Highlights: Ice House Rd • Wentworth Springs Rd • Iowa Hill Rd • Highway 174 • Highway 49 • Gold Lakes Dr • La Porte Rd • Oroville Quincy Rd • Highway 89

 

There are 22 Sierra Nevada Passes, or so the adage goes.
And most of the attention goes to the highest and the longest: namely Monitor, Ebbetts, Sonora & Tioga. We’ll ride those in June and if that’s your thing, come ride with us when the peaks are still capped in snow. However, a few miles to the north are even more mountain passes: Yuba Pass, La Porte, and the Oroville Quincy Highway. Those are ones every skips. Come ride with us as we explore The Crest of the Sierra. Our tour begins in Placerville at the edge of the Sierra Range and we actually don’t have far to go since our destination is only 100 miles away. But, we’ll take a very zig-zaggy route to get there. Spend all day to go 100 miles? Yes. That’s what we do here.

Ice House Rd is a find, a true discovery, a glorious godsend, absolutely beautiful wide-open mountain vistas with snowcapped peaks in the distance, a true treasure within El Dorado County. Ice House is a wide two lane with a center line, occasional shoulder, and no shortage of drop-offs.  No guardrails here. Very few surprises. Oh, and bonus, it’s been freshly repaved. No crazy corners or sharp 90-degree hairpins, rather these hairpins are smooth curves capable of sustained speeds offering over 30 miles of non-stop mountain curves through the heart of the Crystal Range. Just over the range is the Lake Tahoe Basin.

If 30 miles of freshly paved mountain curves didn’t wet your whistle, buckle up buttercup, we’re just getting started. We call Wentworth Springs Rd paved mountaintop perfection. This is what motorcycle dreams are made of. Wentworth is a dreamy slice of pavement newly built in 2003 as the backdoor to the Crystal Mountain Range. This road is a must ride for any type of rider, all motorcyclists love this road. The best stretch being the 15 miles up an over Silver Hill Range and then into the gold rush town of Georgetown.

If there any antithesis to Wentworth, it has to be Iowa Hill Rd dropping into the North Fork of the American River Canyon. Single lane, narrow and zero guard rails, if you have issues with ‘heights’ best to just focus on the road in front of you and don’t look down. Riding the Sierra Nevada Foothills means everywhere you look, there is Gold Rush History of 1849.

Over the years, we’ve stopped and visited Empire Mine, Bridgeport Covered Bridge, and Malakoff Diggins in this region. Any one of these is the perfect break in the day to get off the bikes and stroll through the Empire Mine site or the preserved gold rush town of North Bloomfield.

Empire Mine was one of the longest running gold mines of the Gold Rush Era, operating for over a century from 1850 to 1956 and is said to still contain millions of dollars of gold. The oldest, deepest, richest, and longest operating, it was also the largest hard rock mining operation in California pulling more gold out of the ground than any other gold mine of that era. Overall, the mine produced 5.8 million ounces of gold pulled from 367 miles of tunnels which converts to $10,904,000,000 in today's dollars. That's 10 with a B. The grounds have been converted to a state park and are well-worth a visit. You cannot go into the mine; however, the buildings are preserved perfectly and there are many examples of mining equipment on site.

Our trek along Highway 49-Yuba Pass also offers up a chance to check out North Bloomfield, a well-preserved mining town with numerous preserved buildings along the main street. What is unique about it in this part of California is much like Bodie Ghost Town- the town is more of a living museum. North Bloomfield is in a state of arrested decay and only reachable by a (paved) dead end mountain road.
As many as 1,500 people lived here during the heyday of the Diggins lasting from the 1850s to 1884.  Not only did the town serve as a company town for the miners, but it was the origin of all the equipment needed to extract the gold from the nearby hillside. Giant monitors were built and even a giant sewing machine in the museum was used to create large canvas hoses needed to bring water from higher elevations to the monitors.

North Bloomfield feels stretched out and not as claustrophobic as other gold rush towns, hiking trails surround the town. Several of the tiny buildings have been restored to resemble a day from the 1870s. The drug store shelves are still lined with rows of mysterious elixirs. The general store is still stocked chock full of goods. And one of the restored homes is outfitted to resemble the everyday happenings of the late 1800's.

Our afternoon is taken up by heading up Highway 49 - Yuba Pass. Yuba Pass is one of the most northerly twisty mountain passes in the Sierra Range that is well-paved & well-maintained. The historic towns along this region such as North Bloomfield, Nevada City and Downieville make this a great ride with a heavy dose of Gold Rush flavor plus endless mountain curves. Highway 49 after Nevada City flows down and out of two different canyons twisting ever higher climbing up the Yuba River Canyon to Downieville
At the Yuba River next to Moonshine Rd is also the Oregon Creek Covered Bridge dating back to 1860. This covered bridge was built for the stage coach road to Alleghany. The covered bridge has a length of 101 feet and is currently open to vehicular traffic for the last 140 years.

In 1883, the English Dam failed (some claimed sabotage) near present-day Jackson Meadows Reservoir and sent a flood of water downstream. The deluge washed the Oregon Creek Bridge 150 feet downstream off its moorings and spun it 180 degrees around. The way it was built is the opposite of the way it sits today. The bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and was refurbished in 2018. The 1860 construction makes it one of the oldest covered bridges in the western United States still in daily use.

The gold bearing regions of the Sierra Nevada often refer most commonly to placer gold, this type of gold was most easily found during the (early) 1850s Gold Rush, and found on sand bars along the inside bends of the many mountain streams and rivers flowing out of the Sierra Nevada range. The presence of placer gold also meant a vein of gold was upstream somewhere as the placer gold did not originate from that riverbank location. Prospectors followed mountain streams into the Sierra Nevada until the placer gold played out along the banks of these rivers. At the source or origin of these mountain rivers, they found Lode Gold. This type of gold wasn’t found along a river bank, but rather as a vein of hard quartz rock deep underground.

Through geologic processes millions of years ago, a gold vein forms in rock. The vein might be 20 feet underground and far upstream. Over time, natural erosion takes place breaking down the vein and eroding away at the hard rock breaking down the vein and washing the nuggets of gold downstream. Heavy rain events slowly transport this gold down the river tumbling and smoothing the nuggets over millions of years eventually becoming placer gold and settling out in these sand bars or even at the bottom of waterfalls.

We’ll plan for a break as we descend into the valley that holds Downieville. Originally known as ‘The Forks’, referring to the confluence of the Downie River and the North Fork of the Yuba River, the two rivers combine here.

Named after Major William Downie, a Scottish explorer and prospector. After arriving in San Francisco in June 1849, Downie led an expedition of one Irish sailor and seven African American sailors into the northern gold fields. Arriving at the confluence of these two rivers in September 1849, it was said that they found gold so plentiful on the banks of the river, a shovel was not required. A community quickly sprang up as the Downie Expedition built a cabin and waited out the winter of 1849. By the following year of 1850, there were 15 hotels, 4 bakeries, 4 butcher shops, and a requisite number of saloons.  

Downieville today is a small town full of gingerbread Victorian homes, and is also a haven for bicyclists as vans will haul you up the mountain and you can coast down. After gold was discovered in 1849, the secret soon got out and the fortune seekers flocked to the area.

Twelve miles distant is Sierra City at the 4100 foot level, a mere 225 people claim this mountain community as home and this will be our base. Main Street is a short clip, only a few hundred yards long. Sierra City sits at the base of the 8587 ft. Sierra Buttes. These mountain peaks are 1.6 miles from the town to the north and overshadow the town.

As prospectors followed the placer gold upstream along the banks of the North Yuba River, the easy placer gold stopped at Sierra City and a camp began to grow. An avalanche of snow in the 1852-53 winter destroyed the town burying whatever buildings there were, but Sierra City was later rebuilt at a lower elevation a few years later with a peak population around 3000 by 1860.

Several very large gold nuggets have been found around Sierra City. In 1869, the Monumental Nugget at over 1,800 troy ounces was found here. That's a gold nugget weighing 106 lbs. Miners were stepping right over the nugget while walking to work. After a heavy rain exposed the nugget in 1869, miners looked down and saw the glint of gold in the dirt along their path to work. A replica of the 106-pound Monumental Nugget is on display at the Kentucky Mine Museum in Sierra City, maybe we’ll stop there to check it out & see what 106 pounds of gold looks like.

One might assume the gold has all played out, but a gold nugget weighing over 1,500 troy ounces was found in the Monumental Mine in 1960. That’s a 103 lb. gold nugget discovered 60 years ago.

Sierra County is sparely populated and the entire county only has 3200 permanent residents spread over nearly 1000 square miles. What that means to the motorcyclist is few people, minimal traffic and very small towns along our route. Our destination is La Porte Rd. Another recent addition, if you consider 25 years ago recent, to the list of Sierra Nevada Passes. La Porte was a wagon road carved out by Argonauts, then a dirt jeep trail up and over the Sierra Range, then finally paved in the early 2000s.

La Porte leads into the tiny mountain community of La Porte and then on into Oroville, best known for Lake Oroville completed in 1968 as the second-largest water reservoir in California. The Oroville dam at 770 feet high is the tallest earthen dam in the United States. This dam also made global headlines in 2017 when authorities thought the earthen dam might collapse after massive amounts of rainfall in the mountains above poured into the lake, from Northern California's wettest winter in over 100 years, and over-topped the dam’s emergency spillway heavily damaging the concrete overflow spillway. 180,000 people were told to evacuate and head for higher ground. While the earthen dam held fast, over $550M was spent to rebuild the concrete spillway, dredge the river, and repair the earthen dam in time of the following winter.

Along the eastern border of the lake is our next motorcycle road, Oroville-Quincy Highway. This Sierra Nevada Pass is best known for the many repeating s-curves climbing up and over the Sierra Crest. Imagine repeating S-curves that stretch for miles, with see-through that stretches for miles due to the Dixie Fire in 2021 that burned for 3 months razing 1M acres of mountain forest land, mostly in national forest lands and being the first wildfire in history to jump over the crest of the Sierra Range and flow down into the mountain town of Greenville burning the entire town to the ground.
Bucks Lake at the 5100 ft summit is the perfect stop to take a break and breathe the mountain air. This tour of the Northern Sierra culminates here after weaving our way through the Northern Sierra Range through remote mountain road most have never heard of. The riding here is pure happiness personified.

 

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