Sawyers Bar, California

When I was living in Southern California, and still in my late teens and early twenties, a friend and I would camp sometimes at Sawyers Bar and Forks of Salmon, California. Originally a California Gold Rush settlement, they were accessed through a little mountain road from Yreka.

I haven't been there in more than forty years, but Sawyers Bar was a little town with a population of sixty, while Forks of Salmon had about a hundred people. There was a park along the Salmon River in Sawyers Bar. Although a state park, there were no rangers stationed there.

I don't know of more than one road going in and out, and it was a narrow one. Meeting a car required someone pulling off the road in order to let the other vehicle by. There were cutoffs in the mountain cliffs every so often, for that purpose. Rarely would you meet a car going in or out of Sawyers Bar and, when you did, it was customary to stop and talk. Seldom would there be anyone other than us camping in the park.

At that time, there were no stores in Sawyers Bar. There was one building that looked like it might have been a store at one time, but it hadn't been opened for a while, from the looks of it. There was a store at Forks of Salmon, a few miles to the west, I think it was.

There was nothing to do there, other than to be in nature. We did pan for gold along the river during one trip, and gathered a couple of mayonnaise jars full of ore. We knew that we had two different kinds of glitter, and rightly figured that we had both pyrite (fool's gold) and real gold in the mix, but if it was left to me, I'd have thrown the gold away and kept the pyrite, as it was much prettier. I keep that on a mantel for several years until, at one point, I realized it was no longer there, so someone stole it.

It was a quiet vacation, which was always nice, particularly since there's nothing quiet about Orange County. The locals, what few there were, pretty much ignored us. They weren't unfriendly at all, but that was about as far as it went.

During my last trip there, we drove to the store at Forks of Salmon, and the storekeeper was downright rude to us. That seemed strange, until we drove a little further along past Forks of Salmon, and saw that a mini-gold rush was going on along the river, with tents set up along the banks of the river, and hordes of people drinking beer and panning for gold. None of them went as far east as Sawyers Bar, so our stay there was as peaceful as ever, but I imagine the locals in Forks of Salmon were fed up with the outsiders.

During one of our trips there, we decided to go back on a little dirt trail. It wasn't a road, at all, leading north from Sawyers Bar Road near Jackass Gulch.

That was a scary trip because there were places where it no longer even looked like a trail, as we were driving around trees. There were several forks in the trail, when we could even identify a trail, and we drove and drove through a forest, at one point thinking we wouldn't have the gas to get back, and with no idea if we'd ever come out anywhere going forward.

Eventually, we came out, obviously. I can't remember the name of the town or road that we came out on, but we had been traveling northwest, so we came out in a national forest not far from the coast, far west of Yreka, and quite a ways north of Sawyers Bar. The rangers scolded us for leaving the marked roads, but sort of saw some humor in it when we explained that we had driven from Sawyers Bar. We ended up taking the coastal highway back to Orange County.