The weather was gorgeous yesterday. We decided to try to find the elusive China Gardens off of
USFS Road 4612 in the
Siskiyou National Forest. Touchdown! China Gardens is listed as an old mining site but when we got there we discovered what looked like an old homestead. There was evidence of mining, probably by Chinese immigrants, hence the name. Here is what looks like an old barn:
The throne room:
And evidence of mining:
There were majestic
Doug firs surrounding the area. You can see me, barely, to the left of the base of the tree:
This is a marker on one of the Doug firs indicating the presence of an active
red tree vole nest:
Old shakes (Shakes are hand-split, shingles are sawn) covering the barn roof:
The
California Ground Cone (Boschniakia strobilacea) is popping up all over the forest:
We are happy to report that we did not get eaten by a bear. There was fresh bear poop in several locations but we made it out without any canine/bear encounters. Happy Memorial Day!
It's a small cemetery with a handful of markers (some are missing but are marked with posts) and all the graves are pre-1930s. 
Most markers are from the mid 1800s. I can't help but wonder- who were these people? What did they look like? What did they care about? What did they dream about? Were they loved and missed by family back east? What was their life like in the southern Oregon wildlands in the 1800s? They couldn't just trot over to Shopsmart or Dairy Queen when they needed a bite to eat or pop on over to the clinic when they were sick.
We can read history books and go to reenactment villages but I don't think we can ever really understand what life was really like for anyone in the past. There are so many complicated layers to a society at any given point in time that I think it's not possible to really know. I wish someone would invent a time machine!