Treasure Behind the Iron Door

Old-timers hoped to create fire-safe buildings by using iron doors. This one has worked since 1852. In those days the front door opened onto a stage coach road, rather than a highway, which was no doubt safer.

There was a cloudy sky as we went down the hill from Groveland to Sonora, and it got cold during the time we spent visiting and having a few beers with our new friend Leon, the logger who was planting trees with us because he had no work that week as a logger. He found humor in the fact that he was planting and cutting the same red firs, white firs, Douglas firs and ponderosa pines; earning his living on the same trees at different stages of life.

We weren’t thinking about the weather when we made our pilgrimage to Columbia, the preserve Gold Rush town with no cars allowed, and had one or two beers in a bar we found there, full of wild-looking characters who might have been miners at one time and looked as though they might be miners again. The ground underneath us was holed and undermined in a vast, complex honeycomb, with certain signs of this long-ago excavation visible on the surface, but just a hint.

In the old days, miners would follow the gold veins wherever they led, which resulted in a chaotic, twisted, uncertain series of holes, caves, tunnels and underground dead ends—and topside property disputes more easily settled by gunfire than the courts--as I learned from the locals. By the last years of the 19th century mining was being done by corporations with heavy equipment and crushers capable of breaking up the quartz where the gold was to be found, encased by ancient geology, alternately buried and uncovered by the same forces of erosion and soil movement which allowed James Marshall to discover the handful of flakes in the mill race at Coloma in 1848, the event which led to the rush beginning in 1849.

The days of the independent miner making a quick fortune were short and the making of fortunes was far from assured, since it depended a lot on random chance and any social situation could quickly descend into violence. The literature of Brett Harte originated in these regions, and the legend of Juaquin Murrieta is well-known in the area.

As we headed back up the Old Priest Grade the snow began to fall, a beautiful drifting shower that closed the distances around us until all that was visible was our small white dome of daylight. I was driving a 1972 Duster with dubious tread on at least some of the tires, and on the way down the hill I had needed to stop at the garage in Big Oak Flat to have the brakes worked on. There was doubt in my mind as we ascended the series of steep turns and the snow evolved from scattered and wet to constant and fluffy, but I was glad to be headed up the slope and not down, under the conditions.

It was March, and we had just spent most of two weeks working the dry mountain slopes under clear skies. I hadn’t consulted a radio or newspaper so I had no idea snow was expected. Judging from what I heard later it came as a surprise to a lot of people—a general late-season snowfall that had blanketed much of the Coast Range earlier that day, and was now filtering down to near the thousand-foot level in the Sierras.

My concern of course was the fact that the top of the Priest Grade, whichever option is chosen, comes out on a plateau tilting from a little over 3,000 feet to even higher elevations on the route to Yosemite and its alpine peaks. I don’t do a lot of driving on snow, and the little experience I could call on was enough to make me want to avoid driving on steep, narrow, unfamiliar roads when snow was falling.

However, we had no choice in the matter. We had to get back to our room at the Buck Meadows Lodge so we could be ready to turn out for more tree planting at dawn the next day. That meant we had to get up the grade, and continue a few more miles to Buck Meadow, just past Groveland, where we had done our laundry that morning. Despite the washing, my shirts had all been stained a rusty color by sweat and the dust of our planting sites, where the ground had been scalped and abraded as prep, to give our seedlings the best chance among the native plants which naturally revegetate burned areas.

A year or two earlier massive fires had killed the timber over many square miles, and after salvage logging to remove the standing dead but still intact trunks, the Forest Service had contracted the re-foresting job out to the company we were working for.

The thing we needed, once we were on the plateau in Groveland, was food. Luckily, one thing that has survived from Gold Rush times to the present is California’s oldest bar, the Iron Door Saloon. Located immediately alongside state route 120—dangerously near in fact: one long stride could take one from the front door to the roadway, and a stumble could land one on the center line—the Iron Door provides food and drink, along with live music on the weekends, and is definitely the place to meet people in the area.

The interior is a reliquary of mining memorabilia which hangs suspended from the ceiling and walls, along with a stuffed menagerie of wild beasts ranging from moose and caribou heads to a bobcat frozen in the pose characteristic of their curious advance toward an object of interest. Some standard artwork advertising beers and the like competes for wall space with framed photos of early visits to Yosemite Valley, and curiosities such as the dam-building crew on the slope where Hetch-hetchy dam now stands, amended with informational signage that informs us that hetch-hetchy is a native word for the grass seed that once formed an important part of the native diet. All of it, now, of course, under water which is stored amid magnificence before being piped across California to provide for the city of San Francisco.

Attempts to remove the dam and reclaim the valley many once considered a scenic rival to nearby Yosemite have never really gained momentum, although the idea hasn’t quite died out.

I recalled many of the details of the tree planting trip I made over twenty years ago last weekend when I returned to the Iron Door for the first time since. It had made an impact on me, no doubt owing to the fact that what I ate there was the only decently cooked food I managed to acquire during the three weeks that we spent in the area.

Mornings were spent hurtling down dark Forest Service roads which took us to isolated units which had been marked and prepped in the weeks before. A white refrigerator truck waited for us on the unit, and as we geared up for work the foresters assembled our trees for the day in bags from which we could fill our own treebags, worn on web belts that were uncomfortable under the best of circumstances and became more and more irritating as the day wore on. It was not just the weight, but the dampness, grit, and prickling needles that worked against comfort.

From daylight until late afternoon we moved up and down the dusty hillsides, stopping every few paces to plant. Forest Service inspectors followed closed behind to ensure that we maintained adequate spacing between trees and didn’t resort to famous tree-planter’s tricks like stashing trees in stumpholes or fissures in the earth. They would also dig around the roots of sample trees to make sure we were tucking them in, rather than cramming them in and damaging the young taproots.

We all had the fish and chips this time, although I remember eating cheeseburgers on my earlier visits. I couldn’t tell that anything had changed as far as the food was concerned: nothing special, but what was done was done correctly. The beers on tap were good, which is what matters when there isn’t really another bar for miles in any direction.

Without the traffic in and out of Yosemite it seems unlikely that much business would be done in Groveland, but on both my visits I noticed large groups of tourists coming in to dine. Some particularly festive Japanese men stopped by our table at one point to pour us a drink from their own glasses and propose a toast, probably brought on by excessive feelings of fraternity after spending days among giant mountains and trees.

The thing that seemed most unchanged in the twenty-three years since that tree-planting trip was the curious phenomenon of dollar bills fixed to the ceiling. A rough estimate yields a figure of several thousand dollar bills, nearly all singles, stuck by unknown means to the rough wood ceiling, among the giant bellows and other, less identifiable mining equipment.

People not only seek treasure in the Mother Lode, they sometimes leave it behind.

#Yosemite #hetchhetchy