By Jim Bar

The Stevens Trail starts half a mile too late. The trail officially begins at the end of a frontage road that runs on the sout side of Interstate 80 just beyond the town of Colfax.
But the trail should begin up the road at the Colfax cemetery. There, among the graves of gold seekers and generations that have followed, stands the simple monument to Truman Allen Stevens, trailblazer. Toward the front and center of the graveyard, a chest-high oblisk of black granite marks where Stevens finally rested his feet. That's where the good walk should begin. The good walk that winds its way down the south facing slope to the North Fork of the American River - a walk through time, and now through a space preserved.
Eariler this year, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, with the help of the Trust for Public Lands, acquired 230 acres around the trail. The land had been owned by a group of now retired Sacramento doctors who had envisioned a neighborhood of second homes. The purchase is part of a strategy by the bureau to consolidate public lands around foothill streams to provide environmental protection and recreational opportunities as the state's urbanization crawls eastward out of the valley.
"A wild river is the vestige of primitive America," said Dean Swickard,. "We are trying to protect the public's options for the future and be sure the historic trail is protected and can be used."
In Stevens' day, the trail crossed the stream and cut steeply up the adjacent ridge to the town and gold fields of Iowa Hill. But the bridge is long gone and scrub oak and manzanita, poison oak and poisoned rattlers have pretty much reclaimed that portion of the trail not often taken.
For walkers today the destination is the 4.5 mile trail itself, and the pulsing runoff of the western slope that awaits them at the bottom of the canyon. But the trip, naturally, goes much farther - back in time.
The Stevens Trail really begins more than 130 years ago. It was that time when thousands believed their destiny was El Dorado - and to manifest their destiny they came to the Sierra. Stevens left Camden, Maine, in 1859 and traveled by boat to the tropical jungles of Panama. He crossed the isthmus and then plied the Pacific Ocean up the West Coast. Venturing through Sacramento to the Northern Mines, he traversed the ridge-top route similar to the one that cars and trucks race today with nary a roadside distraction, the road to North Lake Tahoe and all points east.
Colfax at the time was a hub, a community serving mines in the more isolated regions across neighboring canyons.
When Stevens arrived in Colfax, he came to the conclusion there were two ways to get rich here. One involved a lot of stooping in icy streams, or trying to disassemble the Sierra one swing of the pick at a time. It required constant diligence against claim jumpers.
The other way was to mine the placer from the miners. This was not the path to instant riches. It was the guys doing the back-breaking work who were playing the lottery. Nevertheless, Stevens, then 45, chose the safer bet.
Stevens built the trail, or more likely had it built. He organized a livery in Colfax and built another on the ridge to the south in Iowa Hill, a town of 10,000. He charged a toll.
The quality of the construction is tested with each foot fall. While the trail negotiates, 1,100 feet in elevation change, it is not as steep as most. Where the trail skirts across the face of cliffs, the rock reinforcements still hold firm against gravity's constant desire for geographic equality, and the seasonal runoff that is gravity's ally.
The trail crosses just under Cape Horn, the mamoth granite outcrop that was the firest real engineering challenge for builders of the transcontinental railroad - a challenge met with the courage of Chinese laborers, who lowered themselves in baskets (an effective technology, but deadly) to chip out of the rock a gradual right of way for the railroad and for those who came after them.
The trail forges Robber's Ravine - in the spring an eager waterfall that today invites tranquil loitering, but whose name reports an anxious legacy.
The trail passes several mining tunnels. Most of them are closed. But one runs several feet back into the mountain, and then chases the nearly vertical quartz vein running through the rusting rock. Peer into the dank tunnel and envision where the story of the Stevens Trail really begins, more than 100 million years ago.
The violence of heat and pressure deep within the earth forced gold and other minerals up into cracks of the bedrock, then an ancient sea bed. An ancestral Sierra Nevada was pushed skyward.
The rising mountains confronted the steam of moisture marching across the Pacific. The mountains, then as now, forced the weather fronts to rise and cool and surrender their moisture. But the mountains, too, paid for the confrontation, with intensive and incessant erosion. The rocks and earth that comprised the old sea bottom washed down the slope and filled the great Central Valley. The streams cut deep gorges that eventually esposed and then consolidated some of the gold that had been hidden in the rock.
A second Sierra rose, this one forced up by the collision of two great plates of the earth's crust. Again, erosion stripped away the upper layers of the mountain, yielding still more of the once buried trasure.
This was the booty that argonauts plundered, first with pans and sluice boxes. And eventually, in the Yankee tradition, higher technology was employed to capitalize on the good thing. Hydraulic mining scoured away vast chunks of mountain. It was a self-defeating technology.
While keeping alive gold fields like those around Iowa Hill, the hill itself was nearly washed away.
In 1884, Judge Lorenzo Sawyer handed down what stands as one of California's primary environmental decisions. Downstream communities had complained that the mining debris was choking rivers, burying farmland and increasing the severity and frequency of flooding. Sawyer, acting on the nuisance-like complaint, ruled that the hydraulic miners must be responsible for their pollution - in this case waves of detritus. Efforts were made to capture the debris and to convince the goverment to take responsibility. But the industry could not withstand the additional costs, and hydraulic mining in places like Iowa Hill came to an end.
About that same time, a public road was also cut traversing the ravine. Stevens lost his monopoly. Iowa Hill lost its purpose. Miners went to work for the railroad or the timber companies.
In autumn 1894, Stevens died at his home in Colfax. He was 80. According to his obiturary he left a son, a Judge Stevens, also of Colfax. He also left the trail, which in the 1960s officially became a public easement through largely privately held land.
For the last 40 years, a renaissance has been promised the region. A sister agency of the BLM, the Bureau of Reclamation has tried for decades to dam the canyon near Auburn. Those dreams in part have been stymied by the very geology that created the gold and the canyon.
As originally planned, the dam would have backed water to the Iowa Hill bridge. That vision inspired a group of doctors, including Asa Springer of Sacramento, to purchase several hundred acres of land.
"We bought it for an investment, Dr. Springer remembered. We didn't know much about the trail."
Now the trail is experiencing a different kind of renaissance. At the soles of peoples' feet.
The trust for Public Lands, a nonprofit agency that uses its flexibility and the tax code to work for the commonwealth, purchased 260 acres from the investors. It immediately sold the Bureau 230 acres for $570,000 from the federal Land and Conservation Fund. The balance will pass to public ownership when the Bureau comes up with the money.
Both the Trust and the Bureau saw the same attributes in the trail: a natural beauty enhanced by history.
"The trail loooks much like it did when Stevens built it," said Dean Decker, a BLM archaeologist. "The natural environment, the appearance is undisturbed. From those aspects, it is a really valuable historical property and hiking the trail is an interesting experience.
"I have heard this story," Decker said. "It is probably apocryphal, that the trail was once used by circus elephants. An entire circus used the trail to get to Iow Hill.
"You can believe it, or not believe it," Decker said. "It is up to you."