction
Mountain Charley
More Bear Fights
The Summit District
Patchen, the Perambulating Postoffice
The Railroad
The Village of Burrell
Austrian Gulch and Germantown
Along White Wash Alley
Skyland and Highland
Buffalo Jones and John C. Fremont
Silent Charley Parkhurst
Lexington Begins
The History of Alma
The Tevis Estate at Alma
Glenwood
Postscript
Notes for the Expanded Edition
The Woodside Store and Searsville
New Almaden
Stevens Creek County Park
Felton
Covered Bridges
Ben Lomond, Brookdale, and Boulder Creek
Index
Under the title “Ghost Towns of the Santa Cruz Mountains,” these stories appeared in 1934 in the San Jose Mercury Herald as a copyrighted Sunday feature series. The series began April 22, and ran every Sunday until July 22. A final installment was published December 2, 1934.
I wrote the stories as a cub reporter covering a country beat which included Campbell, Los Gatos, Saratoga, and the adjacent foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, which I had known as a boy. My home was in the rural area between Campbell and Los Gatos.
Since news was never plentiful on that beat, I started prowling around the mountains in search of feature material. I soon became involved in talking to the few remaining old-timers and their families, reading old diaries, and plowing through old county histories and other documents—in short, absorbing the true stories, tall tales, and lore of the region. Only later did I find that I had in fact gathered a great deal of basic historical source material.
By chance, I had stumbled into the end of an era in that part of the Santa Cruz Mountains, at the time of the transition from homesteads to weekend homes, from a rural economy to one based on highways, trucks, and autos. The changes then in progress were drastic, and permanent. Not one of the villages I wrote about in 1934 exists as such today, and all but one or two have vanished without a trace.
Some present-day readers may find the title of "Ghost Towns" misleading, considering the current popularity of books about mining camps and Gold Rush settlements. The communities described here were tiny hamlets, not towns, and none were mining camps. The image of ghost towns created by TV oat operas is one of places like Tombstone, Bodie, Calico, or any other of the Mither Lode boom-and-bust towns, each with a dusty main street lined with saloons and bawdy houses, a boot hill filled with hundreds of graves, and a daily shoot-out with the sheriff looking on.
The Santa Cruz Mountain hamlets I wrote about forty-five years ago had none of these stock attributes. Only one, Wright's Station at the peak of construction on the narrow-gauge railtoad, came close to the current TV image. All the others thrived briefly on lumbering, agriculture, the railroad, the highways, and then they all faded into total obscurity. They are memories, not ghosts. It is probably significant that no new, permanent communities have arisen in their place.
I have made relatively few changes in the original text of these stories save to omit and correct some glaring errors, rearrange some sections to make the narrative flow more easily, eliminate a few extraneous and repetitive passages, and to add dates, (1934) (1979), where I have felt they were needed to clarify confusion between past past and present.
I have also inserted some “author's notes” to explain where so many of the places mentioned in the series have gone, since it is all but impossible to find any trace of most of them. Only Holy City, which was still thriving as a highway tourist trap in 1934, now has enough old buildings to look like a tiny ghost town. It is a village that has almost, but not quite, vanished like the rest.
Historical markers, not always accurately placed, purport to show where some old places—like Patchen—once stood. An old church still holds Sunday services at Skyland; a chicken ranch now surrounds the old schoolhouse at Burrell. The old Burrell telephone exchange, nerve center of the region for decades, and its neighboring blacksmith shop, have vanished, along with the Wright mansion and the Wright Presbyterian church that stood across the way.
Wright's Station, largest and liveliest of the old railroad towns, is not even shown on present-day road maps. Its site is marked only by the gaping mouth of the tunnel to Laurel and the rustic steel bridge across Los Gatos Creek. The town started to die when the railroad stopped running in 1940; the last of its tumbledown buildings were razed by the San Jose Water Company years ago as part of a watershed protection project.
Across Los Gatos Creek and higher up the mountainside, no trace remains of Austrian Gulch and Germantown, once-flourishing colonies that lie under the waters of Lake Elsman behind Austrian Dam. Another reservoir farther down the creek, close to Los Gatos, completely engulfs the sites of Lexington and Alma, behind Lexington Dam.
At Glenwood, a historical marker commemorates the location of a busy village deserted first by the railroad and then by the main highway. The name is preserved in roads like Glenwood Drive leading in from Scotts Valley, Glenwood Cut-off leading down from Highway 17 (the freeway), and portions of the old Glenwood Highway still in use. But even former residents of the town have a hard time locating the site of the big hotel and the railroad station, and the railroad tunnel mouth is completely obscured by a tangle of brush, vines, and second-growth timber.
Other roads mentioned in the original “Ghost Towns” series are still on the map and in use. Summit Road, now paved and realigned, is a popular extension of Skyline Boulevard, branching at Burrell to become Loma Prieta Avenue and the San Jose-Soquel Road.
The road up Loma Prieta, after leaving a cluster of weekend homes near Burrell, is not for the timid, and is all but impassable in wet weather. Its upper end is closed to protect the elaborate electronic installations that sprout from its summit and all along the ridge to Mt. Umunhum to the north and Mt. Madonna to the south. Highland Way still runs on down from Soquel Road at Hall's Bridge (now a culvert) to join Eureka Canyon Road leading to Corralitos. It is paved and usually passable but subject to slides.
All in all, any effort to seek out the sites of most of the communities described in the stories must prove futile except for the most diligent perusers of topographic maps and perhaps for the very few remaining old inhabitants who can remember the region's days of glory.
John V. Young
The Call of Gold
Prologue
An Indian Wilderness
Arrival of Gold Seekers and Establishment of County
Arrival of John C. Fremont
First Settlers' Own Stories
Beginnings of Hornitos and Coulterville
War with Indians
Discovery of Something Better than Gold, Yosemite
The First Authorized Mint and Early Mining Code
Early Day Justice
Lost Gold, Amusements, Hotel Rules
Visit of Fremont and Savage
Bunnell's Mining Experiences
Eventful Years of 1854 and 1855
First Newspaper Description of Yosemite
Galen Clark, Outstanding Citizen
Fremont's Political and Mining Activities
The Famous Trial of 1857
Judge Burke's Decision and Sidelights
Battle of the Pine Tree
Bear Valley and the Colonel
Final Judgment for Fremont
The First White Woman in Bear Valley
Autobiography of John S. Diltz
Mariposa Around 1859
Gazette News, 1862 to 1870
Fremont's Great Sale
Mismanagement by Wall Street
Frempnt's Later Career
John Muir, World-Famous Naturalist
Diltz, a Real Benefactor
John Hite, Millionaire Miner
Angevine Reynolds and His Writings
Hi-Lights Around Coulterville
Color Around Hornitos
The Town With the Holy Name
Indian Anecdotes
Mariposa Al
The Pioneer Spirit Exemplified
Re-Union of Old-Timers
The Miners' Ten Commandments
View of Yosemite Valley from the Wawona Road
The tent town of Agua Fria, in 1849
Agua Fria
John C. Frémont
Water-powered quartz mill
Main Street in old Hornitos
River-bed mining
Lafayette H. Bunnell, early-day miner and namer of Yosemite
“The Yosemite Flyer”
Mariposa County Courthouse
Mariposa in 1854
Mt. Ophir mine and mill
Hutchings' Hotel
Hutchings' cabin in Yosemite Valley
Galen Clark, famed Guardian of Yosemite
Galen Clark and Julius Boysen, in the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees
Frémont Tramway in Hells Hollow
Benton Mills
Frémont's cottage in Bear Valley
Mt. Ophir mine at Norwegian Gulch
The Oso House at Bear Valley in 1858
Dear Ma . . . Your Loving Son
Bear Valley in 1860
Captain John S. Diltz
“Rock” Greeley and his logging team
David Clark's home and saw-mill
Indian Gulch store
“Quartz” Johnson
John Muir
Three of the boys
John Hite
Angevine Reynolds
John Gilmore with his team entering Mariposa, 1879
Jeffrey Hotel in Coulterville
Coulterville in the 19th century
Hornitos Hotel
Reeb's butcher shop, Hornitos
Judas being burned at the stake in Hornitos
Mrs. Merck of Hornitos
Tunnel Tree in the Mariposa Grove
Entrance to the Mariposa Road in Yosemite Valley
This is a story of real people and real millions, that played important and necessary parts in the upbuilding of our beloved State and Nation.
It has been the purpose of the author to extract and make available some of the nuggets of valuable and interesting information, hidden in the mines or files of old newspapers and in old books and letters, which have hitherto been practically inaccessible to the present-day world. From these precious relics and from stories told him by old-timers, he has endeavored to choose the real fragrance and color, as portrayed by the pioneers themselves, under pioneer environment, and not enlarged or warped by historians of a later age, in order that the present generation may enjoy the thoughts, expressions, and reactions of the pioneers, as they tell their own story, just as far as possible.
Newell D. Chamberlain
Guide to the Theodore Solomons Trail
Acknowledgements
Introduction
How to Use This Guide
The Theodore Solomons Trail
The Trip Suggestions
The Roadheads
Maps
Tips for the Trail
The Wilderness Ethic
Backcountry Traveler's Checklist
Addresses & Phone Numbers
Bibliography
Index
This book is a guide to the Theodore Solomons Trail, a lower elevation alternative to the John Muir Trail. It is a continuous 271-mile pathway from Yosemite to the Mt. Whitney region. The Solomons Trail passes through some of the finest country in the Sierra Nevada. Here the hiker will find densely forested mountain valleys, sparkling lakes, cascading streams, and great river chasms to explore and enjoy. Unlike the John Muir Trail, which largely traverses the High Sierra, the Solomons Trail stays within the bounds of the timberbelt of the Middle Sierra where firewood is plentiful, wildlife abundant, and the fishing superb. At this lower elevation the hiking season is also much longer, the weather more gentle, and the vegetation more hardy. The Theodore Solomons Trail then is a seldom trod avenue offering solitude, uncrowded campsites, unparalleled scenery, and the opportunity to spend five weeks or longer on an uninterrupted backpack through the Sierra.
The first part of this guide deals with the background of the trail, some details on the region, and the backcountry regulations that must be observed. Next is a detailed description of the trail itself, north to south, beginning to end, divided into four easily absorbed sections. That is followed by 20 other suggested backcountry trips, again north to south, ranging from dayhikes of several hours to backpacks of several days. These all utilize portions of the Solomons Trail to introduce hikers to the delights of the Middle Sierra. In all cases, a description of the area is first given, the roadheads used are named, detailed hiking instructions are provided, and the needed 15-minute topography maps are noted.
The final chapters of this book provide driving directions to all roadheads mentioned, maps to familiarize you with the region, addresses of forest and park service offices and post offices near the trail, a list of trail tips, a word about the Wilderness Ethic, and an equipment checklist.
I invite you to first read about Theodore Solomons and how the dream of a 14-year-old boy went on to become the reality of the famous John Muir Trail. Then consider spending some time recreating in the vast wilderness of the Middle Sierra. Start perhaps with one of the dayhikes to sample a taste of what these mountains have to offer. Then, as your appetite for adventure grows, aim for longer excursions into this beautiful parkland.