To Plan A Trip

Every gold-rush town is worth seeing, but some are especially attractive. Sutler Creek is pretty, and it contains the Sutler Creek Inn, an unusually comfortable bed-and-breakfast place (209-267-5606). Go east out of town on the Sutler Creek-Volcano road; what may be the loveliest twelve-mile drive in California ends in the tiny town of Volcano, which manages to seem at once abandoned and lively. Farther south is Columbia, the sometime “Gem of the Southern Mines.” Like Old Sacramento, it has been laken over as a slale historic park and immaculately restored. If you can, stay in the City Hotel, whose tall bedrooms with their sepulchral Easllake furnishings give you the peculiar and privileged sense of sleeping in a museum (209-532-1479). The Golden Chain Council of the Mother Lode, Inc. (P.O. Box 1246, Auburn, CA 95603), publishes a crowded and useful map of Highway 49. For a fine general history, gel a copy of Joseph Henry Jackson’s Anybody’s Gold: The Story of California’s Mining Towns (Chronicle Books). For the California office of tourism, call 1-800-862-2543.