"Unassuming Shrangri-La in Trinity Alps Weaveville blends mystic East, Old West in Gold Rush alchemy"

- John Flinn, Chronicle Staff Writer, Sunday, August 1, 2004

Weaverville (Trinity County) -- In 1941, James Hilton, the British author of "Lost Horizon," was on a lecture tour of the United States. Inevitable, a reporter asked him: In all your wanderings, what's the closest you've found to a real-life Shrangri-La?

"A little town in northern Californa," the writer responded, presumably with a wistful, far-away look in his eye. "A little town called Weaverville."

I thought the comparison was pushing it a bit, but I started to wonder as I drove into this pretty alpine hamlet, which is cradled by snow-tipped peaks, and found a weathered string of Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags flappng along the main street. Then a pair of saffron-robed Buddhist monks, from the nearby Chagdud Gompa, came strolling out of a natural food store.

Maybe Hilton was on to something after all.

For most visitors, though, Weaverville's chief lures are that it's a wonderfully preserved Gold Rush town and gateway to the exquisite Trinity Alps, a miniature Sierra Nevada between Redding and Eureka.

Its Old West downtown has changed hardly at all since Hilton's visit, although a new conglomeration of strip malls and fast-food outlets is metastasizing a mile to the east along Highway 299.

In the red-brick downtown, the swinging doors of saloons still open onto wood-plank sidewalks, locust trees still line Main Street, and white metal staircases still spiral upward to wrought-iron balconies. . . .

Downtown's most intriguing feature -- and something that contributes to the Shangri-La aura -- is the Taoist Joss House, the oldest Chinese temple in continuous use in the state. It was originally built in the 1850's, when Weaverville had a sizable Chinese population from Guangdong Province, with their own stores, barbershops, theaters and gambling houses. The temple was rebuilt in 1874 after a fire and hasn't changed much in appearance since then. It's now a state park. . .

Rising straight above town are the Trinity Alps, a compact and inviting mountain range filled with soaring pine forests, frothing streams, turquoise lands and castle-like granite peaks, some sporting tiny glaciers. The summits aren't nearly as lofty as the Sierra Nevada -- the highest, Thompson Peak, tops out at a mere 9,002 feet -- but because of the range's northerly latitude, its timberline high country begins at an easy-to-breathe altitude of 6,000 feet.

The Trinities are a renowned fly-fishing venue, and popular backpacking trails such as Canyon Creek get a lot of traffic on summer weekends, but it doesn't take much effort to carve out a little piece for yourself.

At the edge of town, I turned onto a dirt road that switch-backed up the side of a mountain for 9 somewhat jouncy miles -- it was fine in an all - wheel-drive Subaru Outback, and I'm told that, with a little care, normal passenger cars can make it -- to a fire lookout with 360-degree, king-of-the world views.

From a nearby turnout, I set out with my dog Tucker on a hiking trail that angled up to a little notch on a ridge and then descended sharply to a rocky amphitheater containing East Weaver Lake. Ringed with wildflowers and craggy buttresses, it was an unbeatable spot for a leisurely picnic, a long swim (Tucker)  and a siesta on  a sun-warmed granite slab (me). At an alpine lake this easy to reach in the Sierra, I would have had to elbow my way through a mob of hikers just to reach the shore. In the Trinity Alps, Tucker and I had it all to ourselves.

Back in town, I bought an ice cream and went for a stroll through the town's leafy back streets, past tidy old miner's cottages, a few of them festooned with strings of sun-bleached prayer flags. I wondered about a former colleague who had retired here years ago. Weaverville, I decided, would be a pretty great place to grow old -- or perhaps to not grow old at all.

John Flinn, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, August 1, 2004