Millions of dollars were extracted from these placers, but now the villages are deserted and all mining operations have ceased.

The time is not far distant when automobile parties will arrange to stop over in one of these little places, and with a competent guide, go over the deserted placers.

It is hard to realize that by the mere power of water mountains were washed away, leaving the denuded country on the one hand, a land of mounds and hummocks, like the Bad Lands in miniature, and on the other hand of masses of debris, too heavy to be washed away into the streams.
The wildest portions of the Sierras are revealed in ascending from Dutch Flat to the Summit.

The snowsheds of the Southern Pacific Railway come into sight, perched like peculiar long black boxes, with peep-holes, along an impossible ledge of the massive granite cliffs, and the Sierran trees tower upright from every possible vantage ground in the granite beneath.
At Towle, three miles beyond Dutch Flat, the shipping point is reached from which much of the material was hauled for the building of Lake Spaulding dam.

Hundreds of teams were employed in this work, and the road showed an almost unbroken procession for months.