2 min
Overview
From the moment Bay Area lumber barons caught wind of massive trees that rivaled and even surpassed the mighty, but rapidly dwindling coast redwood, they set their sites on the sequoia groves of the Sierra Nevada. With an admirable haste that was as devastating as it was inefficient, lumber companies spearheaded by the Sanger Lumber Company went to work on some of the most accessible groves in the upper Kings River watershed – Converse Basin Grove, Converse Mountain Grove, Indian Basin Grove, and Big Stump Grove. Within a few short decades, these lumber companies thoroughly extirpated the groves along with the co-mingled sugar pines, white fir, and incense cedar in a drive to profit off of the rampant growth of San Francisco. With the low-hanging fruit on the west side of Park Ridge now picked, the nearly defunct Sanger Lumber Company turned its eyes further east to the timber surrounding Tenmile Creek. After the Sanger Lumber Company finally made good on its threat to go belly up in 1905 (sequoia timber was never profitable, making the destruction even more galling and senseless), Thomas Hume and Ira Bennett purchased the Sanger Lumber Company and re-christened it the Hume-Bennett Lumber Company. In order to aid the movement and storage of timber east of Park Ridge, Hume and Bennett deduced the need for a reservoir near the center of their operations. Following the construction of a damn built by John Eastwood across the outlet of a vast meadow known then as “Long Meadow,” newly christened Hume Lake began to fill. The water from the reservoir would be use to store logs and later shuttle them along a 73-mile flume – the longest ever created – down hill to the town of Sanger where the old Sanger Mill was located. For twelve years, Hume and Bennett clear-cut the surrounding forest until a forest fire wiped out their entire operation in 1917. The lumber company resurrected itself, only to finally shut down logging operations for good in 1924 before turning over the land surrounding the lake to the United States
Trail Stats
4.5 km
91 m
1880 m
1578 m
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