Henness Pass Road Hi-Landers October 2013 Club Run Trail Boss: Rich Bugarin Home # 916-771-3359 Cell# 916-300-3192 E-Mail: rbugarin@hi-landers.com Meet at the Grass Valley Lumber Jack Restraint at 9:00am on Saturday October 26 Th, 2013 Lumber Jack is located at 2075 Nevada City Hwy, Grass Valley, CA 95945 Take Hy 49 to Grass Valley take the Brunswick exit, Left on Brunswick then right on Nevada City Hwy for one block to Lumber Jack on the. This run is a full day it is 100 miles from Grass Valley to Verdi Nevada. It is SUV/high clearance 2WD capable and should run through the fall color change. I understand it is the only Trans Sierra back road/dirt road (other than the 10 rated Rubicon Trail). Have a good breakfast; bring a lunch and plenty of drinks/water and I suggest you top off your gas tank in Grass Valley there is an AM/PM near the Lumber jack we are meeting at. The run ends near Reno and is a good chance for a weekend getaway before returning home. Trail Routes: Hy 49 to Camptonville, Henness Pass Road is forest service 293, Then FS S302, FS S309, FS S301 past Milton Reservoir continue on FS S301, Left onto FS 07 at Jackson Meadows Reservoir, Just pass Webber lake turn off of FS 70 onto FS 301, HY 89, FS 450, FS 860 to Verdi Nevada From Ghost Town Explorers Webpage Located in the Tahoe National Forest, Henness Pass Road was thought to have been laid out around 1849 and construction began in 1852 as a wagon toll road from Nevada to the gold fields of California. The road starts on Highway 49 at either Camptonville or a south fork at Oregon Creek where a covered bridge built in the 1860's is still in use. The Henness Pass Road ends in Verdi Nevada. By 1859 the California gold rush was dying down and with the discovery of silver in the Nevada Comstock, a mass exodus of miners from California to Nevada began. The Henness Pass road with it's established mining towns and stage stops became one of the primary routes to the Comstock second to the Placerville-Carson route to the south. So plans to improve the road began. In 1859, the Truckee Turnpike Company was organized to build a road from Marysville to North San Juan in order to connect up with the Henness Pass Road. Not to be left out, in Nevada City the Henness Pass Turnpike Company was formed to hook up Nevada City to the Henness Pass Road at Eureka. The two company's joined forces and, using the old emigrant route, built a road all the way to Virginia City. Between 1860 and 1868, the road was extremely busy, kind of like the Riverside freeway on a Friday! The traffic was so bad that in order to regulate traffic, freight wagons ran during the day and stages ran at night. Even though there was considerable traffic on the Henness Pass Road, it was still second in use to the Placerville-Carson Route. When the Central Pacific Railroad was completed in 1868, the use of the Henness Pass route came to an end.
The Henness Pass Road is one of the last trans-sierra backroads that can still be driven today. The road is pretty much a high clearance two wheel drive dirt road with a few rough spots along the way. Part of the original road has been bypassed with a paved road near Jackson Meadows Reservoir and Weber Lake. I used the GPS and Topo on the laptop to try and stay on the original road, but we found that bridges were washed out and finally when we got near the 89 crossing, we hit our second washed out bridge and had to turn around and take the paved road to the 89. After crossing the 89, Henness Pass Road was a good dirt road all the way to Verdi Nevada where we lost it in a newer housing track. Henness Pass Trail Courtesy of the South Yuba River State Park The original Henness Pass road was primarily a road for an easier entrance into California. After the Donner Party disaster of 1846, emigrants avoided the rugged cliffs above Truckee (later Donner) Lake. Instead they turned northward taking a longer route developed by Patrick Henness (or Hanness) in either 1849 or 1850, although that is a subject of some debate. What is known is that Henness, along with his partner Jackson, is the probable discoverer of the pass that bears his name, and in 1852 the wagon road over it was improved in an attempt to draw overland emigrants to the country of North and Middle Yuba Rivers and to the towns in the Yuba and Nevada Counties. However, most emigrants continued to use the Echo Summit-Placerv lle rou e (Jo nson s Cu off). In 1855 the road was officially surveyed by D.B. Scott as part of the region's bid for selection as the site of the California State Wagon Road. Although Scott's survey spoke in the glowing terms of the relative ease of the route through the Henness Pass and gave low estimates on the cost of improvements, the route was passed over in favor of the road through El Dorado County. The Henness Pass Trail was a primary (and shorter route) to the Comstock Lode in Nevada. A major advantage of the Henness Pass route was its accessibility to trade via navigable Sacramento, Feather, and lower Yuba Rivers. Freight of all kinds loaded at San Francisco on river boats, barges, and steamers unloaded at Sacramento and Marysville and, depending on the dry or wet season, such other landings as Nicolaus, and Knights Landing, for transfer to teamsters, stages, and pack trains. Many camps and towns were created along the roads, the distances between determined by oxen moving seven to ten miles a day and horses and mules traveling twenty miles each day. Even during the peak years of use the Henness Pass road second to the Placerville-Carson route. The great need for transportation across the mountains, the crisis caused by the Civil War, and the need for gold and silver by both the North and the South contributed to the planning and building of the Central Pacific Railroad from Sacramento connecting with the railroad lines of the midwest and eastern United States. The opening of the railroad in 1868 and its completion in 1869 put an end to the heavy hauling over Henness pass. Thereafter it was used only for local traffic. Additional resources: http://www.sierracollege.edu/ejournals/jsnhb/v2n2/trails-henness.html http://www.canvocta.org/henesspass_road.php