This view of the northern Sierra includes many of the same natural seasonal progressions in the few other small towns both east and west of Sierra City in Sierra County, but of course with some differences because of elevation and terrain.

Jay Wilcox had another cat skinner that ran Jays old 7E and it was just a winch machine so he needed a choker setter.

He told me a story about his Uncle Bob, and how he and his brother used to go up in the summer time and spend all summer with Uncle Bob while he was falling timber for Pino Grande Mill at Michigan California Lumber Company.

Charlie Hants is related to the Church family and the Church place was just North of our ranch. They used to have property right next to the ranch.

Taken with permission from Continued From the Woods: True Tales of TimberworkersIt took an hour and a half to get to the hospital from where we were and he said he was delirious and the guy in the ambulance was physically holding him down. He recovered alright, but not good. Finally JR got on the radio and told them that we needed to get relief up here because these guys are dying up here! It was quite an experience. That was 17,000 acres and that was up by Cherry Lake and the park borderline goes right through the lake.When I was logging, all they ever worked as a timber faller was seven hours. Those guys liked those hours because they would have to go back to camp and work on their saws for three hours. Dennis Harvey had quite a collection of saws. His whole garage is like a museum. You can’t park anything in it because he has axes, saws and you think you have seen everything and then I looked up in the rafters and I started laughing. He asked me what I was laughing about and I

Taken with permission from Continued From the Woods: True Tales of TimberworkersHow I came to purchase the Kenworth was I was living up on highway 20 and Buzz came up and said, “I want to sell you a truck.” I said that I really didn’t want to buy it and he said, “I will make you an offer you can’t refuse.” I was always a saver. I had some money in his safe because back in the old days you could coin some jack. I think I got the truck for $12,000 or $12,500, that was the truck and the trailer. I had to give him $3,800 cash to make it work out. I bought the truck in 1981 and the lumber market was really bad in 1981 and 1983. I just parked that truck and worked for Joe Jordan for those two years.I was fighting fires when I was 21. CDF was completely different back then. They did a lot of their own work as far as building stations. The work weren’t contracted out to some general engineering contractor that was getting paid three times the money of

Taken with permission from Mountain SpringsMabel and Calvin Cartwright, c. 1976About a week later, the entire town was called out to fight a fire that suddenly and without explanation engulfed a barn we owned on another property. Then one heartstopping night, my mother was awakened by stealthy footsteps entering our yard. Looking from an upstairs window, she saw a man creeping along the side of our house toward the back, lugging something that appeared heavy and cumbersome. Silently moving downstairs in the dark, my mother took our dog, Mike, by the collar and went down the second set of stairs to the basement. With only the thickness of the outside wall between them, my mother and the intruder moved on a parallel course that converged at the basement door. Then, counting on timing and Mike’s territorial affront, she unlatched the door, unleashed the dog, and hoped for the best. Outside, the night came alive with Mike’s frenzied barking, a startled shriek, and the sound of

Taken with permission from Mountain SpringsMabel, at seventy, with the Sierra Buttes in backgroundThe teacher argued that we were a class of wild hellions who needed discipline. The school board dallied, swayed by the suave mid-westerner. Finally, my mother presented them proof in writing from the parental protests, and the members of the board, given no other choice, sent the man out of our town, out of our county, and thankfully, out of our lives.My mother, I was learning, had her own brand of missionary zeal. Dropped from prospective juryship because she straightforwardly denounced capital punishment, she nevertheless waged fearless war against rattlesnakes and murderers. In the case of both, she maintained that our home territory was off-limits and inviolate. For weapons against this kind of encroachment she used whatever came to hand. Even more of an outrage than finding rattlers among the antique peonies and iris in our garden was discovering one stalking our chickens. Once from

Taken with permission from Mountain SpringsMy mother was an alarming amalgam of contradictions. Beating beneath the pinafore top of her apron was a warrior’s heart. Like her birthplace in the northern Sierra Nevada, she was granite and iron laced with gold. She was an earthy country girl with a slight city sheen. She was a wildflower, a river rock, a skitterish doe who could become a fierce mountain lion of a mother when she had to. She was a strange mix of spirituality: raised a Christian, yet owing to her Scottish background, she was awash in superstition. In a typically confusing mix of both influences, she would admonish us, “Put scissors and knives away before bedtime so the angels won’t cut themselves.” Her favorite aphorism that saw us through the worst of times was, “It’s always darkest before dawn.” She was tender and consoling, with a surprising memory for historical scandal. In her later years she kept misplacing dollar bills hidden

Continued from last week...Lydia Cartwright, age seventeenThe rustic circumstances of my birth were not really due to a lack of resources or availability of modern methods. Indeed, my oldest brother, Jim, was born in a hospital in the foothill town of Grass Valley in 1930, twelve years earlier. Calvin was born in Seaview, Washington. I think my birth in my mother’s childhood home, in the same bed that had welcomed her and my grandparents’ other four children, was simply a matter of my mother’s choice, probably determined by familiarity and comfort. How fortunate to count the doctor as a close friend and to have your own mother as a trusted midwife.But along with that choice was the fact of the remoteness of our town. Sierra City marks the gateway to the Lakes Basin Area of Sierra and Plumas counties, often called The Lost Sierra. Forty pristine lakes, ranging from a pond you could skip a stone across, to the islanded, lagooned, and often white-capped expanse of Gold L

Lydia Cartwright, eight years oldWhen it comes to the story of your own birth, what others have told you many times eventually acquires the aura of a personal legend. You know you attended the occasion, yet the experience is missing from memory, and thus you have to take the story on faith. The legend of my birth goes something like this: On the morning of the first day of spring, March 21st, 1942, my two older brothers, Jim and Cal, aged twelve and ten, woke early in our 1890s home in Sierra City and ran excitedly downstairs and out the front door to scan the skies. But except for the threat of another winter storm, the skies that morning were empty. Disappointed, they came back into the warm kitchen where my tired but very cheerful grandmother had a pot of oatmeal on the six-burner wood range and coffee brewing, miner’s style, in the old blue and ivory spatter ware enamel coffee pot. My brothers told her they had awakened to what they thought was the unmistakable honking of Can

Town of Minnesota in the 1850s. Mary Hope collection, courtesy of Underground Gold Miners Museum.Minnesota California ~ Continued from last week: Wayne Brooks and family are in a class of their own, having an ancestor born in the short-lived town of Minnesota. For this week’s article, I did some research on the town. The “Early Annals of Downieville and Vicinity” first published in 1860, in the Tuolumne Courier state that: “It was Joe Taylor, Chips, and Mike Savage who discovered the rich hill diggings at Minnesota in 1852” [paraphrased]. The population of Minnesota exploded after the discovery then declined rapidly as the gravel channel played out.Minnesota (later referred to as Minnesota Flat) was located above the Middle Yuba on the south facing side of Lafayette Ridge. The longer-lived town of Chips Flat was located on the opposite side of the ridge above Kanaka Creek. According to the Annals, in the 1850s, Chip reasoned that the NW-SE trending go

Brooks Family left to right: Rich, Wayne, Fern, and Dick, in the Plaza in Alleghany, 1951Good Neighbors ~ Long before biker Pappy Brooks moved to Alleghany with his entourage in 1977, the family of Richard “Dick” Brooks resided here. In fact, their house at 101 Plaza Court (the blue house across from the fire station) was next to Mrs. McDougal’s Boarding House where Pappy lived when it burned down. Both families were quick to point out that they weren’t related despite the common last name.The old Kanaka Club was located on the other side of Mrs. McDougal’s Boarding House. In the winter of ‘76/77 my family moved from the Mott Cabin to Alleghany for a year. Our first residence was the Kanaka Club. We had two cats, a solid gray “bobcat” with a single white dot on her chest and a short stub of a tail. Her name was Nugget. Nugget was the mother of my cat, Miss Peepers, a gray tuxedo with big green eyes. After the move, both cats vanished. It

Night Mirror ~ This week I am mustering the courage to delve much deeper into my personal history. Some of my earliest memories involve dreams. When I was a toddler I used the words “night mirror” for “dream.” I remember the pain and disappointment that I felt when my mother informed me that the word was “nightmare” and that it meant a bad dream. As toddlers, my brother Steven and I fought constantly. I thought that I hated him until I had a vivid dream in which he got on his tricycle and pedaled away. He wasn’t coming back! I was so relieved when I realized that it was only a dream. We still fought throughout our childhood, but thanks to that dream I never forgot that I loved him, no matter how angry he made me.My family had a habit of sharing our dreams every morning. One morning, at the Mott Cabin, my dad and I were surprised to learn that we had both dreamt the same thing! We both dreamt that a doe came walking down the road in front of the

What’s in the attic?A Northern Flying Squirrel (Glaucomys sabrinus) in the author’s house. The dark wavy line on the side is the edge of its wing. It is sitting on a chia pet that is 7 ½ inches long.In 1996 when we moved into our current house it had been vacant for about five years. At night there was a ruckus in the attic with gnawing sounds, bumping and thumping. Upon inspection we found a mess of sticks and other debris and turds that we assumed to be rat turds. We set traps again and again to no avail. Our senior cat Roly Poly (long “o” sound) was not the least bit interested in hunting. This went on for several years, mostly during the winter months.When the toddler grandkids came along and were staying with us, we told them that we had chipmunks in the attic because it sounded less scary than rats! Roly Poly died at the age of 19 a few years later.In the summer of 2015 Alleghany was overrun by Ferrell cats. That fall, I was able to work with Sammy&