A Hidden California Gem As Good As Gold

“I’d say just go find yourself a quiet spot on the river, stretch out on a hot rock, and let the world float by,” advises a trusty voice over the phone. “There’s lots of great things to do out here, but nothing tops that on a sunny day.”

What a lodestar of a local tip while stuck in holiday weekend gridlock at the unofficial start of summer. Snailing east on Interstate 80 from the Sacramento airport in seven-mile-per-hour Friday traffic on Memorial Day Weekend, I’m keeping my aggro in check by meditating on that eureka moment waiting up the road in the heart of California Gold Country.

Park at the bridge by the South Yuba River. Hike upstream to a secluded spot with just the right burbling soundtrack. Wade through the crisp current to a sunbaked granite slab with my name on it. Lie down, feel that cosmic heat permeate every pore, and let the rest of the world dissolve through half-dipped fingertips.

Could there be a richer moment than this hiding up in old, gold, still-sort-of-untold Nevada County, California? So old, its name predates Nevada state by 13 years. So gold-saturated, back in the day, it was called “Motherlode Country.” So underappreciated, according to local intel, that a wealth of vacant hot river rocks is still out there for the basking if you know who to ask and where to look.

So, thank you, generous local, for tossing this nugget to a traffic-stuck fortune seeker bound for Gold Rush country a bit late in the game. Turns out, some of the best hidden treasures out there may still be up for grabs.

1/4

From Gold to Getaways

Nevada County was once the hub of California’s gold frenzy. Between 1850 and the mid-20th century, over half a billion dollars of mineral wealth were extracted from just one section of this rugged area tucked in California’s western Sierra Nevada foothills between Sacramento and Reno, Nevada.

Cut to the present, and that’s a tough act to follow. But golden discoveries are all how you define them. Recast as a hidden adventure zone in the shadow of nearby hotspots like Lake Tahoe and Napa Valley, Nevada County is now riding its latest bonanza. It’s the secret getaway spot, says the region’s official tourism website Go Nevada County, “where wild and scenic rivers and high alpine peaks meet small town charm.”

My pair of small-town-charm bases over the next three days will be the neighboring communities of Grass Valley and Nevada City. Just four miles apart, the storied spots are pure California Gold Country pedigree, with all the wild Western boomtown history and revived luster of late to prove it — specifically, at a pair of classic Gold Rush-era hotels spared from the wrecking ball and finding 21st century rebirth. During their 19th-century heydays, the Holbrooke Hotel (in Grass Valley) and the National Exchange (Nevada City) hosted U.S. presidents from Grant to Garfield, literati and glitterati from Mark Twain to exotic dancer Lola Montez, and occasional notorious bandits waiting for their next fat stagecoach to roll in. After recent restorations and grand re-openings, the two California Historical Landmarks are reputedly more lustrous and inviting than ever.

Mainly, though, I’m drawn up here for the area’s outdoor treasures. Seventy years after gold mania officially ended in Nevada County, the region’s most enduring riches are its wild, sprawling landscapes: forested foothills laced with tumbling rivers; circuitous country roads leading to gold rush-era ghost towns and some of the most unique state parks in the Western U.S. The plan is to soak in as much of that as three days will allow, starting with my hot river rock holiday weekend icebreaker — or not.

On any given Friday afternoon (and especially this one) the I-80 crawl is bumper-to-bumper with cars bound for Lake Tahoe, the area’s biggest weekend magnet. By the time I reach the Highway 49 turnoff and zip north toward Grass Valley, the first stars are already appearing, and I’ve missed my sunny South Yuba River window.

Checking into the Holbrooke Hotel, presiding over Grass Valley’s café- and shop-lined Main Street, is some comfy consolation this evening. My second-floor room, named after former guest Mark Twain, is refurbished with leather upholstery, artfully exposed brick walls, cowhide rug, gleaming clawfoot tub and a private balcony overlooking Main Street. It’s still the perfect 19th-century satirist’s lair, but no doubt the ghost of Twain himself would opt for this spiffed-up 21st-century remodel of it.

“He stayed in an earlier version of this space during a visit to Grass Valley on his lecture circuit in the 1860s,” says hotel docent, Amanda Miller, while touring me through the stunningly restored landmark. “Black Bart preferred the room down the hall,” she adds — as it offered a better view of arriving stagecoaches to rob.

Home to the famed Golden Gate Saloon, reputedly the longest continually running bar west of the Mississippi, the Holbrooke’s boldly reimagined main floor dining and imbibing area with its antique-adorned walls, stained glass accents, and century-old, wrought-iron elevator is the town’s nerve center for craft cocktails and inspired Cal-cuisine spilling onto a packed back patio with a solo guitarist crooning a Hank Williams tune. One flight down is the hotel’s revamped Iron Door speakeasy, named for its giant steel portal that’s seen some thirsty through-traffic over the past 165 years.

“The miners came right through the iron door from below,” Miller tells me. “This whole area is combed with miles of underground mining tunnels — so they didn’t even have to see the light of day before hitting the bar after work.

“There’s still lots of gold down there,” she adds. “They’ll tell you all about it at the Empire Mine.”

Miners would descend into the Empire Mine’s main shaft — where tunnels once traced narrow gold “veins” across hundreds of miles and to well over a vertical mile in depth — aboard “man-skips” at a harrowing clip of 600 feet per minute.

Mine All Mine

“There’s still lots of gold down there,” says Jim Slouber at the Empire Mine the following morning. “And that’s exactly where it’s going to stay.”

Hiding behind groves of giant pines on an 856-acre estate on the edge of Grass Valley, the Empire Mine was one of the biggest, longest, deepest gold mines in California for over a century. Now a state historic park like no other, it offers a series of walking tours that are well worth postponing a South Yuba hot rock river siesta for.

“You’re visiting an incredible place,” says Slouber, a volunteer guide and retired electrical engineer with a wealth of gold factoids up his sleeve. “One thousandth of all the gold mined on Earth came from here. And 80 percent of it, geologists estimate, is still down there.”

Before anyone in the tour group gets too excited, Slouber informs us that the Empire Mine’s 367-mile subterranean network of gold-mining shafts and tunnels are now flooded and permanently closed for business.

After gold was discovered at this site in 1850, hard rock mining would soon become a booming industry in Nevada County. Massive outputs at the Empire Mine through the 1930s would make the area virtually Depression-proof, until profits dwindled and the mine closed in 1956. The property would become a state park in 1975.

Leading us past lush floral gardens by the opulent Bourn “Cottage” — a stone citadel built in the late 1800s as a residence for the mine owner’s family — our knowledgeable guide who grew up in the area deftly fields every gold question we can dig up: Where does gold come from? (Supernova explosions and meteorites originally); How was it extracted from here? (With the help of not so environmentally friendly chemical binders like mercury and cyanide); How much does gold weigh? (More than you think. It’s 50 percent heavier than lead and 18 times weightier than water).

“Those Westerns where they toss the gold satchel during a holdup would never happen,” says Slouber. “Engineers are troubled by these things.”

Furnished with leaded glass windows, two-foot-thick mine rock walls, tennis courts, a bowling alley, reflecting pools, and blooming rhododendrons, the gilded Bourn estate lends a briefly elegant view of the Empire Mine. Entering its stark mining grounds steps away, and a world apart, offers quite another.

“You’re standing in the middle of what was a Northern California 19th-century industrial giant,” reads a park sign near a solemn yard full of cadaverous mining equipment. The daily work of Empire Mine crews is summed up on the sign in a few words. “Dirty. Deafening. Dangerous.”

Creaking open a door tucked behind the equipment yard, Slouber ushers us into the Empire Mine’s main shaft — where an underworld of tunnels once traced narrow gold “veins” across hundreds of miles and to well over a vertical mile in depth. Miners descended into these innards aboard “manskips” careening through dark, wet, steep-angled shafts at a harrowing clip of 600 feet-per-minute.

“Who wants to go gold mining?” Slouber asks, seating us aboard a tilted manskip train permanently parked at the top of the shaft, and then shutting off the lights. The ensuing simulation experience — a vibration- and flickering light-driven sensory plunge into the abyss — is authentic enough to rule out a hard rock gold mining career change. “Makes you appreciate what these miners did day in and day out,” says our guide, leading us back out into the sun again.

California communities, past and present, with names like Sweetland, Log Cabin, and Coyoteville roll by, interspersed with riverside campgrounds popping up like reminders to come back next time with a tent.

Several pine-flanked hiking trails wind through the Empire Mine’s surrounding parklands, but who isn’t craving something even wilder and less claustrophobic right about now?

I find it hiding in some desolate hills about 30 miles north of Grass Valley at Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park — where a vast, empty, imagination-defying former gold zone is tucked in a recess of forest at the end of a narrow road sprinkled in pine cones and marked with one of the quirkier signs in a county filled with them: “North Bloomfield — pop. 8-12 — Formerly Humbug, CA.”

A hundred and fifty years ago, North Bloomfield (aka Humbug) was the pop-up home to thousands of rowdy fortune seekers, complete with eight saloons, two breweries, and one of the world’s largest and richest hydraulic gold mines, run by the formidable North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company. High-pressure water jets here tore into a pristine, gold-flecked landscape, reducing it to rubble and sending toxic runoff deep into Sacramento Valley farmland before hydraulic mining was eventually banned. But the damage up here was swiftly done.

Today’s North Bloomfield is a mite different. Wandering through its abbreviated ghost town on a deserted Saturday morning at the park entrance — consisting of a boarded barbershop, livery stable, general store, marshal’s house, and the last bar standing (The King’s Saloon) — you’ll be hard-pressed to locate a single one of the bygone town’s alleged 8-12 holdout residents.

About a mile down the road, the park’s signature Diggins Loop Trail traces a vast mining pit bordered by pallid cliffs formed with ruthless water cannons. The first impression at the outset of a 2.6-mile hike along the pit’s perimeter, accented with rubbled mounds of mining tailings and long-abandoned hydraulic equipment in various states of rusted decomposition, is that most manic human pursuits of this nature eventually come to this. The happier finding, as the winding trail opens into a resiliently vibrant hinterland, is that nature tends to win in the end.

Rising out of this eerie, blasted-out canyon floor is a riparian recovery zone full of pine groves, willows, and pink manzanita bushes hosting a dance contest of butterflies DJ’d by chirping chickadees and the odd shrieking Steller’s jay. Bears, bobcats, black-tailed deer, and the odd mountain lion are said to join the party out here, too. Even those sterile, man-made cliffs are now stubbled here and there with real trees growing out of them at defiant angles.

Near the end of the trail, I run into the only two people I’ll see in the park this afternoon — a pair of local hikers in identical T-shirts that read, “Sloth Hiking Team: We’ll Get There Eventually.”

“There’s a shortcut to the bridge,” one of them suggests, when I mention my plan to ride out the rest of the day on a hot river rock on the South Yuba. “But if it’s your first time out here, what you really should do is take a drive up to Downieville.”

What’s in Downieville?

“La Cocina de Oro,” she says, as if this should be sort of obvious. “They have great fish tacos. When you see Feather there, tell her Darlene says hi.”

Hiding behind groves of giant pines on an 856-acre estate on the edge of Grass Valley, the Empire Mine — now a state historic park — was one of the biggest, longest, deepest gold mines in California for over a century.

Downieville and Back

Straying from a perfectly idyllic plan to snooze on a nearby river rock, and instead drive for over an hour on a winding mountain road to a sequestered hilltown called Downieville to order tacos and relay a message from a Sloth Hiking Team member to a taqueria owner named Feather doesn’t really make sense. It turns out to be the right move.

The circuitous State Route 49 trip to Downieville through shadowy conifer valleys, beside sun-dappled river banks, across lonely bridges spanning tumbling whitewater, past an organic produce stop called Mother Truckers Market, and around towering granite cliffs and craggy pinnacles of Sierra country instantly ranks high among my favorite gas-pedal hikes in the Golden State. California communities, past and present, with names like Sweetland, Log Cabin, and Coyoteville roll by, interspersed with riverside campgrounds popping up like reminders to come back next time with a tent.

Downieville — another former mining hub, which once narrowly lost its mid-19th-century bid to become California’s state capital (“Just 10 less votes than Sacramento!” notes a bronze plaque posted near the one-street downtown) — now warmly welcomes roadside visitors with some old sheriff ’s gallows set up near the town entrance and reputedly the best fish tacos in Sierra County.

“We’re out of cod, but the chicken tacos are nice, too,” says Feather Ortiz at La Cocino de Oro, seating me on a compact back porch with lovely river views and flurries of cottony willow seeds floating in the breeze like warm snow. “Tell Darlene I love her.”

Racing against the sun back into Nevada County after a late lunch, I predictably miss my South Yuba River window yet again. But checking into the historic National Exchange hotel (aka “The Nash”), presiding over Nevada City’s lively Broad Street since 1856, is more sweet consolation.

Described by design bloggers as “classic gold rush-era Americana meets timeless eclectic,” the hotel’s total makeover is pure Victorian modernity — complete with a gallery of lush oil paintings lining its labyrinthine hallways (think giant peacocks posing next to monkeys gorging on grapes and melons) that are straight out of the Wuthering Heights playbook. The hotel’s 38 guest rooms are reconceived with curated vintage furniture, William Morris wallpaper, and tasteful- quirky period touches — a Tiffany lamp here, a love seat with a carved wooden bird fit for a Hitchcock prop there.

“They do a great buffet breakfast on the second floor,” my server advises over dinner that evening at Lola, the hotel’s popular French-inspired restaurant. “You can sit out on the deck with a coffee and watch Broad Street wake up.”

It’s one more delicious local tip. But tomorrow is firmly reserved for something else.

Early the next morning, I head up the road before the Memorial Day crowds, park at the bridge by the South Yuba River, and hike upstream along a footpath to a secluded spot with just the right burbling soundtrack.

The water is bloody cold, but the current is light, the sun is up, and the granite slabs are plentiful. I find my rock, lie down, let the warmth seep in — and the world float by. It was worth the wait.

“I park at the bridge by the South Yuba River and hike upstream along a footpath to a secluded spot with just the right burbling soundtrack. The water is bloody cold, but the current is light, the sun is up, and the granite slabs are plentiful.”

From our July 2025 issue.

PHOTOGRAPHY: By Kial James