Traveling in east central California has been quite a change for us because of the warmer-than-Nevada temperatures. While our home town's morning temps usually hover around high thirties to low forties, here in the Gold Country as we travel Highway 49, the morning temps have probably been close to thirty degrees warmer. It's not so startling for breaking camp in the morning, but by afternoon the temps have gone up another ten degrees so that the post setup activity definitely calls for ice cold cocktails of some sort to cool off.
Today, as we traveled south along Highway 49, many of the village names seemed so familiar that it occurred to us that we might have traveled this same route way back in the late mid 1980s when we were just a newly married couple. I remember us taking a stagecoach ride in the heavily tourist-visited mining town of Columbia, and I'm pretty sure we wandered the Sierra Railroad property in Jamestown as well. No trains were running that day, but back then I was always up for photographing anything railroad related. Later that evening we had dinner in Jamestown, and I distinctly remember the chicken pot pie as being outstanding!
Part of the reason you see only 110 miles racked up today is because of the challenging nature of Highway 49 between Angel's Camp and the town of Oakhurst near the entrance to Yosemite Park. To say that the road is narrow is like saying Yosemite National Park has a few nice trees. Concetta informed me that the route is nicknamed "The Golden Chain" highway, probably because it links all the old gold mining towns. Or perhaps it's because the tiny winding road whips back and forth, up and down, and around dozens of hairpin curves making it hard to see long stretches out ahead.
The entire route is festooned with acres of wild flowers including California's famous poppy. There's so many "edge-of-a-cliff" drop-offs that you can't really focus on the geology, though I think I saw lots of basalt, schist, and granite blur by us. I remember seeing a documentary on California's geology that said the state is overlaid with a great deal of ocean-bottom limestone and sediment that was scraped off the Pacific Plate as most of that plate dove beneath the North American Plate. This has resulted in ocean-bottom fossils being found at the very TOP of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
As per normal, we stopped often today to gaze at the wonderful views and one of the most startling was the Tuolumne River Canyon south of the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct facility near the town of Moccasin, California. Here one could plainly see that hydraulic mining from the 1850s had turned the pristine and wooded river canyon into countless piles of rubble stone once the top soil had been washed down stream. The original use for the waters dammed in the Hetch Hetchy Canyon was to provide water for the hydraulic mining.
When I was a child of about twelve, I had two consuming interests in life and hoped to pursue them further when I was an adult. The first was reading about pirates and diving on treasure ships with men like Mel Fisher and Bob Marks. The second was the exploration of ghost towns and doing lots of ghost town photography. As fate would have it, I never really got to pursue either of those interests outside of briefly using a metal detector in search of old coins, and digging for old bottles in the San Gabriel Mountains when I was attending Eliot Junior High in my home town of Altadena, California. I found a few neat old coins and I still have a shelf full of old bottles, but the only ghost town I really ever explored was in Bodie, California.
We had a few tense moments early this morning after leaving camp when we rounded a bend and ended up right in the middle of some sort parade in the town of Sonora. The parade looked to be countless blocks long and every single access to mainstream had been blocked. Now if you've ever been in any of the gold country towns you know that they have a fairly passable main street through the heart of the area, but once you get on any side streets or bypass routes your chances of success drop precipitously.
When we finally reached the intersection where cops were diverting traffic around town, we found it was basically built largely for compact cars and bicycles. When we rolled up, the cops had to remove all the traffic cones to give us the best chance of making the turn without flattening them and whatever else got in the way. It took quite a few twists and turns and reroutes and detours to finally get out of town, but we made it without incident.
After we finally had been on the road for five hours and Concetta had set us up for a campsite in Oakhurst, we were certainly ready to do a little kicking back. The camp turned out to be a bit dusty and raggedy, but it will do for the night. There's a nice "babbling brook" nearby for sound effects and I think the fact that we're a block of the main highway should give us some peace and quiet. We topped up the gas tank before we sought out our camp, and Concetta is busily cooking chicken for dinner. Tomorrow we're headed down the mountain toward Fresno where my cousin is waiting to welcome us to her house in Clovis on the outskirts of Fresno.
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