Had his golf clubs been handy, Bob Anderson, owner and chef of V Restaurant in Murphys, California, would have pulled a middle iron—a five or maybe a six. But when a ravenous, five-hundred-pound brown bear comes calling, you don’t have time to contemplate the shot.
“He was sticking his drooling snout through the pet door we installed for our Jack Russell,” said Anderson. “I just grabbed two frying pans and started banging them together.”
Anderson, 47, spun this yarn one night last fall after he had served me an excellent rib eye and a few glasses of a superb local zinfandel. Trim, bald and avuncular, Chefbob, as he prefers to be called, is like most people you meet in California Gold Country. Laid-back and loquacious, they love to tell stories of the first gold rush settlers, wax on about the latest varietal to come off the vine, or describe a career round on the golf course.
Chefbob loves his golf—his house overlooks the fourth fairway at Forest Meadows Golf Course—but that night at V was dedicated to retelling adventures ursine. Prior to opening the restaurant in 2004, he had spent twenty years in Yosemite National Park, most recently as executive chef at the Ahwahnee Hotel. “The joke was that the bears knew where to go looking for food,” he concluded in his surfer-guy lilt. “Our house held the residential record for bear break-ins.”
So it goes in California Gold Country, a rustic region long overshadowed by the state’s many other attractions. The last decade has seen the area evolve as visitors have arrived for outdoor adventure, historic exploration, and food and wine indulgences. But they have brought their clubs, too, intent on discovering a golf landscape where stands of century-old oak, ancient rock outcroppings and the occasional mining relic connect the game to the region’s storied past.
Bounded by the Central Valley to the west and the Sierra Mountains to the east, Gold Country is California’s last great secret. The region is navigated via the aptly named Highway 49, which stretches 250 miles from north of Lake Tahoe down to the foothills of Yosemite.
It was first settled during the gold rush of 1849, when California’s population grew from fifteen thousand to a quarter million in just three years. By the late 1860s the gold rush was basically over, and although California continued to grow—more than 37 million live there today—Gold Country was largely abandoned. For years, the forgotten outposts of the Mother Lode, as it is known locally, remained frozen in time, with the remnant population operating tired souvenir shops, greasy spoons and filling stations for the Yosemite- and Sierra-bound.
It was somewhere along Highway 49 that I once spent good babysitting money on a satchel of gold-painted rocks en route to the mountain cabin my family has owned since 1979. We made the three-hour trip from Palo Alto several times a year, stopping only for gas in the deserted foothills of the Sierras. But to me the place was enchanted: After studying state history in the fourth grade, I would perch on the back seat during these rides, conjuring grizzled miners panning in the creeks or gathered at night in their camps.
Today, all along the highway, boomtowns with frontier storefronts and raised wooden sidewalks are thriving once again. Among the many factors are a surge in family-owned wineries and the arrival of superior golf. The best courses in the north primarily are private, but the semiprivate clubs of Calaveras and Tuolumne Counties, in the southern portion of the region, are open to nonmembers, so that’s the place to concentrate a visit.
A good start is the town of Angels Camp, home to three of the four traffic signals in Calaveras County. It was here in the 1860s that Mark Twain gathered material for “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” the short story that brought him to prominence. The Jumping Frog Jubilee is still held here every May, but golfers are more likely to honor Twain by spoiling good walks at nearby Greenhorn Creek, where a bronze statue of the writer sits outside the clubhouse. Opened in 1996 and tweaked by Robert Trent Jones Jr. in 2000, the course offers a stroll along sloping fairways adorned with exposed slate and burbling streams. The highlight is the plunging par-three thirteenth, with its view of the surrounding foothills and of New Melones Lake. Twain’s famous golf quip is frequently brought to mind by the course’s surprisingly slick greens and the ancient oaks at every dogleg.
As a bonus for the scholar-golfer, Greenhorn Creek’s fairways are lined with local history. A rock wall built by Chinese miners splits the landing area of the downhill fourth, and a mining-camp oven borders the fairway of the par-four fifth. The short, sharp dogleg twelfth plays to a green positioned atop the Tuff Nut Mine, one of several shafts that honeycomb the earth below Angels Camp. If there’s a quintessential round to be played in Gold Country, this would be it.
Two hundred feet inside Gold Cliff Mine, the air was stagnant and stale. In coveralls and a hard hat, I sat on a steep incline, loose rubble skittering into the flooded shaft below. The only light came from a candle held up by my guide, Eli Fairchild, who was demonstrating the conditions the miners worked in. Despite his ponytail and boyish looks, he seemed to channel the ghost of an old prospector: His sense of humor was stilted, his phrasing old-fashioned. Without warning, Fairchild blew his candle out. I felt my eyes dart futilely as blackness enveloped us.
“So what would the miners do when this happened?” I asked, breaking an oppressive silence.
“They would wait,” Fairchild answered.
I tried to imagine them sitting around me. The so-called powder monkey with his box of dynamite. The teenagers with their glued-on mustaches. The veterans with dust-filled lungs courtesy of Widow Maker drills. Falling down a mine stope wasn’t the only way for a miner to meet his end in those days, but it was the one that most worried me now. We turned our headlamps back on and ventured farther into the man-made cavern.
Fairchild pointed to veins of quartz and specks of iron pyrite and mica embedded in the rock face. If he knew golf like he knows geology, Fairchild would be able to cite the scoring average of every Vardon Trophy winner since “Lighthorse” Harry Cooper. But even with Greenhorn Creek abutting the mine, he has little time for golf. Fairchild plans to turn the Gold Cliff into a premier educational site on the history of the California gold rush and hard-rock mining. For now, the Angels Camp Museum—where Fairchild volunteers—is the best place to see ore carts, drills and a model stamp mill.
Hazards of a different nature await at Saddle Creek Resort in the town of Copperopolis, a twelve-mile roller-coaster ride west of Angels Camp on Highway 4. Zigzag down this empty stretch of smooth asphalt and you’ll wish you’d upgraded your rental to a Porsche Boxster.
Settled in the 1860s after its namesake ore was discovered, the Copper Valley became the second largest producer of the metal in the United States. But after World War II, the mines closed and the town lay dormant until 1999, when the Castle & Cooke real estate company carved out a thousand acres to develop Saddle Creek Resort. With the population of the valley forecast to grow from four thousand to forty thousand in the near term, Castle & Cooke recently escalated its investment by building the Copperopolis Town Square. More than twenty reproductions of frontier-town fixtures—schoolhouse, fire station, city hall—surround a central square, with dining and retail at street level and residential lofts above. This ambitious mixed-use project, scheduled to open this spring, sits just off Highway 4.
Five miles in from the highway, the centerpiece of Saddle Creek Resort is a 1996 Carter Morrish golf course that’s consistently ranked among the state’s best—even ahead of Torrey Pines and Spanish Bay—but is virtually unknown outside the region. The layout stretches to 6,826 yards, and though the fairways are generous, more than a hundred white sand bunkers lidded with shaggy fescue frame them tightly. Flat lies are in short supply among the close-cropped humps and hillocks.
According to Morrish, designing Saddle Creek “was like going back in time to the 1920s, when you didn’t have to force anything.” The site he was given had lakes and trees and elevation changes that would allow for a variety of holes. It’s tough to find land like that anymore, “especially within a housing development,” he says.
The surrounding homes rarely interfere with views, and the seclusion is enhanced by a layout where no two holes run parallel. Stands of oak and meadow grass cloak the hillsides near and far, and egrets poise along the banks of silvery ponds fringed with reeds. Dusk unfurls shadows across the rolling terrain and fills the air with golden light.
So captivating is Saddle Creek that I simply wasn’t satisfied playing it once. The next day I woke at dawn and was soon at the wheel of a golf cart. Pulling up to the first green, I took stock of its subtle undulations and back-to-front slope.
I remembered the cape-hole second from the day before, where I had hit a 210-yard fade that settled in a bunker beside the pond. In the gauzy mist up ahead, I saw a heavily clothed figure stroking long putts across the green, but by the time I pulled up he was gone.
Arriving at the third, a 477-yard par five creeping uphill to the right, I found something beguiling in the hole’s isolation. I saw the mysterious figure again and caught up to him on the green. “Good morning,” I called.
He ambled over and introduced himself—Scott Dickson, superintendent. The accent was thick; I couldn’t place it. But Dickson, 40, was no local. I told him what I was up to.
“Do you have a favorite hole?” he asked.
“I like this one.” We looked back toward the tee—the view was even better from this vantage point. “What about you?”
“It’s hard to say.” Still no read on the accent. “I like two, though—the carry over Mitchell Lake.”
“How long have you worked here?” I asked.
“Coming up on four years,” he said. “From Maine, originally.” There it was. “My dad was super at Old Orchard Beach Country Club. Guess it’s in my blood.” He said this as if greenkeeping were a curse, so I pointed out that this morning didn’t seem too bad.
“Best part of my day. So peaceful—except when we get cows on the fairways.” Apparently, when cattle wander onto the course through holes in the fence, it’s Dickson’s job to help them find their way out again. “We play cowboy and yell, ‘Yee-haw!’ and ‘Get along, you bah-stahds!’” he added.
Dickson’s task that morning was to Stimp the greens. He held out his nicked-up Wilson 8802. “Want to roll a few?”
I struck the first ball and left it six feet out. At Saddle Creek, it’s easy to overread the break. I knocked the second ball closer, and Dickson hit the third one short of it.
“You win,” he said, with the glint of a smile.
The village of Murphys, half an hour northeast of Copperopolis, is the Sierra foothills’ answer to Carmel. Along both sides of tree-lined Main Street, galleries, inns and upscale shops occupy Victorian and frontier-style buildings. Formerly one of Calaveras County’s principal mining communities, it was named for brothers Dan and John Murphy, who opened a trading post here, and it is allegedly where the highwayman Joaquin Murieta began his murderous career.
Today Murphys is the culinary capital of Gold Country, with an array of casual eateries serving sophisticated fare. For oenophiles weary of Napa and Sonoma crowds, nineteen local wineries—with names like Twisted Oak and Frog’s Tooth—have tasting rooms downtown. The area’s steep hillsides and warm daytime climate, followed by cool evenings, are ideal for Rhône and Italian varietals. Although the region is just now gaining wider recognition, winemaking has existed in Gold Country since the 1850s, when European prospectors arrived. I wonder what those early vintners would think about wine as California’s modern-day gold.
For a stiffer drink in a more historic setting, there’s the bar at the Murphys Hotel, California’s oldest continuously operating hostelry, and the Iron Door Saloon in Groveland, the state’s oldest continuously running saloon. Constructed in 1852 from blocks of granite and English iron, the saloon first served whiskey from a plank laid over two flour barrels. Today the decor includes rusty mining implements on the walls.
The town of Groveland is the last outpost for travelers destined for Yosemite via the Big Oak Flat entrance. It’s also home to Pine Mountain Lake, where on any given afternoon the extremely friendly members and staff gather on the deck by the eighteenth green to watch everyone putt out. Visitors depart echoing sentiments displayed on one member’s license plate, lovnpml, not least of all due to the sporty Billy Bell design.
At 6,300 yards and with only forty-four bunkers, the challenge here is the tight fairways framed by oak, pine, cypress and cedar, as well as the subtly undulating greens with false fronts. The overall elevation change—two hundred and fifty feet—feels maximized throughout. The result is that club selection can be tricky and sidehill lies are inevitable.
The back nine at Pine Mountain Lake kicks off with four tumbling par fours, each offering views of Stanislaus National Forest. The crescendo comes at holes fifteen through seventeen. The fifteenth green, a compact uphill dogleg left, features a slippery back-to-front slope and a view of Yosemite. Lined by an alley of oaks on the right, the par-five sixteenth opens with a downhill tee shot and concludes with an uphill approach to a green bulging with undulations. The penultimate hole, a downhill par three, boasts a green ringed with oaks whose rustling leaves scatter the streams of light.
The end of the line for Highway 49 is the town of Oakhurst. It’s home to Château du Sureau, one of the world’s hundred best hotels, as selected by readers of Travel + Leisure. This Provençal-style inn merits a visit not only for the sumptuous rooms and the gastronomy at Erna’s Elderberry House but also for its proximity to Sierra Meadows Country Club, the final stop on the Gold Country golf trail.
Located in a hidden valley in the town of Ahwahnee, Sierra Meadows received a makeover in 2001. Its terrain is less dramatic than that of other courses in Gold Country, with fewer contours and flatter greens. But the shady holes along the perimeter offer variety and elevation change, and the use of native grasses and existing trees and water impart a minimalist feel. The course also features striking rock formations seemingly borrowed from Stonehenge. The views of the forested surrounding hills are sublime.
Now that I’m behind the wheel and no longer peering out a window from the back seat, I’m happy that California forgot about Gold Country for so long. Left largely undisturbed, it was able to retain its authenticity. The remaining flecks of gold may be buried deep in abandoned mines, but above the surface there is still much to be discovered, both on and off the course.
It’s a melancholy trip, back through the flat and dusty valley toward California’s crowded coast. But I know I’ll be back.
