Gold Bug Mine

The hills of Placerville and environs are filled with Gold Rush trails, mine shafts, ditches, structures and former gold mines, leaving evidence of the Gold Rush era that upon sight brings those days into a visible reality that you can’t gain from history books or disintegrating wild west photos of ghostly blank faced miners.  My childhood neighborhood was situated above what is now known as Gold Bug Park.  Only shortly before my life began, the area defined by Big Canyon Creek that passed several historic Gold Rush spots was taken over by the Bureau of Land Management to establish the area as public property in 1965 and the first version of Gold Bug Park came into being.  A long flat grassy area along the creek included several foot bridges, picnic tables, a teeter totter, merry-go-round and a refurbished for public use Gold Bug Mine.  The mine had been dug into the hard rock back in 1888 when the ease of pulling gold right out of the creek came to an end.  The mine changed owners over the years, but remained in operation until World War II when the President ordered that mining be terminated as a “non essential industry,” so the men could go to war.

In the 1970s, when I was growing up, the upkeep of the park was in slow decline.  Once established, only a minimum of effort was devoted to it, but the park toys and the joy of running in and out of a real live gold mine was enough fun to make long summer days a little less boring.  We could walk down our street to hook up with Big Canyon Creek Road and down to our not so secret trail that lead straight down the side of a steep mountain to the park below.  One could drive there from Placerville’s Main Street, but that would have taken longer.  Our connecting secret trail gave us easy access to this most interesting historical area.  There were enhanced hiking trails about the area and another mine up the hill from the Gold Bug Mine, which was always boarded off, but it was interesting to look at none the less.  Across the street entrance to the park was a dilapidated stamp mill, which could have used a serious restoration to make it a really wonderful tourist site, but it just sat there continuing to deteriorate.  I’m sure we were in constant danger as we crawled all over the old shack.

We hiked all over the area and knew every trail––including the trails made by deer rather than men.  We were warned by the parents against getting too close to mine shafts and we found several. It is a wonder we never had an accident around these unprotected sites.  The city didn’t expect that a gang of kids from above the park would be roaming the area in search of adventure and so didn’t bother to close off these places, but we survived.  We were also warned about hippies lurking about and so we stayed clear of anyone seen around the park with long hair and a motorcycle.  Now it seems very humors to think we were wary of the “hippies,” which were only a group distinguished by a fashion style that somehow signified trouble.  We had no idea why the hippies were worse than other strangers we might meet, but apparently they were of particular concern.  I don’t think we came across more than two hippies through all the years we played in this park so the worry was unfounded.

An amazing thing by today’s standards was that we played in this park for hours without any connection to our parents––even with the possible hippie threat lurking about.  We were not within earshot, we had no phone access, there was never a park ranger or any authority near by to ask for help if we fell down a mine shaft or got molested by a hippie and yet our parents were fine with us going to Gold Bug Park.  My mother would give me her watch and say, “Be back by five.”  The park added a coolness factor for visiting friends,  not only friends from out of town who never saw a gold mine before, but to kids from other areas of Placerville who didn’t have the easy access secret trail available to them.  We definitely felt lucky to have this park as our extended back yard.  The only other park in town was the City Park, which didn’t have a lot going on unless it was summer and you were there to visit the City Pool.

I had no idea that in 1980 a committee was formed to renovate the park and make it into a true historical destination handled in the way that Coloma State Park had been managed because there was no immediate evidence of change.  This group, “Hangtown’s Gold Bug Park Development Committee, Inc.,” was formed to do something about the neglected park and run it with the respect that the historical site deserved.  If you’re going to be a town that trades on your Gold Rush history, then you’ve got to have a respectable Gold Rush park that is a joy to visit––it’s got to be worth getting off Highway 50 on the way to Lake Tahoe for more than gas and the McDonald’s drive-through.  Nothing much happened to better the park in 1980, but by 1985 the area was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and things started to look up––most likely because the funding began to accumulate.  Now the park is cleaned up, there is a museum on sight as well as a tourist friendly gift shop.  The shack that housed the stamp mill is torn down and replaced by a new building that houses the stamp mill machinery as a proper museum exhibit that is of greater value to the public.  Other improvements are in the works, so this marvelous historical asset to the center of the California Gold Rush is finally finding its post gold giving potential.

That 352 foot Gold Bug Mine that you can actually walk into all the way to the back, is still the coolest site in Placerville.  Today there are no hippies lurking about and sadly, no kids at the top of the hill to climb down and explore the area.  My old neighborhood still has many of the same folks living there, but they are grandparents now and the kids have long moved out.  My parents haven’t had a trick-or-treater on Halloween in more than ten years.  Although, now some official might stop a new generation of kids from having too much fun in the park, but back in the 1970s when absolutely no one was looking, the kids of the hill ruled the Gold Bug Park.  My time with the park was long before today’s media saturation took over the attention of the children and besides a rerun of Batman on TV, the Gold Bug Park gave us a great deal of fun and adventure.