Empire Mine State Historic Park, California

Nevada City is an old gold mining town. Beautiful Victorian homes and interesting shops line the streets, and their website lists many of the local activities and historic points of interest. We have limited time here, so we decided our one stop this time would be the Empire Mine State Historic Park, in nearby Grass Valley.

Wow! . .  I have to admit we are both a bit jaded when it comes to museums, as we've been through so many over the years. It takes a lot to impress us, and this park/museum definitely did!

Our experiences in the Rand mining area of southern California gave us the background to fully appreciate the depth and breadth of the displays and information available here, through the indoor and outdoor museum displays and the scale model of the mine as well as the well informed volunteers. The website for the Empire Mine park contains a lot of information so I won't replicate that here. Please follow that link and read about the mine. It's a very impressive history.

We were impressed by the completeness of the buildings, tool and machinery collections, and the furnishings of the restored offices. We really thought most of this was original, as sometimes happens when a factory is shut down with the idea of reopening it later. Not so in this case.


The docent (blacksmith) we spoke with explained that all the metal buildings, machinery, tools, etc. had been sold off. 

Once the decision to restore the mine was made the buildings were rebuilt and they began collecting the other items. They've done a wonderful job, and the park is definitely worth a visit.

If you do plan a visit check the tour schedule on the website. We just missed the opportunity to actually go into the Cottage and some of the other building. The Cottage is beautiful from the outside, as are the grounds, so I can only imagine what the inside is like.


This is a wonderful bit of California history. As well informed on the gold mining area as we are, we had never heard about this park. It's definitely worth a stop!

Check out our album, and the Empire Mine website, for more on the park.

Nevada City, California

We arrived here in Nevada City in early afternoon on Monday. We're staying at the Nevada City Elk's Lodge. This is a lovely facility built specifically for them in 1996. The lodge itself is 111 years old, and they had used a downtown building for years before they had this built.

The facility is nicely designed to serve a variety of purposes, and they clearly have an active membership judging by the number in attendance and the well maintained grounds. When they obtained the property there was an area that had been identified as a Native American ceremonial site, so they they have very effectively incorporated that into their landscaping.

The lounge and restaurant opened up at 4 o'clock so we joined the crew for a beverage, a tour of the facility, and dinner later in the evening. What a nice bunch of folks! That's the advantage of staying at a lodge, you get to meet a lot of local people and learn about the community.

We'll be here for only two nights, then move east to visit friends in Nevada.

Saturday was drizzly, but we went for a walk around the loop anyway, our every move watched by a very attentive great blue heron. He was standing in one of the campsites and looked a bit startled when we bounded out of the trailer. He implemented the usual ploy of imitating a stick, only the head turning so we stayed in view as we continued down the road. Those things are tall when standing on solid ground - nearly 4 feet! They're usually in a couple of feet of water so it's not so obvious.

We saw several different water birds in the park and I hope they have safe places to sleep because after dark we heard a fairly large pack of coyotes traveling through.

The boat ramp was quite over the weekend, as the construction workers all took the weekend off, so we had a nice view of the Feather River and it's resident wildlife.


 Sunday was beautiful - sunshine! and so as not to waste it we invited brother and his wife over to the campground for a BBQ.  Nothing like having an entire park to yourself.

In the evening we had a rather nice sunset, which set off the Buttes in the distance, seen here over the top of a young peach orchard.


Monday we headed east into the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, into gold country. passed the turnoff to   Timbuctoo , love that name, was a roaring mining town at one time.
There's only one remaining building there now, and this marker along the highway.

We also passed the town of Rough and Ready. If I had more energy we'd stop and explore. It's a charming little town, still with a strong old west flavor, and the narrow, steep streets typical of mining towns. As it is, the cold still has the upper hand so we continued on to our destination, Nevada City.