Does look like fun, but if it is yuba gold fields STAY OUT OF WATER IN LAKES it is very bad for you!
BIG JOE SSMF
Does look like fun, but if it is yuba gold fields STAY OUT OF WATER IN LAKES it is very bad for you!
BIG JOE SSMF
It is the Yuba Gold Fields, I just found out today. We didnt go in the water in the lakes for that reason but the river water is awsome and where we were swimming.
The directions are exactly per the above out by Tiechert and Nordic off Hammonton-Smartville.
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Protecting the people’s right of way: Public-access advocate Bill Calvert
PROFILE - December 20, 2004 by Tim Holt
Bill Calvert. PHOTO COURTESY BILL CALVERT
The Yuba Goldfields in California’s Central Valley is one of the more bizarre and intriguing landscapes in the state — a swath of moonscape, wetlands, and sagebrush that stretches along both sides of the Yuba River. Huge piles of rock tailings, left by gold dredgers in the early part of the last century, loom over ponds filled with bass and trout and frequented by migrating waterfowl.
This lonely landscape, about 15 miles from Marysville, has only four houses and very few roads. But life here hasn’t always been peaceful: In 1971, a large Texas-based conglomerate, Centex, attracted by the Goldfields’ immense reserves of gravel, began purchasing land in the region. By 1987, it had acquired 2,600 acres, more than a quarter of the Goldfields. Gravel is much in demand for roads and the concrete needed for development.
That same year, Centex’s subsidiary, Western Aggregates, declared ownership of a long-used Goldfields road, closing it off and locking the gates at both ends. The move shut off access to some 5,000 acres of public land long popular with local fishermen, hunters, and kids looking for swimming holes. It also meant that a retired garage-door-opener salesman named Bill Calvert had a hard time getting to and from his ranch in the Goldfields. The company gave him a key to one of the gates, but the lock was sometimes jammed and inoperable.
Someone other than Calvert might have sold the ranch and moved to a less contentious setting. But not Calvert, who’s now 70, and is described by those who know him as extremely stubborn, and — at times — "ferocious."
Taking on Western Aggregates meant confronting its deep-pocketed parent company. "There was no way I could fight them on my own. I knew I was going to need a lot of help," Calvert says.
He used his salesman’s charm to cobble together the Yuba Goldfields Access Coalition, an alliance that included a sport-hunting group and a watershed organization based in Nevada City, about 30 miles from the Goldfields. The group set to work researching the region’s complicated land ownership, but it also employed less subtle tactics. Huey Johnson, a former California secretary of Resources and an early member of the coalition, remembers the evening that Calvert, hearing that one of Johnson’s friends had been stopped by a locked gate, stormed out of his house, hopped on his tractor, and yanked the gate open with a chain. At other times, Calvert used bolt cutters to get the gates open. "The man is a tiger," Johnson says.
But what Calvert’s friends saw as acts of heroism, the mining company considered blatant vandalism and trespassing. Calvert can’t remember exactly how many times he was arrested — he thinks maybe six — and he estimates that there were a total of 50 arrests among the Goldfields public-access advocates. The Goldfields coalition was not part of the Sagebrush Rebellion, like the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade, which tried to open a road into a national forest in Nevada despite the risk to endangered bull trout, or Utah’s bulldozer-driving county commissioners, who want to disqualify land from wilderness protection. There was no ulterior motive, members say: Simply a desire to get to public and private lands the way locals had done for years.
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