ROAD TRIP! Hope Yet for a Little Rail Town

Courtesy of cornerstonedunsmuir.com/historic-dunsmuir/

Heading north from the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, we stopped in Dunsmuir, a small town in the midst of a beautiful mountain range before the CA/OR border. My daughter had fond memories of the place, but my impression was of a town that waved goodbye to its glory days: empty storefronts, a deserted downtown. Dunsmuir has had its share of booms and busts. By the early 1900s, largely thanks to being a railroad center, Dunsmuir was the most populous California city north of Sacramento. By the mid-1950s, the railroad transitioned from steam to diesel locomotives, and the substantial workforce in Dunsmuir was let go and dispersed. Due to its position in a time warp, frozen in the 1930s, the downtown is designated a National Historic District. Dunsmuir remained popular with tourists and sportsmen until 1991, when a train derailed upstream from town. A tank car ruptured and spilled its entire contents into the river:  approximately 19,000 gallons of soil fumigant. Over a million fish, and tens of thousands of amphibians and crayfish were killed. The entire basis of the river’s ecosystem was destroyed including trees and other plant life along the river. The chemical plume left a 41-mile wake of destruction; the accident still ranks as the largest hazardous chemical spill in California history. The area is now largely recovered from the spill though some species (crayfish and frogs) have not yet come back. The watershed is carefully stewarded by the Upper Sacramento River Exchange, and the Upper Sacramento River is open to catch-and-release fishing all year round. Let’s hope the once-thriving little town of Dunsmuir sees better days. At least they've got plans for upcoming events, and the town has a lot of fans and potential. A great opportunity here for someone enterprising… 

Journeying on, we smelled the scene of destruction before we saw it – evidence of this year’s extensive fires left charred trees like thousands of 40-foot-tall black pencils across much of the range between Dunsmuir and the border. It will take a while, but fire and regrowth is the natural order of things. We dropped into a high plain, then into Ashland.