It's time to escape to California's Gold Rush towns for postcard charms and swimming holes

Los Angeles Times

3 days ago

You could argue that Nevada City peaked 170 years ago, along with Charles Darwin, Herman Melville and Queen Victoria.
But we're still talking about them all. And Nevada City, 60 miles northeast of Sacramento in the Sierra foothills, is reachable without a séance.
In the 1850s, it grew from a miners' outpost into a Gold Rush boomtown of 10,000 (heavy on the bars and brothels) before anyone got around to naming that other Nevada as a territory or a state. Today it lives on as a tiny town with a lively arts scene and a liberal bent, home to about 3,200 souls.
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Perhaps because there's so much to escape from these days, Nevada City and its larger, more middle-of-the-road neighbor Grass Valley have been drawing more visitors than ever lately. Nevada County's hotel and vacation rental tax revenues have doubled in the last five years to a record high.
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'A lot of people are coming up from the Bay Area and settling up here because Nevada City is in a lot of ways like the Bay Area,' said Ross Woodbury, owner of Nevada City's Mystic Theater. 'It's a very blue town in a very red region.'
If you're from elsewhere, it's easy at first to overlook the differences among these Gold Rush towns. Once your feet are on the ground, however, the distinctions and fascinating details shine through — as do historic rivalries.
'Nevada City thinks it's a little better than Grass Valley and Grass Valley think it's a little better than Nevada City. I don't think that's ever going to change,' said restaurateur John Gemignani, standing by the grill of the Willo steakhouse in Nevada City.
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'That's never going to change,' confirmed his wife, Chris Gemignani.
Nevada City's intimate size, upscale shops and throwback 19th century architecture alone are enough to win over many people. Its downtown is a 16-acre collection of more than 90 historic buildings, cheek by Victorian jowl. Say you have breakfast at Communal Cafe, lunch at Three Forks Bakery, dinner at Friar Tuck's, a drink after at the Golden Era. You haven't even hit 1,000 steps for the day yet, unless you've been dancing to the live music that often fills the area. (One night, I stepped from Spring Street into Miners Foundry — an 1856 landmark now used as a cultural center — and found about 200 locals gathered for a community sing, a chorus of Beatles-belting Boomers.)
For those who seek higher step counts, forested foothills and miles of trails wait outside town, along with often-perilous springtime whitewater and summer swimming holes along the South Yuba River. And in surrounding hill country, the Empire Mine and Malakoff Diggins, once the major employers (and polluters) of the region, now serve as state historic parks. The Beat Generation poet Gary Snyder (95 years old and well represented on the shelves at Harmony Books on Main Street) still lives on a ridge outside town.
Meanwhile, four miles down the road from Nevada City in Grass Valley, changes are afoot. The Holbrooke Hotel (statelier sibling to Nevada's City's National Exchange Hotel) reopened after a dramatic renovation in 2020. Soon after, spurred by the pandemic, the city closed busy Mill Street to cars, making it a permanent two-block pedestrian promenade full of restaurants, bars and shops.
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Still, if Los Angeles moves at 100 miles per hour, Foggy Mountain Music store clerk Pete Tavera told me, 'Grass Valley is like 60.'
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Both towns preserve their mining heritage, and when you stroll through them, you can just about hear echoes of those raucous Gold Rush days. Here's a little more of what I learned during a three-day visit:
In the early days of the Gold Rush, most of the area's mine workers lived in Grass Valley while the owners, bosses and other white-collar people built their upscale Victorian homes in Nevada City, the county seat.
The Great Depression of the 1930s never really reached this corner of Gold Country, because the big hard-rock mines kept on producing gold.
In 2024, when a company tried to restart gold mining at the nearby old Idaho-Maryland Mine, residents of Nevada County, which includes Nevada City and Grass Valley, rose up and the county board of supervisors shut down the idea, citing environmental risks. These days, it seems, Nevada County wants to remember gold mining, not live with it.
Because everybody needs a break now and then, here is a closer look at 15 essential spots, starting in Nevada City, continuing with Grass Valley.