Gold Rush Towns & Lake Tahoe

Leaving Yosemite, Ken's plan was to rent a car, drive up through the Sonora Pass, and take two scenic days getting himself to his desert home in SoCal while his sister and brother-in-law continued exploring California to the more verdant north.

We ended up near Columbia, an historic town that happened to be on our travel route through Sonora. It also, as we adventitiously learned, happened to be an historic town taken over by the state government to become a re-enactment village. Government workers, docents and happy-to-be-there volunteers were populating the old buildings that dated from the mid-1800's. Sutter's Mill wasn't too far away, and in that same year of 1848, a couple guys happened to kick over a rock and find gold in Columbia. We call it the “49'ers Gold Rush” these days because they didn't have Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest, so it took time for the word to spread.

Within a couple years the area's population had gone from almost zero to thousands. Our State Parks tour guide, Ryan, was an excited fount of enthusiastically detailed information about the people there then. It took a couple weeks, nevertheless, to appreciate that this town actually was a microcosm of The 49er's.  The town and Ryan's vivid descriptions encapsulated the whole Gold Rush era, pretty much.  We were going to stay just one night to drop Ken at the car-rental, but this –just down the road a piece– had us extending at our RV park another day just to explore. We consider discoveries like this better than cake icing.

Okay, that was a lie, but– See how freewheeling, educational, and entertaining life can be when you're retired?

So next stop is Lake Tahoe. John has to admit that, even though Bonanza was a favorite show for years as a teen, he never actually had put two-and-two together on that burning map. Ohhh! That Lake Tahoe! And that Virginia City! There's nothing more self-embarrassing than a fifty year overdue Duh! slapping you upside your head.

But then Debbie admitted she's always had the idea that the Calaveras County of Mark Twain's celebrated jumping frog was closer to Missouri.  Perceptions changed as we found place-name after place-name north of Sonora along the lines of Clemens Highway or Twain Boulevard or Riverboat Mall or Jumpin' Bar and Grill or.... You get the picture.  

We stayed near Carson City, Nevada, and drove our Honda to the no-longer mythological towns of Silver City and Virginia City. Debbie was just thrilled to see the California gasoline tax disappear and immediately implemented the next step in her long-laid-out plan to screw that greedy state's government out of our big 7mpg diesel fuel tax bonanza. Stay tuned to see how that worked out in the end.

Silver City ain't much. Truly. Just some small rundown buildings and a nearly bare hill overlooking a valley on which three signs sing of the late 1800's when the rare metal ores were mined there. One board named some local people who died in the pursuit including one Richard Brey.  John's brother, Bill, has done some extensive digging into the family past and found that we may originally have been Breys ourselves, but for something of an emotional schism in Pennsylvania and New Jersey at some point. Our branch seems to have dropped the “e” sometime before the birth of JCB, Sr. We never knew him; John's Dad never knew the man who's name he carried, but passed it on nonetheless. And, yes, there is a John, IV, who now lives with his own family four time zones north and west of the ancestral Brey/Bry home.

The next town over is Virginia City, the real life Western town that fictional Ben, and his sons, Adam, Hoss and Little Joe always did business in. Thank you TV show for turning this otherwise sleepy place into a six block long jumpin' Tourist Trap (italics and capitals!) with everybody trying to get into our pockets:  four museums each charging admission, a newspaper office (Mark Twain wrote here!), hotel (with rooms to let), saloons (dispensing drinks), and two Honest To Real cowboys tossin' their six shooters in the street and crackin' the bullwhip while loudly proclaiming their Wild West Shootout Starts at One O'clock Just Up The Street.

Debbie and John aren't amused.  John is affronted.  We've been to Disneyworld, where fantasy is done professionally and very well. On the other hand, we are wandering America's West for the first time in our lives and –if the town really has nothing but history going for it– we would appreciate a less fantasmagorical presentation. We can't help but compare to Ryan, the state government tour guide in Columbia, CA, who was so enthusiastic about the personal stories of real people that he'd unearthed there. But Debbie forgives, arguing that Columbia was a somewhat staid government production while this is a hodgepodge of private enterprise, real people trying to earn a real living instead of sucking off an entire population's taxes.  John just wishes it were a lot more classy.  

After spending $4 apiece on one museum that focused on 1850's mining equipment (what else?) and refusing to take a picture of the gun-totin' rootin' tootin' bullwhip cracker, we got in the car and turned at a right angle to head out of town on the very first street we saw.  That was John's perception, anyway; Debbie just wanted to git outta Dod- er, Virginia City.

It was called Six Mile Canyon Road and dropped sharply from the fake glitz to wander among closely spaced steep hills that never cease to thrill us flatlanders. It followed a creek and was very near totally undeveloped.  Debbie was commenting that this probably looked exactly the same as it had for centuries.    John could envision miners with their pack mules camping under the cottonwoods at one bend, and cowhands sweaty off the trail under the next. {So, who's fantasizing now? --blush}
John was a bit surprised to see a familiar pattern in the desert of greener brush along the creek banks morphing into groves of trees at the bends where the water slowed down; he had unconsciously noted this exact pattern in every cowboy movie he'd seen. Seeing it in person, now, he understood why, and appreciated how those small, lusher areas became favored camping spots between the arid hills.  This is The West.
The real Virginia City, by the way, sits on a hilly steep ridge, not the flat studio lot of Bonanza.

The only thing of note for John from that town had been in the museum where some wine glasses were on display. They had belonged to a rich guy who was interwoven into the area's history. It was Debbie who got it first; the gold rim on each glass has the exact same pattern that a set of tumblers

has in our house in Michigan. They had come to us from John, Jr's mother and aunts. We'd known they were old but now we wonder: are they from the same set? If so, how did they become separated from his mansion in Nevada to end up in a Philadelphia home where they came to the table every Thanksgiving and Christmas as they do now in ours? Did Me-Ma and her two sisters know Adolph Sutro's family? And how? All intriguing questions, but in the end probably not worth the time to track down and –really– only of curiosity value to John, his brother, and sister anymore anyway. 
Ahhh-- ...well, maybe they came from Woolworth's.

Back to the modern day at Lake Tahoe, John appreciated the whimsy of this beer can tab chain that obviously has been in progress on this tree's limb for some time. Either that or there was a heckuva party here! Debbie wanted to know why he was wasting pictures. Unlike decades earlier, he could safely ignore her because there is no one-use-only film in this camera. 

Today we drove south around the east end of Lake Tahoe, which is nicely blue when you can see it past the crowded tourist infrastructure. Toward the south end, we ended up at a federal Park preserving some nearly hundred year old vacation cottages built by wealthy folk. Here we could even touch the water.

Interestingly, every “Dogs Must Be Leashed” sign included the specific cite from the Code of Federal Regulations. John wonders what sort of bureaucratic psyche is so weak that it must justify such an innocuous order– and take money from our pockets to pay for it.  Does the guy even have a chin?  

If Lake Tahoe were a wall clock, we'd gotten around to Emerald Bay at the eight o'clock position when it was late enough that we wanted to get back to the coach for our own dinner. The next day, we set out westward to Lake Tahoe again, but turned right to go north and west. We stopped at Lupita's near Crystal Bay for an “authentic Mexican” lunch of chili relleno and a burrito. John is so into West Michigan Mexican that he had not noticed the lack of “wet” in the burrito's title. It was tasty and good, but not anything at all like the Beltline Bar's version. Almost finger-food really.

We continued driving counter-clockwise until we reached Dollar Point, which actually seems to have properties of lesser value than the previous cluster of homes that had some other forgettable name.

The next day, Debbie determined to go back to Emerald Bay and walk the mile down to tour the "Vikingsholm," another uniquely personal vacation property on which another well-off woman had spent her own money.   Now it's a sightseeing destination, down the steep bank to the Lake's edge.  John elected to stay in our new RV location mainly because he is anything but a Parade of Homes type of guy.  Also, our coach now is parked on a bounteously beautiful BLM site near Truckee, CA, overlooking a gorgeous lake with a snow capped mountain in the background. He was trying to catch up on these

blog postings, but spent much of the time immersed in the scenery, instead. When we first arrived later in the day before, John had busied himself with setting up the coach, then settled in for a nap, so it was not until our wine-and-cheese moment that we try to reserve before dinner that he'd taken the time to actually look at our surroundings.  His first words were heartfelt and contentedly appreciative, "I could die here."  Debbie suggested that perhaps we could enjoy it without going to that extreme.   The view so mesmerized the two of us that we forgot all about taking pictures, until we snapped phone-cam shots just before leaving. D'oh! Your loss; our memories until we do pass.

Speaking of death, our camp on the Prosser Reservoir was not far from Donner Pass. That would be the Donner Pass of your history books where 87 pioneers hoping to find their new land were caught by an early high country snowy winter and some survivors fell to eating the only meat available. On the way in, we had passed a sign that pointed toward the “Donner Camp Picnic Area.” Both of us thought aloud that, perhaps, the government could have reconsidered that designation.

We're working our way north toward the Seattle area for mid-July to meet up with John's brother Bill. Thing is, NorCal is relatively primitive compared to Palm Springs, LA, San Francisco –and we like rural sightseeing anyway. We spent nearly two full weeks totally out of touch. Entire days with no bars on the phone, or on the internet 4G box either.

Stay tuned to find out how much fun it was.