Prairie Creek Visitor Center

The most impressive achievement of the CCC was the construction of the "concession and recreation building" which is now the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park Visitor Center. With the exception of the window lights, plumbing, and chimney flue, all the ...

Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park

Ranchers and homesteaders pre-empted most of the lands bordering on Prairie Creek, north of Orick, in the 1880s and 1890s, with the rest of the area now included in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park being staked out as mining and ...

Battery Point Lighthouse

In 1855, the year after Crescent City was incorporated, the California legislature urged the state's delegation in Congress to pass an act to erect lighthouses at “Trinidad and Crescent City." On March 3, 1855, Congress appropriated $15,000 for the construction ...

Crescent City

Crescent City was laid out in 1853, and soon large numbers of settlers arrived, attracted by the nearby mineral and agricultural resources. The Kelsey Trail linked Crescent City with the Salmon and Trinity gold mines in the 19th century.

Trinity River

On April 17, 1828 Jedediah Smith led a company across the divide to the Hay Fork of Trinity River. The trail was difficult, as it wound among steep hills, and the Indians were unfriendly.

Smith continued to press on, forcing ...

Point Reyes Lighthouse

The ancient home of the Coast Miwok people, the dramatic landscape of the Point Reyes peninsula with its wave battered cliffs, remained undiscovered by European explorers until the late 1500's. Sir Francis Drake probably first sighted and mapped the fog-shrouded ...

Moro Rock

Beginning at the 6,500 feet elevation level of the rock (survey point 0), below which point the trail is of recent origin, the stairway follows a natural ledge for nearly 100 feet and then steeply ascends a natural crevice to an observation ...

Crystal Caves

By some accounts Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks could have been set aside solely to protect the amazing caves found in this area of the Southern Sierra Nevada. The two parks protect half of the caves more than a ...

Mineral King

The winter passed quickly, and eager prospectors pushed their way up the East Fork canyon well before the snows melted in the spring of 1874. During the warm weather of July and August, the subalpine valley the miners optimistically called ...

Tharps Log

Tharp also noted the substantial Native American population, which to its later dismay, welcomed him graciously:I first located my ranch where I now live in the summer of 1856. There were about 2,000 Indians then living along the Kaweah Rivers ...