Re-reading yesterday’s post made me realize I described details of my trip up but not of my trip back.
Part of why my visit was not so ‘transcendent’ was that even as I was marveling at the water pounding through the canyon I was thinking of the trip home. I knew I wanted to be home that night and I didn’t want to be so late as to have to deal with lots of Bay Area traffic.
I remembered my trip last year via Highway 88 and had decided ahead of time that I would go home that way. It was pretty, but it didn’t strike me as hard as it had before. Caples Lake was still mostly frozen over and Silver Lake, which so enchanted me last year, I missed entirely, presumably because it looked like a meadow covered with snow.
Here’s a picture from just below Carson Pass.
There was hardly anyone on the road, so that was nice.
Eventually I got down to Jackson, where I stopped to eat my sandwich at Kennedy Tailing Wheels Park. It’s the site of an old gold mine. From 1913 to 1942, tailings from the mine were sluiced across a valley and over a hill with the aid of 4 huge wheels. One has been restored and protected in a shed, two others are in varying states of disintegration. The fourth I found by accident and got this picture.
This one is smaller. The big one now in the shed is about 60 feet in diameter.
Below Jackson was familiar territory as it was the same road I had driven on Sunday coming home from Drytown. I didn’t stop any more until I got home to Pacifica about 2:30. Since the night before at 7 pm I had driven 440 miles.