Nevada City, CA Vacation within a Vacation!

Had a few days off and Isabel wanted to get back to Grass Valley to see her friends from last year so we took off after "work" Monday night to spend our two days off in Nevada City which is one of our favorite towns and it's right next to Grass Valley!  When we were here last year we happened upon a 1930's mom and pop motel that has been remodeled into theme rooms with lavish gardens surrounding the place.  What a find!  We are staying two nights in the "woodland" room (more for the fact that it has two beds than for its theme).  We spent the day walking about the dog friendly town, sipping coffee and chai and doing absolutely nothing! while Isabel ran around town with her friends. (The biggest item on my agenda was to buy another Tibetan garden bell to go with the smaller one I bought last year.  These make great wind chimes!)  Here's a picture of us enjoying the gardens, the hor d' vours, and updating our blog!

Hiking to Crystal Crag

Crystal Crag is a rocky formation that juts out of the Sierra range  near our cabins and Chrystal Lake sits right at its base.  We recently hiked in to Crystal Lake to picnic and try our luck at catching its esteemed Golden Trout.

The trail itself was an out and back 5 ½ mile round trip with a 600 ft elevation gain.  Here’s a view of the crag (top, center) taken near the trailhead at Lake George.  Crystal Lake is located just to the right of Crystal Crag.

The trail was listed as easy to moderate, but anytime you start an uphill hike at 9,000 feet you notice how little oxygen there is.  Needless to say, we took our time!  Here are the girls on the trail

And a little further on (is someone getting winded?)

The first reward came as we broke through the treeline!  Lake George is in the foreground with Lake Mary behind (Crystal Crag Lodge is hidden in the trees at the bottom right corner of Lake Mary)

Here’s some more of the view from on high

Then, we reached the lake!  Totally worth the effort!

We had our picnic

And Isabel climbed a tree

We fished, but alas, the Golden Trout evaded us this day!  (we did see a few swimming in the creek though).

Isabel at Crystal Lake

Mammoth Consolidated Gold Mine

Diana and I got up early one day in the recent past and took a walk around the lake to Cold Creek Campground which is the site of the old Mammoth Consolidated gold mine.

It was pretty neat as many of the old buildings were still intact

These were some of the old bunkhouses for workers

Here’s what’s left of the cabin of a later miner.  Notice on the roof of the porch all the coffee can lid patches and cracker tin repairs that were nailed in place to stop leaks. (and we think we’re such good recyclers.)

I think the restoration value on this old sedan is near nil!  I don’t think it’ll be moving anywhere soon!  I can’t begin to tell you what kind of car it was, but we did make out that it once had a trunk!

Here’s part of an old generator/air compressor that sat half way up the side of the hill!  I wonder how long it took them to get it up there.

And look at the flywheels on these 100 hp single cylinder engines!  I’d hate to have been a mule back in the days that these were shipped in and hauled up here.

Here’s Sadie, returning from as long day of work in the mine!

And finally, the view from the top

As a side note, we visited another mining section further down the valley on a different day and it comes to mind now since I was talking about how heavy some of this equipment was way back then.  This picture includes pieces and parts of a stamp mill  that someone had set up in the mid 1800’s.  I can’t begin to imagine how hard it was to get this to its site and installed before the advent of good roads and modern machinery to help!

It’s all cast iron!

And it’s ¼ mile off the nearest modern road, up a draw, across a creek, in the middle of what is now nowhere!

Yosemite!

We finally got the opportunity to visit Yosemite for the first time.  All I can say is – go.  We went later in May so the crowds weren’t bad and we bought a season pass ($40 vs $20 for a one time visit) so we can go back again and again.  We drove in from the East on Hwy 120 and did a quick tour around the village loop.  The only downside is that dogs were not welcome inside the park off paved surfaces (makes hiking in to see the sites impossible for us) Sadie was not impressedL  Other than that, awe inspiring!  We’ll take time to see more sites on our next visit after we do some research for the best dog friendly places to visit!

Nice little stream alongside the road.

Here we are in the valley.  Sadie broke the rules and ran off the pavement J

Another view of the valley meadow.

The view of the valley walls with the falls!

Another waterfall!

The view all around is inspirational!

We’ll definitely be back!

Fishing!

The fishing in the Mammoth Lakes Basin is some of the best there is!  There seems to be no shortage of fish to go around – that is, for everyone but us!  Our guests are pulling in huge stringers of fish on a daily basis right here at Lake Mary, but our success so far is one fish.  It has taken us a while to adjust back to trout fishing as most of our tackle has been focused on bass for the last few years.  So it’s no wonder that we haven’t had much luck flipping big crank baits on the end of 10 pound braided line.  But all that has changed now!  We took a trip to the local bait shop (and liquor store) and bought enough bait and tackle (and a few bottles of wine) to empty these lakes!  We are now casting miniature Rapalas, Panther Martin lures, and garlic worms on the end of 4 pound invisible monofilament test. 

(Not to veer too far from the subject, but we did have some really neat chartreuse garlic marshmallows with sparkles too, but we left them outside the trailer one day and one of our resident bears came and ate them.  He also took time to eat our citronella candle for desert.  I imagine his stomach doesn’t feel too good now, but at least the bugs won’t bother him, and we can smell him coming!)

Back to the fishing -- Our swivels are now a dainty size 12, instead of the industrial size 4’s we used for bass.  We no longer scare the fish away when our bait hits the water!  And out efforts have paid off –

This rainbow, caught on a 1 inch shallow running black and silver Rapala, measured 17” and weighed just under 2 pounds (we couldn’t get an exact weight since the scale we used was stuck on Kg and we couldn’t figure out how to fix it so Isabel had to do the conversion on her cell phone). 

I wish I had more pictures of giant fish I could post, but for now this is it.  Stay tuned for our pictures of packed stringers, coming in the near future (I hope)!