The first time I walked this trail was back in the Fall of 1969. I was attending College of the Siskiyous and my biology class went there on a field trip. Our instructor, a serious biologist, informed us that we would be going to a place that had recently been found to hold a record of sorts. Our destination was Sugar Creek, a drainage flowing from the eastern flanks of the Russian Mountains. I was excited to be going there, as being a fanatic fisherman when a teen, that mountain range and its lakes had been one of my favorite destinations.
The reason we were going there was because a recent “discovery” had put the spot on nature’s map. There, professors from Humboldt State University (a name that I will stick with doggedly, regardless of its recent change) had found a huge diversity of conifers (the group of trees that produces cones). In fact, there were more species of conifers in one small part of Sugar Creek than any other place of like size in the entire world!
Our professor drove us to the trailhead and the half-dozen of us aspiring scientists headed up the trail. We began to see trees that most of us were very familiar with: sugar pine, ponderosa pine, incense cedar, white fir, and as we climbed to higher elevations, red fir and mountain hemlock. They were all commonly found in our local “mixed conifer” forests. Many of us had cut them for firewood or Christmas trees. Some of our dads had worked in mills that turned them into lumber.
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The Moores, of Moore’s Gravel pit, at Callahan, — Richard and his father, Stanley, — discovered the largest Bristlecone Pine in that area. It made it to the record books.
Very interesting! But, are you sure it was bristlecones? Anyway, I knew Tim Moore after he got back from Viet Nam. We attended college at Weed together. Can he be reached now?