Calpine, CA

At 5,689 feet in Sierra County, Calpine is a high Sierra settlement built around a very specific piece of working history. The Davies-Johnson Lumber Company established the town around 1919, and a Western Pacific branch from Portola served the mill between 1921 and 1940. Timber stocks were gone by the end of the 1930s, but the town's layout still carries the imprint of that short, intense logging era.

ATTRJudy Gallagher / CC BY 2.0

The mill pond remains, and several of the old skid houses have been put to humble second uses as chicken houses or storage. Even the former depot has a second chapter after being moved to Sierra Valley Ranch. Sierra Valley Ranch and the county's history-minded residents help keep those remnants from becoming anonymous leftovers beside the road. That mix of wood buildings, reused outbuildings, mountain roads, and a community that keeps its own history close gives Calpine a texture you can miss if you treat it as a name on the way through Sierra Valley.