We spent a total of 4 days and nights at the Walden B&B in Green Valley, CA—3 meals/day inclusive. They even throw in a dog for your personal enjoyment. The best part—totally free! Daily weather, fire, and air quality reports with analysis included. Each report presented thoughtfully by a NFS employee incorporating an historical context. Who said there aren’t any bargains in CA?
Struggles’ cousin, Karen, and her husband, Pete, are both foresters by training and trade. Karen is a NFS employee who prepares long term planning based upon scientific analysis of environmental impact. If the forest service plans on doing anything, it gets thoroughly analyzed beforehand. The only drawback is that politicians and outside groups get in the way of implementation which dilutes the science and injects other agendas into the process. In other words, the NFS hands are tied the majority of the time when dealing with long term strategies.
Karen had sat in on the meeting when the decision to close the forests in CA was made. With over 2 million acres on fire, fire fighting resources are stretched thin. The NFS can’t afford to pull fire resources to save people trapped in the forest. Until the fire situation gets better (maybe a little rain to help) it’s just not worth the risk of allowing people into the back country. This translates to “our hike is on hold” until the forest closure is rescinded or expires. The current order expires at midnight on 9/14/20. With any luck, it won’t be renewed or will be reduced in scope to not include all forests in the state.
Until then, we wait…and eat. Karen and Pete had originally planned on picking us up in Belden Thursday morning and taking us to the other side of the North Complex Fire and hike with us for a few days. With the winds we experienced the last couple days of hiking, the North Complex Fire grew from 80,000 acres to over 250,000 acres making it one of the 5 largest fires in CA history. Given a choice of hiking and burning, or waiting until it’s safe, we can wait.
In the mean time, we explored the foothills of the Central Valley northeast of Sacramento. Karen already had the time off scheduled and Pete’s work in the forest has been postponed until the fire situation improves. This area was part of the gold rush. We started off exploring the Empire Mine area which is now a state park. The museum portion of the park is closed (thanks Covid) but we were able to explore some of the trails and gleen what history we could. Karen also shared some of her tree and plant knowledge with us.
Karen is also an amazing artist. She paints in oils and showed us several of the paintings she has done over the years. About 15 years ago, she decided she wanted to go bigger, so she took a mural painting class. She has been involved with painting several murals in the Grass Valley area since.
Grass Valley was not an area we expected to find in California. We should have. California is so big, you can find anything you would want to find. The area is a mixed conifer forest area nestled between the Central Valley and the Sierra Mountains. It gets a bit more than the national average for precipitation, but that comes mostly in the spring rains and the snow of winter. It’s fairly dry right now. Too dry for our liking with a couple million acres already on fire.
The North Complex Fire never did make it into Belden, but it would have been a pretty boring place to be stuck, especially since the area was under an evacuation warning and there wasn’t any power. We were very lucky that Karen agreed to rescue us along with Struggles and Charcoal.
After we discovered the forest closure, we all did some soul searching. Ultimately, Struggles and Charcoal decided their hike was over for this year. They decided to rent a car and drive up to Yellowstone National Park and explore it for a couple of weeks. Bunny and I decided our PCT hike was also done for this year…kind of. Instead, Charcoal and Struggles dropped us off in Truckee on their way to Yellowstone.
The total forest closure in CA was set to expire on 9/14. Since there aren’t any fires in Tahoe, we were hopeful we could begin hiking again on the 15th. The plan was to hike down to Tahoe City on the PCT and then switch to the Tahoe Rim Trail. In reality, the PCT and TRT overlay about 60 miles…since we’ll eventually return to the PCT at Belden and hike to Walker Pass (just under 650 miles), we’ll get to repeat those 60 miles on a future trip.
We made it to Truckee on Sunday, 9/13. We booked 2 nights in the local hostel, Redlight. It had the feel of a former brothel that now sells ice cream. We spent Monday just relaxing and eating (we assumed we were still hiking at that point).
Tuesday morning, we got up with the expectation that the closure order had expired. We went to have one last town breakfast before catching a ride up to Donner Pass. Like an idiot, I checked the forest closure page one last time to verify we were “good to go.” A new order had been issued for an additional week of closure of all CA Forests. We were so close!
With an additional day, we had time enough time to check out the story behind the Donner Party and the tragedy that befell them. I was unaware that the majority of the people trapped for the winter were actually children. Of the 89 people that started the trip, over 40 died at Donner Pass just west of Truckee. Surviving adults claimed that they fed the children parts of their dead companions but they, themselves, didn’t partake of the human flesh. Some of the surviving children, in a short sighted attempt at regaining anonymity, changed their names to Dahmer in the hopes that they would not, forever be associated with cannibalism. It almost worked except for one great great grandchild (don’t bother fact checking this).
We booked another night while we figured out a new plan. It’s clear, the PCT is off the table. We decided to rent a car for a week and go explore possible home locations for when we finish hiking (not this year, but in the future). If the closure gets renewed again, we will change our plane reservations and call it quits for this year. For now, we drive.
EFG
Glad you stop for the year; just too dangerous to continue. I spent a couple of days in Grass Valley about 1.5 years back on a business trip. I wanted to go back because I didn’t see the mines due to business appointments. Maybe this is a good place for an RV trip in the future. Thanks for the tour.
We just stopped the PCT. We are starting the Tahoe Rim Trail today and will be posting on that soon. We’re going to take our time on it. Grass Valley is definitely worth a road trip.