Soap Creek  June 2003 In 1903, the Sugar Pine Railway was incorporated to bring lumber from the vast timber tracts of the California Sierra Nevada Mountains to the lumber mill  at Standard California. In 1921, the line was sold to the Pickering Lumber company which pushed the main line over 70 miles into the Sierra to just outside Calaveras Big Trees State Park.  Before logging operations ceased in 1965, the last major logging camp at Soap Creek Pass was the seasonal home to nearly 2000 rail workers, lumber men, and their families.  At the end of logging operations  in the 1950’s the camp was closed.T day, slowly returning to the forest from which their lumber was originally hewn.

Photo of logging camp  buildings being moved is from “Sugar Pine Railway Memories”by Manny Marshall.  Book may be ordered from the  Tuolumne County  Historical Society.

Logging camps were by  nature temporary things.  Cabins and equipment on skids were hauled in on rail  cars and set in place to be moved on when the timber was depleted. Loggers, rail  men, and their families would occupy the camps through the summer until winter forced closure, where they would be boarded up until logging resumed the following spring. Soap Creek Camp was the the last logging camp on the Sugar Pine railway. When railroad logging was given up in favor of truck and tractor  logging, the camp buildings were abandoned in the woods in the 1950’s.

An hour and a half into the forest along a road that follows the old railroad grade, the camp site  sits largely undisturbed. My daughters, my friend John, and his son Willy made a  day of tramping through the forest looking for artifacts of this nearly lost  era.

	The last decade has  been hard on the buildings. Most have collapsed, but several remain standing. This cabin was probably a supervisor’s cabin. The cabins were dragged into place with Steam Donkey winches or tractors and set on wood beams. All had water piped  in from a nearby tank and electricity from wires strung tree to tree on insulators.
					The wood cribing on  the downhill corner of this cabin is nearly 5’ tall. Company administrators and  men with families rated the larger cabins. Single men stayed in accommodations ranging from dormitories and bunkhouses to one room cabins.
		Despite being  “temporary” structures, the cabins were built to withstand being moved and are  quite stout. This cabin appears to have been assembled from three or four  different modules with a covered porch added on later. (notice the large rat’s  nest of sticks and branches on the bed frame in the foreground.)

				As recently as 6 years ago, this foreman’s cabin was nearly intact. The Boy Scout Camp that owns this land appears to be salvaging the lumber from some of the better buildings and using it to rebuild the one or two buildings that have some potential for  being saved.
		Since John and I then worked for a plumbing company, we were quick to spot plumbing. Notice how John pointed  out this fine 1950’s specimen before it bit him.

I especially liked the bright and airy kitchen. They sure could build ‘em back then.....

Again, quick to find the nearest privy, John looks into a 4-stall outhouse.  Well, sort of an  outhouse; it had electrical power and flush toilets, but no doors on the stalls.

Despite the abundance  of flush toilets, there was evidence of an earlier, less civilized sanitation system. Numerous caved-in privies were in evidence, even outside cabins that had flush toilets.  Obviously, running water and flush toilets came later when it  looked like the camp might last a while.

The main area of the camp had miles of sidings for for storing log cars and performing maintenance on  the rolling stock. Next to the main line are terrace after terrace of abandoned sidings.  The rails were salvaged for scrap leaving the ties, frog plates, and numerous rail spikes behind.

This telling photo shows how things ended for the railroad. When the railroad ceased operation, lines of loaded log cars were abandoned on their spur tracks.  When salvors in the 60’s returned to remove the rails and rolling stock for scrap steel, the cables on the log cars were cut and their loads of logs pushed over the side.  These rows of railcar-length logs are still wrapped in their binding cables and lay in a line where they landed 40 years ago.

The whole 1/4 mile length of one spur track is neatly lined with rotting old-growth logs of a size not found today.    Notice the trees in the background above: in photos  from the 40’s, not a single tree is visible along this spur line. All have grown in the last 60 years.

Also left behind were  the skid logs off a steam donkey.  Steam donkeys were huge steam-powered winches. These monsters pulled themselves through the woods by hooking the cable from their own massive winch to a tree or rock and pulling themselves along on skids carved from whole

				tree trunks. (Just about all that remains of this donkey are the skids and hardware holding them  together.) Once in place, the donkey pulled felled trees to the rail line over a  “skid road” made from two lines of logs laid parallel to each other like a  wooden train track.  The logs were then loaded onto railcars by another donkey using cables and pulleys strung from trees or headframes.
		This heavily constructed tank (look at all those rivets!) is possibly part of the boiler or upper stack assembly off the steam donkey carcass. The kids stopped whining  about the mosquitos long enough to smile for this photo....... (The photographer had  to take three shots...he was slapping the !!$#%^! mosquitos and kept getting a  blurry image!!)

Scattered amongst the  trees and in the wreckage of the cabins are numerous artifacts. (Ok, it’s junk, but it’s cool junk....give it another 50 years and it will be priceless junk!!) Ironing  Board Oil  Cans. The one above reads: “Red Line Lubricant” Union 76. Kerosene can

Circa  1940 electric clothes washing machine.

Drum off a very large  cement mixer.  It is probable that this was used in pouring the 25’ x 40’ concrete slab for the “cat shack” garage just across the road. I’m confident in saying this because not a single piece of concrete larger than the 18’ pads used under a water tank are to be found in this entire mile-long  logging camp. Loggers didn’t use concrete much when they had abundant rot-resistant cedar readily at hand and didn’t have to build anything that lasted more than 10 years; by that time the trees were depleted and the camp moved on...usually. Soap Creek camp was in use for over 10 years, an eternity for a logging camp. Since the camp was 70 miles of rail line away from headquarters, a more permanent shop was built here.

All that remains of the Cat shop is the large concrete slab and this inspection pit. Steel rails cast into the slab show that this was a shop for working tracked vehicles (Hence the name “cat (Caterpilliar) shack:) The steel sticks up out of the concrete just a bit to keep the treads from the tractors from tearing up the floor. This in itself is interesting because it shows a time of transition for the logging company where tractors replaced steam donkeys but were still delivered to the woods on steam trains.

Not far from the remains of the cat shack was another standing cabin. Outside were the carcasses of a washer, dryer, oven, and water heater. (Circa 1935)  This cabin had both a  modern bathroom with a septic tank as well as a collapsed outhouse.  It is apparent from the added-on porches front and rear that the building moved here  on railcars and then sort of “grew”into it’s  surroundings.

The flooring inside  was too hazardous to venture into, but we liked the arched doorway we could see inside. Notice the heavy log skid on the underside of this cabin. It appears that each room was dragged in by  donkey and leveled  on wooden cribs; the whole thing was nailed together and  then the roofs were patched together.

Out back was an old  truck. John spotted it first....John likes trucks.  If this one hadn’t been over  100 yards off the main road, up a hill, across a creek, and through a forest of new-growth cedars,  I’m sure he would have asked me if I had my tow chain with me. The vegetation in the foreground appears to be non-native, probably something that was planted by a logger’s wife in a summer garden 50 years ago  and has taken a liking to the area. You can barely see it  now, but the doors of the truck have the Pickering Lumber Co. logo on them.

John saying: “I drive  stuff to work in worse shape than that....”

This building appears  to be either a mess hall or a meeting hall. It is documented that the railroad had converted rail cars serving as kitchen/mess halls in these days but the unusual permanence of the Soap Creek camp and its residents makes it likely that this large building was used for many varied purposes.   In the foreground is a 55 gallon oil drum converted to a woodstove with an ingenious  draft device welded on. Like most things in the camp, it is make-do technology that probably worked very well.
			Look at the full-size  lumber used in the roof trusses and steep roof on this building! It’s no wonder that this large building, even with it’s huge open area has survived the crushing snows while dozens of others have collapsed.     Notice the bed  frame in the rafters. The woods around here are littered with iron bedframes....so many I didn’t bother taking pictures. This camp was home to  nearly 2000 at one time; that’s a lot of beds! As the camp has been stripped for scrap and looted over the years, the rusty bedframes are one of the more durable  artifacts left behind as worthless.

Another picture of massive wood skids on a collapsed cabin. Notice the beveled edge;  these things were made to be dragged through the dirt long distances after being lowered off  a railcar by a crane or donkey. It’s a testimonial to their builders that  anything at all is left to see after 60 years in the woods.

The road out from  Soap Creek is literally blasted from solid granite.  The side we drove up is  relatively mild...looking across the canyon however shows a piece of granite  called the “peeled onion”, a chunk of railroad bed that was called “the million dollar road” because it cost that much in 1930 dollars (!!) to blast though. Today it is a closed road used only by power company guys to access a hydroelectric plant in the river canyon.

These old photos from  Sugar Pine Railway Memories”, available from the Tuolumne County Historical  Society, show  the “onion” before and after...and the reason why it got the name; the rock strata exfoliates off the cliff sideways like the layers of an onion.  Notice  there are lot more bushes and trees on the cliff these days.

					Not too far from the Soap Creek is the boiler and winch portion of a 1922 steam donkey at the site of  the Sourgrass logging camp. In 1930, Sourgrass was the last pre-depression camp on the rail line. When orders for lumber evaporated during the depression, the  logging line shut down for 7 years.  This steam winch probably fell into such a  state of disrepair in those 7 years, it was probably left where it sat and wasn’t worth fixing in 1937 when operations resumed.  The still-visible rating plate reads: “Willamette” and “1922” and “200 PSI boiler pressure.”
			It looks like the  donkey was used as a parts donor. The upper smoke stack is gone, as well as most of the wooden sled, but enough remains to see the size of the boiler and cable  reel used. These were massive machines that ruled the forest at one  time!

Leaving the beauty of  the river canyon, we had to stop on a side road to pay tribute in the only fashion that we fat, white, balding guys know how......by filling a few soda cans and stumps from (environmentally friendly) selective logging cuts with  (environmentally inert) lead.

John prefers his .22 target pistol with its uncanny ability to hit things at ranges normally associated with rifles, but when goaded, he has to whip out his .303 British antique and demonstrate that those old army rifles you can buy at Big 5 Sporting  goods for 70 bucks (with no waiting period since they are “collectible”) are  fiendishly accurate. Unfortunately there are no photos of me wielding arms here  as I was too busy wailing away in the .32, .38, .22, .25 and 12 gauge calibers to spend much time taking photos.

	We did however take  the time to instruct my oldest daughter in proper handling of a dating  situation, er, I mean,  firearms safety.    I’m envious of her young eyes as  they can not only see that tiny front site on the 10-22 without squinting, they can pick  which letter on the 7-UP can they want to aim at at 100 yards. I’m doing good to  see the green can that far away.........she’s a darned good  shot.
				I’m hoping to frame  these photos and hang them in the hall where potential boyfriends can see  them.....heck, when I was a young guy I know I wouldn’t be disrespectful of any girl who could handle semiautomatic weapons!

Soap Creek Revisited!

After seeing the above write-up on Soap Creek, Cat wanted to see the site for herself.   Soap Creek is private property owned by a Boy Scout Camp.  We’re not crazy about tramping around on private property without permission, but since a forest service road runs right through the place, the BSA hasn’t been too vigorous about running off the casual sightseer as long as they stayed out of the main camp area. Unfortunately, the Boy Sprouts have been dismantling the historic artifacts at Soap Creek at an alarming pace with little regard as to the historical significance of what they are destroying.
   Intact cabins have been dismantled for scrap lumber, railroad ties have been pulled up and used as “practice emergency shelters”, and other historic artifacts have been sold for scrap.  It IS after all their land and they can do with it as they please, but the rate of destruction impelled us with a sense of urgency to see and photograph what was left while it was still there.
   Fortunately for us (and unfortunately for the BSA), the camp was ordered to close in 2006 due to contaminated water.  We seized upon this chance to visit the camp and grab a few more photos while there was still something to see. In the works during our visit was a state-of-the-art water treatment plant.  This will probably allow the BSA to reoccupy the camp in summer 2007 and continue to ignore the crumbling history in it’s possession while reducing the rest to scattered lumber.   (Sorry BSA, but you’ve got a gem of history there and you’re abusing it in our opinon!) 

In the camp “proper” are a dozen cabins built on the same design in pretty much the same state of disrepair.
  Cat poses here in one that showed signs of having had a little garden out front. Water pipes running overland enter these buildings through the exterior walls, which probably indicates that plumbing was added later.

Another cabin bites the dust after years of heavy snowfall.

This might be an original sign, or it might be a reproduction crafted by the BSA. I hope not...the irony of letting the whole logging camp rot while celebrating it’s history would piss me off too much!

Parts bins from the old roundhouse machine shop.  These bins narrowly missed being bulldozed to make room for the new water treatment plant. Some of the bins still have parts in them.

As noted in our first visit here, Soap Creek has numerous outhouses that were later replaced by indoor plumbing.   The camp here was unusually long-lived and the necessary sanitation improvements were added-on in later years.  

Beau and Rip take a break by the old Pickering Lumber truck. 

The only creature besides ourselves in Soap Creek that day was a feisty female alligator lizard.  Ghost Town Brat, Tabbi waits her turn to hold her.  Alligator lizards have “pit viper” shaped heads and will often imitate a rattlesnake when disturbed by tucking in their legs and looking menacing.  They have a powerful bite. (hence the careful grip on this squirmy rascal!), but rest assured, no lizards were harmed in the shooting of this photo.

Disclaimer:  All photos on this site our property of offroadexplorers.com. Unauthorized use will cause us to employ our team of flesh-eating lawyers to sue your ass off.  Off-Road and desert travel carries with it inherent risks. Pack plenty of water, spare gas  and a lot of common sense.  If you break down 75 miles from the nearest point of civilization, don’t come whining to us!   Respect the roads and artifacts you might find off-road. Leave everything where you find it so your children and grandchildren might have something to see in the future. Above all, tread lightly & pack out your own frigging trash.
No electrons were harmed in the making of this website; only cruelty-free voltages are used in maintaining this site
 which is guranteed to be low-carb, fat-free, phosphate free, and 100% American Made.