A walk with Lenny on the Champion Mine ditch trail for about 1.5 miles. That’s about all he can do now but for that short hike, he’s sniffing and loping along with us.
Wildlife we saw was a banana slug and a mule deer
The phone is there to show the size of the slug
We took Lenny back to the RV to rest and we drove the windy, twisty road to Malakof Diggins State Park.
When we arrived at the park, there were 2 rangers that gave us a tour of the preserved town. So much of history. When the town was at its heyday, there were around 2,00 people living and working there.
The bar inside the saloon. A fun fact. When a customer drank too much and didn’t have a place to spend the night, they could “hangover” the bar for the night … where the term hangover started.
This was their pharmacy.
There was a general store that had just about anything they would need, including a bathtub for sale
We took a hike around the “Diggins” to see the huge cliffs created by the mighty streams of water, washing away entire mountains of gravel to find the gold.
They used this water canon to blow streams of water into the mountains to find gold.
The following is from their website:
The park was created in 1965 by concerned citizens to preserve the exciting and controversial story of our country’s largest hydraulic gold mining operation that devastated the area from the mid-1800s.
Malakoff Diggins is the site of our country’s first environmental law issued by the federal government against the North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company (Sawyer Decision) to curtail the release of the mud, gravel, and debris that clogged streams and major rivers from the foothills down to San Francisco Bay
The controversy was the effects of the hydraulic mining on the environment, sending run off into the American River and the Sacramento River. Even with the Sawyer Decision, it took many years to clean up the land and the rivers.
For dinner we went to Three Forks.
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