Travel

SCORCHED LAND Plenty of burn scars from recent fires dot the trip along Highway 50 near Lake Tahoe. PLEASANT WALK Downtown Carson City in Nevada is a quiet city with historical elements and trendy businesses.

Through the snow-covered hills

By TARMO HANNULA

In the first part of this story my wife Sarah and I were exploring Sonora and Columbia in the Sierra foothills in Gold Rush country. The landscape in these small historic towns, including Chinese Camp, Jamestown, Angels Camp, Mokelumne Hill and so on is a bizarre outcropping of stone formations and massive heaps of rocks left exposed by the miners using hydraulic mining in their crazed search for gold. Hydraulic mining called for copious amounts of water, often channeled to the area by lengths of metal and wood flume systems. Ultimately, the water was blasted by heavy duty pumps through hoses and giant nozzles to wash away the soil and send rivers of mud through a system of sluice boxes. Now, the area has an eerie moonscape aspect to it with the thousands of acres of raw rocks standing above the ground surface. You cannot wander through these towns without seeing references to various groups of gold seekers, Italians, Irish, Chinese and scads of Americans from all over. There are umpteen informative plaques scattered about telling of the tremendous work groups of Chinese workers did in creating the roads in record time that led to the mines and over the passes and elsewhere. The Chinese also did a huge amount of the work building the railroads as well.

A fascinating article in the New York Times explores some of this, called “Looking for a Gold-Rush Town Named Chinese Camp,” by Nina Ichikawa. A truly powerful line in her article reads: “But once the Chinese workers’ abundant and grueling labor had built the railroads and laid important groundwork for California agriculture, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, barring their immigration into the country.”

We left Sonora on Highway 49 and climbed further into the Sierra, keeping a close watch on weather reports. Having lived in that area in Twain Harte and Long Barn one winter in the early ‘70s, I learned a few hard lessons about what big snow can do, especially to the roadways. Too many times I watched tourists come charging up in the mountains from the Bay Area with their expensive toys for a little fun in the snow, many unprepared. Suddenly, as though they could outthink Mother Nature, there they were stuck in a snowbank with no chains as night and colder temp’s approached. Many had no gloves and some even wore flip flops. It was quite a show watching them, their limbs frozen with pain, trying to dig out their cars as more snow buried their efforts.

On our trek over Highway 50 we lucked out: The highway report kicked the doors open to us past South Lake Tahoe and over the Nevada line with no chains required. It was on this pass that we got an eyeful of the lovely pines and the rugged terrain heavily draped with fresh snow. It was like driving through a famous painting—the whiteness, the stillness, the calm that snow brings was so refreshing.

We wound our way from Highway 50 to 395 north into Carson City, the place named after the famed explorer Kit Carson.

We found the Hardman House Inn & Suites downtown, which gave us walking access to loads of interesting eateries, cafes and the like. The weather was pleasant and a light coat was all we needed. One thing that struck us about the place was the traffic: there wasn’t any (compared to the grinding bumper-to-bumper traffic that we’ve grown used to in so many California cities).

On our first exploratory outing, we drove through a neighborhood of mostly older homes, taking in the beauty of Craftsman, Victorian, Spanish and other styles. As we came to the edge of a wilderness area, we spotted a herd of about 15 deer. They came right over to us, and as I jokingly called the leader over to my car window, they did just that, almost jutting her head into our car! I quickly rolled up the window, took a couple portraits with my camera and watched as the herd calmly moved on. Maybe that was the welcome wagon to Carson City?

On our next leg, we take in more of Carson City and head north through Virginia City to that big gambling place, Reno.