Preview of Beaten Paths & Back Roads

New book explores “the other California”

Beaten Paths & Back Roads is available on line at Lulu.com. Locally, the book will be available for sale at the Merced County Courthouse Museum Gift Shop.

My new book is called Beaten Paths & Back Roads.

It contains more than forty stories about places and people all over California with a focus on locations off the so-called beaten path.

In many ways, this is a sequel to the 2017 book California Back Roads. There are just too many stories to write about in just one book.

Here’s a preview

The California Gold Rush was sparked by the discovery of nuggets in the Sacramento Valley. It put California on the radar of the nation.

When gold was discovered at John Sutter’s mill near Coloma in El Dorado County, California in 1848 (the actual year, not 1849 as legend states) the gold rush was on. Soon, the region would fill with prospectors, wannabee gold seekers, and a myriad of service providers.

As news spread of the discovery, thousands of prospective gold miners traveled by sea or over land to San Francisco and the surrounding area. The non-native population of the region exploded from fewer than one-thousand in 1847 to well over one-hundred thousand by 1850.

Resting on a customized park bench as the base of two of the many trees inside Calaveras Big Tree State Park.

Photo: Newvine Personal Collection

While the rush peaked in 1852, some people who look at the era estimate that over two-billion dollars of gold was found during that short period of time.

The rush was effectively over within a few years, but left behind is a beautiful part of the California landscape that visitors now enjoy.

The scenery is spectacular, to coin a word often used by the late California Gold television show host Huell Howser. The region lies north of Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Mountains.

Calaveras Big Tree State Park is a free venue that offers small and medium scale hiking paths among the Sequoia trees.

The trees are the stars of the show. Looking up in some spaces, it is hard to see the tops of the majestic towers of nature.

There are a couple of fallen trees that have been left for visitors to view up close. You get a real idea as to how big these big trees are.

My wife and I posed for a photo in front of the Empire State Tree. As we are transplants from upstate New York, the symbolism of standing next to a tree named for our native state really hit home.

The park had a gift shop that had just the right number of taxidermy wild animals to impress the visitor.

My suggestion is to save the gift shop visit until the very end.

Otherwise, you might be on the lookout for an angry wildcat or wolf just like the ones preserved for posterity in the gift shop.

There’s too much to document in these pages, but permit me to share three venues that have provided natural beauty, with a link to the state’s motion picture history, with a little Broadway thrown in.

Steve Newvine lives in Merced.

Beaten Paths and Back Roads is available now on Lulu.com.

After October 5, copies will be available for sale at the Merced County Courthouse Museum gift shop.

Steve is launching the new book at a meeting of the Merced Women’s Club on October 3.