(I) The upper portion of this route, as will become apparent, is not well mapped, and in any case is subject to change.
(II) While we saw no dangerous wildlife, there are several mountain-lion-warning signs along the route, and it is unlikely that Rattlesnake Bar received its name for no good reason. Watch where you put your hands, and don't try to sneak up on the wildlife.
(III) Probably the most common shrub along the route is poison oak. Most people I know claim to be immune to it. If you are one of these, you may get plenty of chances to test your immunity if you don't stick to the middle of the trail -- where there is a trail.
(IV) On the best of days, it is warm in the canyon ... and most days are not the best. Be sure to carry plenty of liquid to drink. There are lots of attractive little streams coming down from the north side; be aware that they come down from the city of Auburn, and may not be safe to drink. Water from the North Fork of the American River is probably safe, but usually involves a side trip, with a climb down and up of at least 100 vertical feet, to reach.
(V) This walk is 12 to 15 miles long. Start early.
I was less than enthused about spending a day walking along the north shore of a lake, but I noticed that if you picked up the trail near the northeast end of the lake, at Rattlesnake Bar, you could follow it up into the lower canyon of the North Fork of the American River, from which it climbed out into the town of Auburn. I didn't particularly want to climb up the sunny slope of the canyon, so I looked for other alternatives. My USGS topographic map of the area showed an "Old Railway Grade" running along the north side of the canyon; I figured that this might make an acceptable alternative. So, on a sunny March morning in 1974, I set off from Rattlesnake Bar.
There were relatively minor problems along the route. At one point on the Pioneer Express Trail I had to work my way through a nasty little swamp, over part of which someone had kindly laid down planks. Not far beyond this, I crossed a wooden bridge over a raging creek that apparently carried fallen trees and logs down from rural farmlands above. Later, when the Pioneer Express Trail started to climb and I deviated off it to the right, I found myself in the middle of the work going on to build the huge dam that was intended to eventually flood these beautiful canyons; my being there was highly illegal, although none of the construction people seemed to care -- the few I saw merely waved a greeting to me. A bit of bushwhacking upslope eventually brought me to the old railway grade, and from that point it was a stroll -- with some minor contours along made paths around the ends of side canyons from which the railway's trestles had been removed -- up to the junction with highway 49.
In the intervening years, I hadn't seen most of that route; about once a year we come down to highway 49 and hike back down the canyon a mile and a half to visit a lovely little waterfall. In those intervening years, the "old railway grade" at that upper end has become part of the California Riding and Hiking Trail, with plenty of walkers, joggers and equestrians (and the occasional bicyclist) traveling along it. But the section below the waterfall was terra incognita to me.
So on the date given above I and my son David decided to retrace my route of 22 years earlier. The results, as you will see, were decidedly mixed.
Follow Federal Highway 50 east from Sacramento some 15 miles to the Hazel Avenue exit. Turn north (left) on Hazel and go three miles to Madison. Turn right on Madison and proceed through the town of Orangevale, past the junction of Madison and Greenback, and down a steep hill past the Negro Bar picnic ground; at the bottom of the hill, turn left on the Old Auburn-Folsom Road.
Your route now takes you up a moderate grade past the entrance to Folsom Dam and through an area that in the last 20 years has changed from arguably rural to inarguably suburban. In about ten miles you will pass the exit to Horseshoe Bar. From this point, keep close watch, because in another 3-4 miles you will reach the turnoff on the right to Rattlesnake Bar. Turn off here and go downhill about three miles to the entrance to the boat launching area (the ranger booth is usually boarded up). Keep to the left and watch for a California Riding and Hiking Trail post (with a yellow bootprint and horseshoe) to your left. This is the start of the walk.
Where the person meeting you will wait depends on where you plan to come out. If you think you can get to the end of this walk, they should drive back up to the Old Auburn-Folsom Road and follow it on east to the town of Auburn, from which they will descend south some three miles on state highway 49. At the bottom of the canyon, just beyond a bridge across the American River, right at the junction of the North and Middle Forks, there is a small parking area. This is what you should be aiming for.
There are no signs along this route; the trailhead is not signed as such, and there is no parking space at this point. An alternative is to go down to the parking area for the boat ramp and take one of the unmarked trails above the little rest room, which will eventually lead you up the hill to the trail. The junction is not marked, either.
If you start out from the marked but unsigned trailhead, you'll walk uphill for a minute through the shade of digger pines and ceanothus, to emerge shortly onto an open hillside area that looks out over the road to the boat launching area, the northeast arm of the lake, and the peninsular area that separate the northeastern and southeastern arms. In this particular year, Folsom Lake is quite low; though other California reservoirs are full to 90% of capacity or more, Folsom is at less than 40%, largely because of an accident with a spillway door last summer.
Beyond the hillside you enter an open wood mainly of oak, with plenty of poison oak. Down around the poison oak stems, you can also find miner's lettuce, a little plant whose single leaf completely surrounds its stem, from which a small white flower protrudes above. The leaf is good to eat, if you happen to be hungry this early in the day.
You pass a bulldozed area of red soil on the right, and find yourself above the boat launching area. Here's where the paths from above the toilet will join you. Watch for bracken shoots on the left.
We met our first, but not last, horse party here; it consisted of a man, woman and two little girls on Lippizaner wannabes, all headed east, the direction we were going. Etiquette for meeting such parties: (1) stand on the downhill side of the path, and be quiet as they go by; (2) from this point on, be very careful where you put your feet.
From here you come up over a little crest and get your first good view up the canyon, through the trees. Those trees, while mainly digger pine and oak, from now on will also include madrone -- easily recognizable by its red woody stem and lack of bark. The digger pine, by the way, is distinguished from the more common pines of higher elevations by its generally disheveled look. The Digger pine appears to be a poor relation. (Point to check: is this by any chance the same tree that John Muir refers to as the "Sabine pine"?) Digger pines are supposed to grow in the ecozone between 500 and 2000 feet, but I have seen lone specimens in the American River bottom near Sacramento, where the difference from sea level is not enough to feed a cockroach.
By and large, this end of the Pioneer Express Trail is not particularly distinguished. It wanders over low crests and into shallow valleys, through open woods and over brushy grassland. You get many good views across to the peninsula and its grassy meadows. At one point you will descend with a vertical, shady rock wall to your left. Pay particular attention to the tiny ferns growing out of the crevices. I didn't test them out this time, but when I was here in 1974 I noticed that they looked very similar to a kind that grew in a rocky area in back of my parents' home in Oregon, so I pulled one up, cleaned the dirt off the root, and chewed on it. Sure enough, these were "licorice fern", so-called because their root tasted sharply of licorice -- before the sugar is added. If you go this way, I don't recommend that you repeat the experiment -- this is the only place in California I've noticed such ferns (though there are probably others), and if too many people pull out a fern to chew its root, the wall will soon be denuded (this is why I did not repeat the experiment this time).
Shortly beyond the wall, the trail is rerouted, up to the left. Several switchbacks carry you up the hill a hundred feet; then, after about 200 feet of level walking, you drop back down through a couple of switchbacks and rejoin the old trail.
By this time I was starting to get a little antsy, because I hadn't run into the marsh that had given me trouble the last time I was here. Hope springs eternal, however, and I felt that I was getting close when we came to a little wooden bridge over a bramble-filled canyon. Next to the west end of the bridge was a stone-encircled pool with water bubbling up from a pipe -- apparently a horse trough. The bridge, from a sign on the west end, appeared to be part of a restoration project undertaken by Boy Scout Troop 248 in September, 1994, apparently under the leadership of one Paul R. Perkins, Jr. (no "in memoriam").
We crossed the bridge, but the swamp didn't appear; instead we came to a lake -- rather, a very large pond, bordered with lots of nice reeds, and with a few ducks swimming on its placid waters -- about which I had no memory whatsoever. We followed the longer horse trail around the south side rather than the shorter foot trail around the north, and found a beautiful little grassy verge right at the south end, a sunny spot for a picnic had it been time to eat yet.
On the northeast shore of this lake the foot trail rejoined the horse trail in a grove of digger pines. The new trail passed just to the east of what appeared to be a campground of some sort -- "use subject to registration" the sign said, and I don't think it was referring to the primitive toilet beside which it was erected. There were three somewhat decrepit picnic tables of standard variety, and flat areas quite suitable for modern dome tents. I don't remember any of this from 1974.
By this time we had come about three miles, and I wondered how many weekenders would be willing to pack in here from the parking areas at Rattlesnake Bar. Answer: not necessary. In only a couple of hundred yards we hit a paved road that had also not been there in 1974. This was also where we found our first warning sign about mountain lions.
The pavement ended at this point, but the trail followed a continuation of the road, now gravelled, to the right and then curving around to the left, along the estuary of the white-foaming stream I remembered from my earlier trip. Where it led soon became obvious -- a gravel parking lot, in the middle of which stood an untended building marked "PG&E Newcastle Powerhouse". Around on the north side of the building you could hear its powerful turbine generator humming along.
We followed a shady rock cliff north from the powerhouse for a hundred yards or so, to reach a wooden bridge over a remarkably shrunken stream. Why it was shrunken became obvious from the other side. Somewhere above the bridge, most of the stream was being diverted into a penstock and sent down into the powerhouse to drive the turbine -- and then poured back into the lower end of the creek from a slot below the powerhouse. All this was made clear from an informational bulletin board ("A Century of Hydroelectric Power") standing by the trail on the east side of the creek, directly across from the powerhouse. This "stream", by the way, is no stream at all, but the outflow of something called the "South Canal". It can be seen from the Old Auburn-Folsom Road, across which it flows over its very own bridge. The powerhouse, the same bulletin board informs us, was erected in 1986.
After this little excursion upstream, across and then downstream again, the trail once more turns east, paralleling the lakeshore, crossing open, brushy hillside again, with scattered live oaks. There are some impressive granitic boulders -- typical of the Sierra -- to the left, and below, to the right, the ruins of an old building. You'll also get your first sight of an old Gold-Rush-era ditch that parallels the trail off to the right.
By this time you will be approaching the end of Folsom Lake -- though it may extend further up the canyon when they get the spillway fixed and raise its level somewhat. Gravel bars appear out in the water as the distance between your shore and the peninsula gets smaller and smaller. Along here, where lake meets river, may be a good place to stop and have lunch, in the shade of one of the little coppices off to the right of and downslope from the trail.
You'll contour in and out of a couple of little canyons beyond this point; one of them, with water flowing through a culvert, is a mass of brambles; another, across whose stream you must step, has some really giant ferns growing down in the bottom below you. You may also hear some unaccustomed sounds -- the flow of the North Fork as it races through the canyon into the lake, and (in our case) gunfire from above us to the north -- somebody target shooting, apparently.
You'll come out high above the river beyond this point, with good views back towards the lake. Here, even in early spring, poppies are growing -- I saw no others along the trail.
The section of trail here goes steeply up and down, and is quite rocky -- watch your step as you stride along it or you may take a spill. You can recognize this particular stretch of canyon by the deep tributary canyon opposite you on the peninsula side. We also found lots and lots of grasshoppers, and a dragonfly or two. I should probably also mention the huge numbers of butterflies we saw along the route, sampling the nectar of little purple flowers growing by the trail; for the most part they were black, with yellow and orange spots along the backsides of their wings.
Downslope, you'll see a concrete retaining wall of some sort and, just beyond this, a huge gravel bar alongside the river covered with a tundra-like grassy plain. It looks like a great place to set up camp, but I suspect that that thin layer of grass covers a lot of rocky lumps... You'll also see portions of the old ditch, mentioned earlier, with its moss-covered downslope rock lining.
For the next mile you descend through shady woodland, with white water riffling below you in the river, and then you contour through pine forest. There are several side canyons that you have to cross, usually containing both brambles and water; then you follow an open, level shelf some 50 feet above the river level. Just beyond here, you can see where the river breaks temporarily into three major channels, plummeting in short, shallow cataracts past boulder-strewn islands. At this point you will turn and climb steeply uphill along a stony, rutted road.
The road climbs steeply upward for about 1/4 mile, reaching a level shelf along which you turn right, just below a steep, carefully graded and terraced slope. The shelf continues level for a distance, then climbs up to a multiway road junction.
You want to note three different routes here, all of them indicated by Parks and Recreation signposts as correct. The first is a trail leading steeply up through the forest. The second is a gravelled road, leading off and to the right at a slight upward grade; this is the one along which we started. The third is a paved road leading down toward the canyon, with a huge sign stating that hikers, horses, &c are strengt verboten.
After somewhat more than a quarter mile on the gravel road we met a group of ladies coming downhill who told us that to get into the canyon we would have to go down the paved road, and that the sign banning us from doing so was long out of date. So we decided to try that instead. At this point, I suspect that the proper route would have been to continue as we were going, for reasons I'll make clear further down.
We retraced our steps to the multiway road junction and started down into the canyon, past a slope (on our left) completely covered with young madrone trees. In roughly 1/2 mile we had reached the bottom -- and I do mean "bottom", for this was originally the bed of the North Fork, which twenty years ago was diverted into a tunnel below the southern shore of the river to make way for dam construction. Here we were in the middle of the nearly abandoned site of the Auburn High Dam.
A historical excursion: Folsom Dam was constructed in the 1950s primarily as a flood control mechanism -- Sacramento has been flooded regularly ever since it was founded back in the middle of the 19th century. By the 1970's the government had decided to add yet another dam to the chain, the High Dam below Auburn, which would flood the canyons of the North and Middle Forks of the American River to a depth of several hundred feet. Environmentalists protested this as unnecessary, and there were also some safety concerns -- what would happen to Folsom Dam if the Auburn Dam ever broke and released all its water at once? (Answer: Those of us who live in the Bay Area could stand on the bluffs over the Carquinez Strait and wave at our relatives from Sacramento as they came floating past!) On the other hand, a lot of private money was invested in the coming lake -- for instance, those who were planning a huge development to be known as Auburn Lake Trails in the relatively pristine hills south of the canyons. The dam was long considered a "done deal," and one memorable year the Rand-McNally Road Atlas even included "Auburn Lake" in its map of California, expecting the lake to be filled during that year. Finally, the straw that broke the camel's back was the discovery of a small but occasionally active earthquake fault only a couple of miles away from the dam site. Work stopped on the dam in the late seventies, and has been in abeyance ever since. There is currently a movement to get it started again, but the increase in construction costs coupled with the current move towards budgetary restrictions make it likely that nothing much will happen for some time to come.
Early in the summer of 1996, the U.S. Congress once again rejected a plan to recommence building the Auburn Dam. As far as I know, though, no funds were allocated for cleaning up any of the mess made during the lifetime of the project, most particularly for bringing the North Fork of the American River back up out of its diversion tunnel.Still, the area had changed considerably since I was here in 1974, when, if I remember correctly, the river still flowed along its accustomed bed. The trail we were on made its way across the desert-like floor of the canyon and up the other side; as nearly as I could tell, it continued on up through the peninsular hills toward the little town of Cool on highway 49. We, on the other hand, made our way up along the canyon bottom, past a huge vertical rock scar that now marked the space up which I had bushwhacked to the old railway grade 22 years earlier, and finally found a steep, steep slope up which we could climb toward what appeared to be the railway grade. We scrambled up this 30-50-degree slope for a couple of hundred vertical feet, and finally reached a six-foot stone wall up which we scrambled, to come out on the shelf.
No doubt that this was the grade. Unfortunately, more of the landscape had changed than that single rock scar. A few hundred yards further east we came to a severe landslip that had taken out the grade. (There's such a landslip near the east end of the trail, as described below.) We followed a made trail up over the upper end of the landslip, then made our way back down a rutted combination trail-and-creekbed to...
Well, to put it shortly, we ended up right back down at the river, well above its diversion point -- definitely not where we were supposed to be. We filled up our water bottle with good river water, whose only failing is that, having tasted it, you are not likely to be satisfied with the tap water in your home ever again. We then made our way back up the trail to the point opposite where the railway grade ran into the landslip and found, to our right ... the old railway grade, heavily overgrown now. We got onto it and headed about a quarter mile east, where we came up against one of those side canyons over which the trestle had been removed. But now another problem arose. This area was obviously not used for hiking, and the made trail I had followed twenty two years earlier was now buried in poison oak, young pine trees, and various other natural phenomena. No way around.
And the final problem: it was now 5:15 p.m., less than an hour before sundown and perhaps an hour and a quarter until darkness. Between the fact that the moon was new so there would be no natural light and the various mountain lion warnings we had seen, I had no great desire to be down in this canyon in an hour. So we went back to the creekbed-trail, made our way up to the top, and continued along it beyond that point, curving back to the west again over the upper part of the dam site and toward any of several exits to the town of Auburn.
At one point, we came to a fairly level, wide and heavily used trail leading off to the east. I suspect that this -- though, like so much else here, unsigned -- was the trail with whose east end I had become familiar, largely because of a number of large hunks of horse trace scattered around on the ground along it. Given an extra hour of light, I would have followed it. But, as far as I am concerned, it currently remains unexplored.
We reached a construction road and curved around to the right, climbing uphill toward a notch in the ridge, passing a power substation on our right, eventually emerging through a trailhead gate onto a suburban street passing $200,000-houses two blocks south of the Old Auburn-Folsom Road, perhaps five minutes after the sun dropped below the horizon. Three blocks down that road we refreshed ourselves at a 7-11 and called my daughter's home to leave a message for my wife where she could pick us up -- which she did, some 20 minutes later.
Park your car just north of the bridge. Notice the huge slabs of concrete scattered along the river's shore; those come from the huge flood of 1963, when the Hellhole Dam (at that time not completed) broke, and an eighty-foot wall of water swept down the Middle Fork and took out the old highway bridge.
Cross the new highway bridge and turn right, past a tall rock spire, onto a trail leading along the south side of the river, some 50 feet above it. In a couple of hundred yards you will come to the old railway bridge, now used for hikers and equestrians. Cross the river back to the north side and continue west along the old railway grade. In short order you will have to climb up a made trail over a huge landslip that took out much of the railway grade in the bad winter of 1982-1983. Soon you'll be back on the grade again.
Stroll along the grade, contouring through two side canyons from which the trestles were removed. After the first side canyon, notice the fisherman's trail leading down toward the river. There are a lot of nice rocks down below, on which residents of this part of California often sun themselves on nice days. Sun all of themselves.
Anecdote: back in the mid-seventies, my father and I went hiking through here one morning, and took this fisherman's trail down to the river. When we reached the rocks, we found two young ladies enjoying the weather au naturel. My father was terribly flustered. "Should we be here?" he whispered to me, as though this were not public land. My response: "If it doesn't bother them, it doesn't bother me." Nevertheless, we both made a great show of studied disinterest, keeping our eyes well averted.Another anecdote: Some eight years ago, we brought an Esperanto-speaking woman friend from China, who had recently arrived here to go to school, up on a hike to our waterfall. As we were returning, near dusk, a gentlemen emerged ahead of us from this same trail. He was dressed in an Aussie-style hat, knapsack, walking shoes, and a marvelous tan. Have you ever seen genuine culture shock???
Beyond the second canyon, the grade runs straight for some little distance, with a very high dike on the river side; you can get a good view if you climb up and walk along the rim. The third side canyon you come to will be the site of the waterfall, which plummets into a little pool back among the rocks, and the old tree just below the trail -- I think it is a ficus, but I am not sure. It is an idyllic place, and, IMHO, home to what the Romans called a genius loci and the Japanese Shintoists a kami. If you stop here, keep off the trail, because hikers, joggers and horseman come past here on a regular basis.
Well, perhaps not so much now. My wife informed me, after she picked me up, that she found out from a ranger that the old railway bridge, which is part of the trail, was determined to be unsafe and was closed and condemned just one week before our trip. There are other side trails up to highway 49 from the old railway grade, but I don't know where they are located. So even to follow this well-known part of the trail, you'll have to do a little bit of exploring.
Don Harlow
| Map will be added later | Map description will be added later |
Don Harlow <donh@netcom.com>
