Gold Country

---

Today, I’m heading south.

Since I enjoyed the drive through gold country, I’m now doing it in reverse.

The hills are still golden and glorious.

My goal is a place that everyone in the world has seen pictures of, but even the best can’t begin to match real life.

Gold Bug Mine Tour

Along the way, I have a very special stop to make.

California gold country used to have number of old mines open for tours.

Gradually, nearly every one closed due to inability to get liability insurance.

It seems that the old tunnels just have too many hazards.

I finally managed to track down one that is still open, the Gold Bug Mine near Placerville.





The Gold Bug Mine is what was called a gypsy mine.

It was a very small vein of gold worked by miners between other jobs.

It never produced much gold, but it was enough to survive when no other work could be found.

Various miners explored this hole in the ground for nearly fifty years.





Tours of the mine are self-guided.

Everyone must wear a hard hat while in the mine, because rocks and other hazards stick out everywhere.

Visitors also get an audio tour that explains the various parts of the mine.

The tour is rather hokey, voiced by a “ghost” that supposedly emanates from the walls of the mine.

Although the audio is highly informative, this aspect made it feel like a theme park exhibit.

Of course, banging the hard hat into something (which WILL happen at least once) brings it right back to real life.





The mine consists of a long main tunnel with short vertical shafts above.

The miners followed a vein of quartz into the hillside, which contained gold.

When the vein spread out, they followed it with the vertical shafts.

One shaft was drilled for ventilation.

The shaft looks just like a cave passage, except for the regularly shaped walls and lack of stalactites and stalagmites.





Wooden timbers hold up parts of the shaft.

Although they are the classic stereotype of a mine from western movies, they were actually only used where the rock was too soft to be self supporting.

Every timber was cut by hand, a significant amount of work.

They fit together without nails.





Mines in the Sierra were notoriously muddy.

Water seeps through cracks in the rock whenever it rains.

This showed on the tour, in that parts of the mine dripped even though it hadn’t rained in two weeks.

Plan accordingly when choosing clothes for the tour 😊





The last part of the tour shows how the miners got the rock out of the mine.

After blasting it from the walls, they shoveled it into a cart.

They then rolled the cart to the entrance and down to the stamp mill.

Some mines used mules or miniature trains to haul the ore; here they just pushed the cart down the hillside.





For fans of Loony Tunes, this mine has a special detail.

This mine was ultimately electrified, including lights.

At this mine those lights are powered by a transformer near the entrance to the mine.

It was made, believe it or not, by Acme Electric!

Let’s hope it’s more reliable than the stuff Wile E Coyote always bought 😊

Stamp Mill

The ore from the mine was sent to a nearby stamp mill to extract the gold.

I saw a model of a large one at the Lead Mining Museum (see Gold Fever).

The stamp mill for this mine is restored and runs, the only working mill in California.

The rock is dumped on a belt which runs under a series of pistons.

The pistons rise above the belt and then slam down to break the rock into powder.

They rotate as they rise to prevent ore from sticking.

The mill is powered by a water wheel.

When fully operational, the pounding was so loud it could be heard throughout the area.





The powder from the belt collects in vats, which are then mixed with a slew of toxic chemicals including both cyanide and mercury.

The chemicals react differently with the quartz (which is made of silicon) and the gold.

The vat is then heated to make the silicon compounds float to the top.

This is skimmed off.

The remainder is mixed with yet more toxins and heated again, ultimately separating out both pure gold dust and the mercury.

The latter is normally captured and fed back into the process.

Needless to say, the entire extraction procedure produces a great deal of toxic pollution.





After the mine, I kept driving south.

I ultimately found myself in the town of Sonora.

During the gold rush, Sonora competed with Columbia as the largest town in the region.

Unlike Columbia, Sonora managed to survive after the gold ran out.

It has a pretty downtown of brick Victorian buildings that can be a nightmare to drive through.

I stopped in Sonora for gas.

For some reason, gas prices climb steadily heading east through the Sierra Nevada in California.

Gas near National Parks is always expensive, but prices here continue to climb even away from the parks.

Near the Mojave Desert, gas prices become the most expensive in the country.

Knowledgeable visitors always top off before heading east of highway 49, and Sonora is the last large town I’ll see on the highway.

Driving to Yosemite

A little south of Sonora, I headed east into the heart of the Sierra.

This meant yet another experience on the Priest Grade, the steep twisty road up to Groveland I saw almost two weeks ago (see The Golden State).

As noted back then, the road was the replacement for an even more difficult climb.

Well, I saw a roadway marked ‘Old Priest Grade’ and had to see what it is.

I first passed a sign with the long list of vehicles prohibited on this road (big trucks, RVs, anything with hazardous chemicals, and much else).

That was followed by a sign to turn off air conditioning, and then one to put the car in low gear.

The road then shrunk to a width of two cars, reached the side of a ravine, and up it went.

Unlike its modern replacement, this one climbs steep and steady with no switchbacks whatsoever.

The road gains its elevation with no pretense or mercy.

Since many eastern highways are laid out like this, I felt I was home!





Past Groveland, the highway follows the Tuolumne Canyon, high above the most intense raft ride in the United States.

This view looked very familiar, since I had seen it hiking in two weeks earlier.

One spot on the road has an overlook right at the edge, called the “End of the World”.

The name is appropriate.





The road finally pulls away from the Tuolumne and enters a sea of pine trees.

The road rolls over hills with those pine trees as the only view.

After the golden hills of gold country and the majesty of King Canyon (see Granite Majesty), this is rather anticlimactic.

It became really disappointing when I finally saw the entrance sign for Yosemite National Park.

This park has a worldwide reputation for containing some of the most dramatic scenery on earth.

I finally get here, and all I can see are pine trees!





As it turns out, the grand scenery sits in the middle of the park, rather far from the entrance.

The road passes through yet more rolling hills with pine trees.

It passes a pair of gas stations, with prices over a dollar per gallon more than what I paid in Sonora.

The road then enters the spot of a former forest fire on a mountain side, and the view improves quite a bit.

It now shows a view of a distant V-shaped valley surrounded by granite peaks.

This is still not what I have been promised though.

The sun set in this stretch.

Yosemite Valley

From that first view the road drops through the burn area toward the valley.

It turns a corner and passes through a tunnel.

On the far side, the view just appears.

Yosemite Valley has appeared in so many photographs over the years it has become iconic.

I thought I knew what it looks like.

In reality, no photograph, no matter how skillful, can capture the majesty of that first view in real life.

Huge granite walls, vertical cliffs of almost unreal size, tower over the narrow valley below.

A human shrinks to nothingness next to this landscape.

Photos are so inadequate to capture how it feels that I didn’t bother taking any.





For anyone sensitive to low light contrast (including me), seeing Yosemite Valley in moonlight provides an unexpected treat.

The granite cliffs glow light gray, clearly visible against the black of surrounding pine trees and mountains.

Early in the drive, an unbelievably large cliff appears on the left, as tall as a 23 story building.

Little red lights glow on its face.

The cliff is El Capitan, the largest single piece of granite in the world, and the lights are rock climbers.

Soon afterward a rushing sound appears on the right.

Looking up reveals a tall waterfall reflecting the moonlight, Bridal Veil Falls.

Further down the road passes three pyramid peaks close together, the Three Brothers.

Soon afterward, I reached Yosemite Village at the east end of the valley, which has enough light to wash out the view.





I ate dinner at Camp Curry at the eastern end of Yosemite Village.

The village is Yosemite’s first tourist facility, founded by David and Jennie Curry in 1899.

The main lodge contains a restaurant (sadly closed), a pizza joint, an ice cream parlor, and a bar.

I got a manageable dinner between the middle two, although an expensive one.

The ice cream was quite good.

All three places were absolutely packed.

Yosemite Valley is hugely popular any time of year that snow isn’t falling (and can get crowded even then).

Anywhere popular in this National Park feels like a theme park due to the crowds (see So This is What A View Looks Like).

Yosemite Lodging Absurdity

That incredible popularity means that the lodging situation in the valley is downright absurd.

The very best lodging, the Ahwahnee Hotel, is the best in the entire National Park system.

Quality very quickly drops from there, without a matching drop in price.

A descent example is the tent cabins at Camp Curry.

These consist of a canvas tent over a wooden frame, with electric lights.

These cabins rent for over a hundred dollars a night!

The cabins are still a step up from Housekeeping Camp, which consists of cinderblock shelters with canvas roofs.

These spots, which make an army barracks look luxurious, rent for over EIGHTY DOLLARS a night.

Reread those last five sentences until it sinks in.





With those kinds of prices, campsites are the only descent value in the valley.

There are remarkably few for the number of people that visit.

The reason is conservation, to minimize the impact on the environment.

The Park Service has removed a number in the last few decades due to unstable cliffs and flood prone creeks.

While the sites are quite pretty, they are not really comfortable.

People are packed pretty close together and noise carries everywhere.

Bring earplugs.





The situation won’t be changing any time soon, because demand is so high.

During the summer, all lodging sells out within minutes of becoming available.

For campsites, it happens in SECONDS.

For spring and fall dates, it takes all of a few hours.

Demand is high enough that even winter holidays sell out.





Getting a spot in the valley is so tough that people have developed specific strategies.

All lodging is reserved in blocks of dates.

For campsites, the block is a month long.

Each block becomes available for reservation a certain amount of time in advance, which varies per lodging.

One common strategy is to try to reserve the same dates at different lodgings, which have different dates they become available.

If more than one succeeds, keep one and cancel the rest.

Some lodgings have become wise to this tactic and now charge cancellation fees.

The most high tech strategy I know of is to measure to the second the time between placing a call to the reservation center and being put in the queue, and then call that many seconds before the wanted block becomes available.

For what it’s worth, demand in late September is low enough that I managed to secure a spot in Upper Pines Campground by calling within an hour of first availability.





To get my site permit tonight, I had to sign a bear contract, the same document as Sequoia National Park (see Wide Trees).

Unlike Sequoia, the office showed the “bear video” while waiting.

The video shows footage shot through night scopes of bears breaking into cars and campsites.

While Yosemite black bears are no more aggressive than their Sequoia cousins, this park has many more overnight campers, which means sloppier ones just by the law of averages.

Yosemite has more human problems regarding bears (a more accurate description than “bear problems”, since the bears are not the problem) than any other National Park.

The video is the park’s way of scaring people into following the rules.

---

Photos

Gold Bug Mine
Entrance to a genuine California gold mine

Mine tunnel
Most of the mine looks like this. Remember to duck!

Quartz vein
What miners were seeking, a quartz vein potentially containing gold

Mine timbers
These are seen far more often in movies than real life

Mine Cart
Used to haul gold bearing ore to the stamp mill

Stamp Mill
Restored stamp mill at the Gold Bug mine

Piston driver
metal hooks that rotate and lift the pistons in the stamp mill

Stamp mill pistons
Close up of how gold ore was crushed

Chemical bottles
A small handful of historic bottles used to hold the toxic chemicals needed for gold refining

Priest Grade
The Don Pedro Reservior with the mountain ridge containing the Priest Grade behind it

Tuolumne River canyon
The Tuolumne River canyon, containing the toughest commercial raft trip in the United States. The photo is from the End of the World overlook