Читать книгу Trinity Alps & Vicinity: Including Whiskeytown, Russian Wilderness, and Castle Crags Areas. A Hiking and Backpacking Guide онлайн

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Ranchers

Along with the miners of the 1850s came a number of ranchers who homesteaded along the rivers, mostly in the area north of Lewiston known as Trinity Meadows, which now rests at the bottom of artificial Trinity Lake. Some of their descendants remain cowboys, still driving beef cattle to summer pasture in the Klamath Mountains.

Anton and Anna Weber, an Austrian immigrant couple, bought one of these ranches in 1922 and established Trinity Alps Resort along the Stuart Fork. The Webers are credited with naming the mountains the Trinity Alps, as they felt the mountains resembled the Alps in their native country.

Loggers and Lumbermen

The miners and early settlers, although profligate in their use, hardly made a dent in the vast supply of timber present in the mountains. However, with the coming of the railroad in the late 1800s, timber cutting began in earnest, and logging and running sawmills soon eclipsed mining as the main industry in the region.

Later improvements in transportation and mechanization increased the rate of cutting dramatically, pushing the cuts to the boundary of the former Salmon–Trinity Alps Primitive Area in many places. In spite of intense pressure on the Forest Service and Congress by timber interests, much of the wilderness was spared the loggers’ ax. Checkerboard ownership (due to land grants from the federal government as an inducement to build the Central Pacific Railroad) of some of the land within the wilderness area was supposed to have been resolved by land trades and buyouts.