Snow Days

Thinking of snow in Placerville brings back memories of that rare joy when you wake up on a school morning, open the window and see the yard covered in snow.  You know right there and then that you won’t be going to school.  After breakfast it’s on with the powder pants, moon boots and mittens and out to the hill to start sledding, throwing snowballs, making snow people.  This didn’t happen all that often as the snow line was just a bit higher than Placerville, so it was a real treat.  The part that wasn’t a treat was the lingering snow that made it difficult to drive to the grocery store and get things done or the usual occurrence of losing the electricity.  It still doesn’t take much to lose the electricity in Placerville.

We didn’t have to wait for that week or two in February or March when the snow might drop low enough to keep us home from school, for just up the road about 30 minutes was the wonderful world of Camp Sacramento and Strawberry Lodge.  These two places were our key destinations when the family of my father’s high school and college chum, Fred Towers, came to visit from Santa Rosa.  Fred and Rose Towers had a pair of kids, Lisa and Brent, who were just about the ages of me and my brother Mark.  So, up the hill we drove, bundled up and ready for the thrills of the really good sledding hills of Strawberry Lodge or Camp Sacramento.

Strawberry Lodge, an historic Pony Express stop, was started by a New Yorker who crossed over Echo Summit about 1858 and stopped in a place we now call Kyburz to build a crude stage coach stop and settle the land.  His name was Irad Berry and his little stage stop turned out to be a much needed facility for all the traffic that would shortly be going up and down the trail from Placerville to Nevada City where a silver strike lured the miners just the way James Marshall’s gold discovery lured the world to California in the first place in 1849.

About the time of the Nevada silver strike, Powell Crosley built a hotel that made the stop a major destination, but the hotel burned down in 1867, just two years after a former stage coach driver, Charlie Watson, took over.  Strawberry Lodge was rebuilt as a functional hotel, but business quickly fell off with the introduction of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 and from that point on the lodge had more downs than ups in an ever lasting struggle to survive, but survive it has.  Watson’s daughter kept the place going until 1919 when Norma Scherrer leased the property and updated it for modern travelers going to Lake Tahoe.  A pool was added, along with a dancing hall and an auto garage and extra cabins.  However, with the onset of the Great Depression, the place went bankrupt.

Gold Dredger Fred Baumhoff took over the lodge in 1939 and built the lodge you see today.  Baumhoff didn’t stick with the lodge long, selling it to Otto Schaefer in 1942 when golf and skiing were added.  The dead ski hill was always a fascination to me because it had an old ski lift on it, but the run had long been out of service by the time we were climbing it to woosh down the hill on huge tractor tire inner tubes.  In the 1970s, snow sledding was the main function of that abandoned ski run and it was busy when the snow was good.

Schaefer tired of the lodge in 1960 and a series of owners followed during the era when my family was visiting the property most frequently.  The Hicks-Hills family became the current owners in 2003 and have been promoting the lodge as an historic destination with easy access to the natural wonders of the El Dorado National Forest and Lake Tahoe.  They also offer a festive Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner and from all reports, have turned the place into a very warm and wonderful getaway.

When you had to go a bit higher to find snow, Camp Sacramento was an excellent option with a real monster of a hill, which had a chunk of river at the bottom.  The trick was to put on the breaks before sliding into the river.  It was probably smart that we started using a rubber river raft to slide down the hill, but the real reason we used it was because you could pile a bunch of kids in it all at once and go really fast.  On the tractor tires you would tend to bounce out on the way down and it was a real challenge to hang on.  I remember Brent and I bouncing down the hill and at one point he really caught air, but I grabbed him by a limb and pulled him back onto the tire.  It was nice to know I could react instantly during treacherous moments.

Camp Sacramento is located in what is known as the Sayless Flat area of the El Dorado National Forest.  The camp is fourteen acres owned by the U.S. Forest Service leased by the City of Sacramento.  We never used it for more than snow sledding, but the camp has sixty-one cabins built in the 1930s, a dining hall, lodge, store, nursing office, softball diamond, basket ball and valley ball courts and campfire pits.

One year the Towers came up for their annual visit and there was no snow.  We didn’t even bother to go up the hill and visit Strawberry Lodge or Camp Sacramento.  While the parents spent time catching up, we kids headed over to the Placerville Cinema 4 (that name was chosen in a contest and had to be the most uncreative choice in the list––I was always a bit irked by the banality of the name).  I remember the film was Quicksilver with Kevin Bacon and the theatre had only a smattering of patrons in attendance.  I must have been a senior in high school, because that film was released in 1986.  That marked the end of the snow days of my youth and it went out with a whimper.  From there it was off to college and other towns, but it is nice to know that Strawberry Lodge and Camp Sacramento are still there.  I’ve driven by on the way to Lake Tahoe a few times over the past twenty years, but never stopped.  I glance at that hill where the ski run used to be and will always see the ghosts of kids sliding down, bouncing about on tractor tire inner tubes, nearly killing themselves, but somehow surviving to warm up before the great fireplace of the Strawberry Lodge.

Me in the snow in 1975