USA 2006: Las Vegas & California
(continued)
June 22nd:
From Chester, we drive southeast through the Plumas National Forest and alongside the Feather River (above left) to
Quincy. This pleasant town nestles on the northernmost reaches of the Sierra Nevada mountains. We stop at Quincy for coffee at the
Courthouse Cafe - a nearby mural bears witness to the area's Indian culture
We spend the nights of June 22nd and 23rd at Truckee - fifteen miles to the northwest of Lake Tahoe. Truckee retains a fair amount
of its late-nineteenth-century wooden architecture that appeared as a backdrop in Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush. Two miles west
of Truckee, surrounded by alpine cliffs of silver-grey granite, Donner Pass and Donner Lake (above) were the sights of one of the
most gruesome and notorious tragedies of early Californian history - in 1846, pioneers were trapped by winter snows and were forced
to eat the bodies of their dead companions; of the original party of ninety-one, only some thirty or so survived. A statue
in the Donner Memorial State Park honours all the pioneers who made the hazardous trek west in the 1840s
June 23rd: Lake Tahoe sits placidly in a dramatic alpine bowl just east of the Sierra Nevada Ridge. Surrounded by granite peaks and
a thickly-wooded forest, it is one of the highest, deepest (over 1600-feet), cleanest, and coldest lakes in the world. The lake straddles
the border between California and Nevada
A cruise across Lake Tahoe aboard the MS Dixie II takes us from Zephyr Cove into Emerald Bay (right), the site of Vikingsholm, an
authentic reproduction of a Viking castle
The Gondola aerial tram takes us up to the Heavenly skiing and snowboarding area where there are wonderful views across Lake Tahoe
June 24th:
In the 1880s, the gold-mining town of Bodie boasted three breweries, some sixty saloons and dance halls, and a population
of nearly ten thousand. It also had a well-earned reputation as the raunchiest and most lawless mining camp in the West. Contemporary
accounts describe a town that ended each day with a shootout on Main Street, while the firehouse bell, rung once for every year
of a murdered man's life seemed never to stop ringing. The town boomed for just four years, starting in 1877, when a fairly poor existing
mine collapsed, exposing an enormously rich vein. Within four years this was the second largest town in California after San Francisco.
By 1885, a drop in the price of gold made mining largely unprofitable. The town dwindled and then was virtually destroyed by two disastrous
fires, the last in 1932. The Ghost Town was taken over by the State of California in the early 1960s