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Champagne With Madam Moustache

2/11/2016

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The year is 1854, and the once sleepy Spanish province of California
has been booming for the past five years with men pouring in from
around the world to find quick and easy wealth. The place is Nevada
City – a gold mining town in the Sierra Nevada Mountains which is at
the peak of its boom with high grade ore seemingly flowing in rivers
from the ground, pausing only briefly to spend a few hours in a
leather pouch hanging from a man’s belt, and then moving on to be
measured out in grains and nuggets to purchase whiskey, or female
companionship, or something else just as ephemeral and just as quickly
forgotten. Men crowd the streets of Nevada City seeking that alcoholic
haze of the night which will briefly separate them from the mindless
shovelfuls of endless dirt which fill their days, and perhaps they
might seek a woman as well who will share a few moments of her time
for a few flakes of gold. But women are few, and the wait for them is
always long. The day is the fourteenth of February, a day which is
vaguely familiar to you from memories of the home you left behind; a
day as one on which a man and a woman are supposed to share
intimations of affection. But the miners walking the rough streets of
Nevada City have no one with whom to share affection.

And the miner who is walking these streets? He is you, and you are
looking for . . . well, some kind of distraction. You’ve had a few
drinks but that pleasant floating sensation has disappeared too soon
from your brain while the acid remains too long in your throat. The
lines at the brothels are much too long and the gold in your pouch has
shrunk to a few small nuggets, so you’re wandering aimlessly with the
thin hope in your heart of finding an inexpensive laugh, or at least a
smile. Letting your feet guide your way you turn on to Broad Street
and, looking up, you find yourself standing in front of a saloon you
don’t remember ever seeing before. Looking at the elegant gold script
on the front window you see that the place is called Dumont’s, and
then you remember seeing the handbills posted around town for the past
week which announced its opening.

                                                            Dumont’s.
                              A Gambling Establishment For Gentlemen Only

Peeking around the gold lettering and in through the window you see a
fairly large gathering, all men, clustered around two dozen or more
gaming tables, most of them holding a glass in their hand and all
behaving calmly, civilized; much more sedate than in any other
establishment in town. So you straighten your spine, tuck your shirt
into your belt, brush the loose dirt off your pants, take a deep
breath, and push open the door.
You have just entered Dumont’s, the newest and most elegant gambling
hall in Nevada City. The proprietor is Eleanor Dumont, more famously
known as Madame Moustache.

There is a haze of cigar smoke in the air and the staccato sound of
clattering chips mixed with the hum of men’s voices. Against the far
wall at a long bar men are lined up, drinking mostly whiskey although
an occasional beer mug glitters in the filtered light. Each of the
tables in the room holds a small crowd of men, mostly playing faro or
poker. Off to the left there is a table around which is gathered by
far the largest crowd in the room, so you walk through the smoke and
edge your way through the men until you’re standing at the table’s
edge. And there, directly across from you, sits one of the most
mesmerizing women you have ever seen. With her hair pulled back from a
round face of olive skin her dark eyes suddenly look up at you. She
catches your eye and gives you a slight smile, then raises her glass
in a slight, personal toast and drains it.

“Madame drinks only champagne,” the man next to you whispers softly,
almost reverently.

And as she holds your gaze your hand goes to the leather pouch on your
belt, fingering the few small nuggets within and wondering just how
much champagne they will purchase. But it doesn’t really matter,
because you know you will spend them all anyway. You sigh as you open
it and order a drink for the lady; the most famous lady in the
California gold fields, the beautiful lady with the thin line of dark
hair on her upper lip; the lady with the moustache.

Eleanor Dumont was born in either France or in New Orleans, depending
upon which tale you believe, and is consequently either French or
Creole. She left home in her late teens and made her way to San
Francisco, where at the age of twenty one she took a job as a card
dealer playing the French game of vingt et un, the precursor to the
modern game of twenty-one. It was a game which was almost completely
unknown in California at the time, and therefore worthy of interest to
all of the men who sought any kind of new and exciting entertainment
in saloons. That, combined with the unheard of novelty of it being
dealt by a woman, made her table the most popular one at the Bella
Union, if not in all of San Francisco. Although she held the advantage
of being the dealer as well as that of knowing the game well, she
immediately gained a reputation of being a fair and honest card
player, which further increased her popularity. She would greet each
new player who approached her table with a slight smile and ask, “You
will play, monsieur?” Few men could refuse. The expected reply was
always, “Yes, I will play.” Or, “Oui,” if you wished to try to impress
her with your limited knowledge of French. If a player happened to
lose every last cent at her table she always offered to buy him a
drink or give him a few dollars to get home, never expecting to be
paid back. She would also help total strangers she would meet on the
street and offer them money or a hot meal. She became so well liked
around San Francisco that other dealers grew jealous and accused her
of being a clever card sharp; a cheater who skinned her victims as she
smiled at them, but this was seen as a ruse to discredit her and lure
men away from her table so that others might profit. No one believed
those stories because they were all enamored with the elegant French
lady with the thin line of dark hair on her upper lip, Madame
Moustache.

By 1854 Eleanor had moved on to the mining camps and was in Nevada
City, where she opened Dumont’s. It became an immediate success. Her
partner managed the other tables in the establishment and left it to
Eleanor draw the men in, which she did in droves. Her table was by far
the most popular in the place, and she continued her habit of treating
her patrons fairly and never hesitating to loan or give them money if
they needed it. If a man wished to buy her a drink she would smile and
always say “Oui”, as long as it was champagne. She would roll her own
cigarettes and occasionally accept a cigar. And she asked that men
refrain from cursing when with her and from telling ribald stories in
her presence. She kept her private life private, was never known to
take a lover, and her ever-present luck at the blackjack table never
ceased.

By 1857 the gold was playing out in Nevada City so Eleanor moved on to
the mining town of Columbia, where she had similar success. When the
gold played out there as well she went across the Sierra and by the
early 1860’s had settled in Carson City, Nevada, where she decided to
invest her substantial savings and retire from gambling. She settled
down, bought a ranch, and the woman who had never before taken a lover
suddenly fell in love.
The man’s name was Jack McKnight, and he told Eleanor that he was in
the cattle business and gave every impression of being a wealthy and
successful man. He was in fact an accomplished con man, and it took
him less than a month to fleece Eleanor of every cent she had,
including her ranch. He disappeared with all of her money and left her
financially destitute as well as broken hearted.

But Eleanor wasn’t one to take this kind of treatment lying down. Her
time of feeling sorry for herself quickly passed and she soon set off
on McKnight’s trail. When she found him she rekindled their
acquaintance with the aid of a double barreled shotgun, and gave him
the contents of both barrels straight in the chest at close range as
she said a final goodbye to the man who had broken her heart. She
didn’t get her money back, but it certainly made her feel better.

Alone again and broke, Eleanor was forced to return to the only
profession she knew – dealing cards. She reestablished her trade in
the gambling halls of Nevada, and from there moved on to several
different towns in Montana. Then came Idaho, Utah, and again back to
Nevada. Such famous Old West towns as Deadwood, South Dakota and
Tombstone, Arizona were also graced with her presence, and wherever
she went Madame Moustache was always the most famous lady in town as
well as the most gracious, continuing her lifelong habit of generously
standing the losers to a stake as she collected her winnings.

But not all men behaved in quite the gentlemanly fashion which was
expected of them. One evening in Bannack, Montana as Eleanor walked
home, two men suddenly jumped out of the shadows and demanded her
money – or else. Eleanor calmly replied that she would not give them
her purse. Then, smiling, she added that they could have something
else instead. Slowly and enticingly she lifted her skirt, and the
men’s attention became riveted as Eleanor’s under garments were
gradually exposed. Still smiling, she reached one hand beneath her
skirt and quickly pulled out a Derringer and fired it point blank at
one of the would-be robbers, who dropped where he stood with a hole in
his chest and never moved again. The other man quickly disappeared
back into the shadows from where he’d come and never bothered her
again.

As the 1860’s flowed into the 1870’s many of the mining towns of the
West faded into ghost towns, and the communities that survived grew
into more well-rounded places where a woman was no longer a novelty.
Although still famous and still quite good at playing cards, Eleanor,
too, changed with the times. The thin, pretty girl of San Francisco of
1849 grew into a more heavy character who now sat in the chair at the
blackjack table. She now also had a darker and heavier moustache, and
her taste in liquor expanded to include whiskey. As the towns grew
more civilized and money spent at the gambling tables decreased,
Madame Moustache was forced to expand her repertoire and become an
actual Madame as well as a card dealer. In Deadwood, South Dakota,
Eleanor struck up a friendship with Calamity Jane and taught the
famous cowgirl the finer points of playing poker, although Jane
apparently never developed the talent for cards as had Madame
Moustache.  When Eleanor next moved on to Tombstone, Arizona, she
quickly saw that more income was to be made from prostitution that
from playing cards. So, despite the fact that Tombstone already had a
very popular brothel known as Blond Marie’s, Eleanor opened up a rival
house just down the street, hiring a variety of girls to fill the
beds. On Sundays she would have the ladies put on their best dresses,
load them into an open wagon, and then drive up and down the streets
of Tombstone so the men could get a good look. Eleanor would often
smoke a cigar as she drove and wave it as the finer ladies in town
stared at her in horror.

By the middle of 1878 things had gone full circle for Madame Moustache
and she was back in California; back in a mining camp; back to dealing
twenty-one. In May of that year she arrived in the town of Bodie on
the eastern side of the Sierra, and a Bodie newspaper acknowledged the
arrival of the famous gambler in town and welcomed her, commenting
that she still looked as young and as pretty as she ever had. For a
little over a year Eleanor continued to deal cards in Bodie and made a
quiet living, but was never able to replace the fortune taken from her
by Jack McKnight.

On September seventh of 1879 the luck of Madame Moustache finally ran
out. The previous several nights had not seen her usual run of money
at the card table, and her personal card-playing bank had slowly
diminished as the week went by. On the seventh it ran out completely
and Eleanor had to beg a few hundred dollars from a friend to continue
playing. When that, too, was soon lost and all her friends refused to
lend Eleanor a stake, she rose and said a quiet goodnight to the men
in the Magnolia Saloon where her table had been for the past year and
headed out the door. She went to her room and scribbled a short note.
Then, taking a bottle off the table, she went down the street and out
of town, walking into the desert. There, all alone, Madame Moustache
ended her life.

The next morning a sheep herder found her body, laying on the ground
with a rock for a pillow beneath her head, the hastily scribbled note
still clutched in her hand and the now empty bottle by her side. Broke
and all alone, Eleanor had committed suicide. People in Bodie had
noticed that she had been spiraling emotionally downward for months
and no one was there for her on that final evening when she so
desperately needed someone; someone to help her as she had helped so
many others. The note in her hand indicated her wishes for the
disposition of her few possessions, and the autopsy showed that her
last drink had been of red wine heavily laced with morphine – a most
uncharacteristic drink for the famous champagne-loving Madame
Moustache. Word of her death spread like wildfire throughout the towns
of the West. The citizens of Bodie passed the hat around to collect
money to send her off properly, and men travelled hundreds of miles to
attend her funeral – the largest funeral ever held in the town of
Bodie and one of the largest funerals anywhere in California up to
that time. So many carriages were needed for the funeral procession
that they had to be brought in from Carson City, over a hundred miles
away. Men from all over the West joined the procession and then
retired to the saloons to raise a glass in her honor. The news stories
from the Bodie newspapers were wired all across the country, and
Madame Moustache’s fame in death now eclipsed the considerable fame
she had enjoyed in life.

Eleanor Dumont was laid to rest in the Bodie cemetery where she
resides to this day, although the marker on her grave has long since
disappeared and now no one is quite sure of exactly where rests. But
if you visit the mining town of Bodie, which is now a state park, and
if you walk its streets and peer in the windows of its saloons, then
perhaps you just might hear the echoes of the shouts of the boisterous
crowds who once jostled around the table of Madame Moustache. And if
you are in Bodie in the late evening when the cards were once falling
and the piles of chips were being pushed across the tables as men
drank whiskey; won and lost small fortunes; and bought glasses of
champagne for the elegant Madame Moustache, then perhaps you will want
to take a few minutes to say goodbye to the famous lady yourself and
walk across the road to the Bodie Cemetery.
Bring a bottle of champagne with you, and a couple of glasses.

And as the stars shine bright above the quiet desert, from somewhere
amidst the headstones you just may hear her whisper, “You will play,
monsieur?”

Fill the glasses with cold champagne and lift yours in a toast, a
salute to a full life; a life well-lived.

“Oui, madame. I will play.”
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The Restless Spirits of Shuteye Peak

2/1/2016

4 Comments

 
The Sierra Nevada Mountains are always beautiful, but often deadly.
Those who do not give due consideration to even the most casual of
walks can quickly end up being themselves a casualty; those who are
unaware of the body of historical tragedies in this area sometimes add
their own body to the historical count; those who don’t believe there
is even a ghost of a chance that they will be injured may well end up
walking the mountains as ghosts themselves. And one of the Sierra
Nevada high mountain peaks with a larger than average population of
those entities who might check the box on the Census Form labeled
Ghost is the aptly named Shuteye Peak.

Shuteye Peak is an imposing edifice reaching to a height of 8,358 feet
in the Sierra National Forest just to the north of Kings Canyon
National Park. If you manage to reach the top of this impressive peak,
then from its summit you will have a commanding view of the
surrounding mountains for miles in every direction. That’s why the
U.S. Forest Service established a fire lookout here in 1907, and the
comforting presence of its watchful eyes stands careful guard over not
only the woods below but also over the town of North Fork nearby as
its staff constantly searches the forest for approaching fires. That
same view is what has brought hikers to this area for more than a
century. Perhaps that breathtaking view is why the ghosts of some are
said to linger in the area as well; spirits of those who came only to
briefly play, but whom Shuteye Peak decided to claim.

When you get to the top of Shuteye Peak you will meet a few of the
ghosts almost immediately, and it will be a welcome relief from the
trip if you pause to pay your respects. If you’ve hiked here then
you’re probably hot, tired, and thirsty. If you’ve driven here, then
those last few miles on the deeply rutted dirt road will probably have
broken your derriere if not your vehicle’s axles. So as you limp
toward the lookout you will notice a large rock with some metallic
plates which are asking for your attention as they reflect shards of
sunlight into your eyes, and you’ll be glad to pause before that
boulder and see that the plaques all have names and dates; that they
commemorate the hard work and dedicated lives of several Forest
Service employees who devoted large portions of their lives and energy
to this forest and the lookout near Shuteye Peak. They all loved this
mountain and wanted to remain a part of it, and these plaques in their
memory are their way of remaining. Then, off to one side, you will see
that cemented into this boulder is an urn containing the ashes of Sam
MacFarland, one of the pioneer lookouts at Shuteye Peak. He, too
wished to remain, and his is a kind and friendly spirit.

These are the ghosts of those who watch over Shuteye Peak from the
Other Side. These are the Benevolent Ghosts of those who spent happy
times here and wished for a portion of themselves to remain as part of
the mountain they loved.

But not all of Shuteye’s ghosts are quite so happy.

James Arthur was an avid photographer. It was a hobby which brought
him much satisfaction, and he often trekked in the Sierra Nevada
Mountains to capture unique photographs of rough rocky slopes and high
alpine lakes. He was a retired military man in excellent physical
condition and with far above average survival skills. He was
sixty-seven years old when he climbed into his pickup truck early in
the morning of July 28th, 2008, telling his family that he was off to
take some pictures near Shuteye Peak and that he’d return that same
day. James was quite wrong about that. He never returned.

When James Arthur’s family reported him as missing the Madera County
Sheriff’s Department immediately initiated a search and dozens of
volunteers went into the mountains to look for him. They split into
groups and focused on different areas where he might have gone to take
his photos. The next afternoon one of those search groups found
Arthur’s pickup truck at an elevation of about seven thousand feet.
James was not in the vehicle. There was no evidence of either an
accident or of foul play. The weather was sunny, warm, and mild, and
the three search groups converged near the truck to canvass the area.
They were convinced that they would soon find him as Arthur’s family
had said that he was wearing a bright orange shirt or vest when he
left home.

But the searchers never caught a glimpse of orange; they never found a
trace of anything – no trail; no clothing, camera, or equipment; no
James Arthur. He was a man in excellent physical condition, with an
intelligent mind used to solving problems, and with skills that could
easily see him through spending a summer night or two in the forest.
But he had disappeared, leaving his truck parked on a frequently used
road, never to be seen again. He was only a few miles from Shuteye
Peak.

Strangely, someone else had disappeared in just about exactly that
same area only a few years before.

In April of 2005 a Mariposa resident by the name of Doug Pearce
decided to go camping in the Shuteye Peak area. Doug was a retired
nuclear engineer and, at the age of eighty-six, was in excellent
physical shape. He was also still mentally sharp and was an active
volunteer in his community, particularly at schools where he worked
with young students. Doug had an abundance of mental and physical
energy and a keen interest in life, so when he decided to go camping
by himself it didn’t strike anyone whom he knew as being strange. But
when he took off on April 21st of that year it was the last time
anyone would ever see him. Shortly thereafter Douglas’s truck was
found on a road near Summit Campground, at an elevation of just under
six thousand feet, stuck in mud and largely burned by a fire of
unknown cause. The truck contained no body, and nearby Summit
Campground, which had apparently been his destination, contained no
trace of Pearce. Friends knew of no reason why Pearce would want to
disappear; nor did they know of any enemies who may have stalked him.
A bear or mountain lion attack would have left evidence. Logic
dictated that Pearce, being both an intelligent person and a man with
wilderness experience, would have simply walked along the road after
his vehicle failed him until he either reached the campground or came
across another vehicle on the road. But no other people in the area
ever saw him.

Search parties organized by the county sheriff combed the area around
both the campground as well as the road on which the truck had been
found, and then fanned out for several miles from those points. No
trace of Doug Pearce was ever found – not a body; not a fragment of
clothing; not even a footprint. Pearce had disappeared into thin air,
never to be seen again. He was less than five miles from Shuteye Peak,
and his disappearance remains both strange and unsettling. One of the
strange things is that he vanished very close to the spot where James
Arthur was to disappear just three years later.

Theresa Bier went missing in 1987. She was a young girl from Fresno;
only sixteen years of age. She went to Shuteye Peak one day and simply
disappeared, never to be seen or heard from ever again. And there are
several odd circumstances regarding her disappearance - odd, perhaps
even creepy.

One day in June of 1987 Theresa’s neighbor, an older man who lived
nearby and knew her family well, asked her parents for their
permission to take Theresa on a camping trip into the Sierras to look
for that elusive creature known as Bigfoot. The neighbor, it seemed,
was a self-proclaimed leading expert on Bigfoot. That was the first
oddity about this case. The second strange thing about this is that
Theresa’s parents immediately said ‘Yes, you can take her’, and sent
their sixteen year old daughter off to the mountains alone to go
camping with an older man on the pretext of contacting a creature
never proven to exist. Although, to be fair, there were rumors of
Bigfoot sightings in many areas of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. So off
the two went to find and contact Bigfoot, but when the neighbor
returned to Fresno, he returned without Theresa.

The man had taken the teenager to Shuteye Peak. Theresa was reported
as a Missing Person, and the reason that she was missing, as sworn by
the neighbor, was that she had been abducted by a tribe of Bigfoots on
a rocky lope near Shuteye. This, too, should have seemed slightly odd
to Theresa’s parents, and it did not escape the detection of law
enforcement officials who asked the man to guide them to the scene of
the kidnapping and the guilty tribe of elusive primates. He dutifully
did so and the area was thoroughly searched. Theresa was not found;
neither were any of her belongings; her clothing; her blood. Nor was
any evidence of large mammals found. Nothing. The neighbor was
arrested but the charges soon had to be dropped for lack of evidence,
as several subsequent searches of the area around Shuteye Peak turned
up nothing. Theresa Bier disappeared into thin air on June first of
1987 and to this day not the slightest scrap of evidence has been
found to resolve the mystery of her vanishing. If the disappearance of
Doug Pearce was Odd, this case oozed over the line into the Creepy
Zone.

Theresa Bier was a happy girl; a trusting girl, and though her body
has never been found her memory, her spirit, still hang restlessly
around Shuteye Peak. And there with her, keeping her company, is the
shade of another child who disappeared back in 1934, a boy by the name
of Richard McPherson.

Richard was only ten years old when he disappeared near Shuteye Peak
on May 26th of 1934. He and his brother Robert were the children of a
Forest Service Ranger named Chester McPherson, a man who worked in the
Shuteye Peak area, and the children were apparently comfortable with
often entertaining themselves on the mountain while their father was
occupied with his ranger duties. One day in May the two boys, along
with their cousin Howard, decided to go fishing in a nearby stream
known as Rock Creek. It is a small stream at an elevation of about
5,500 feet, neither wide nor deep. While they were thus occupied
trying to catch dinner the boys were unaware of a fast moving storm
blowing into the area – an event which is not unusual in May in the
Sierra Nevada Mountains. The temperature fell along with the snow and
the three boys decided to wait it out and camp for the night next to
the creek. The next morning Robert set out to get assistance, leaving
Richard and Cousin Howard at the fishing site. When Robert returned
with help, Howard told them that ten year old Richard McPherson had
wandered off and never returned.
Dozens of Forest Service Rangers, the father’s friends and co-workers,
immediately descended on the area and began the search. They were soon
supplemented with volunteers from the Civilian Conservation Corps who
had been working on projects in the region. The search soon spread
outward from the creek and the men searched for miles in all
directions.

What was most odd about this disappearance was that Richard should
have left a clear trail of footprints in the freshly fallen snow, a
trail which would have been still visible to the searchers and easy to
follow. But there was no such trail. It was as if Richard had simply
been lifted into the air. But despite this mystery the men kept up
their search and two days later their efforts were rewarded – if the
finding of a body can be interpreted as a reward. Richard McPherson
was dead. He had apparently died of exposure. But the other odd thing
which the searchers noted when they found the body was that half of
Richard’s clothing had been removed, and the officials concluded that
Richard himself must have done so because the clothing may have become
wet and uncomfortable. Yet such a conclusion simply did not make
sense. Even at his young age Richard had spent much of his time in the
forest with his father the forest service ranger. If he was cold and
suffering from exposure he would have known enough to instead seek
additional insulation and definitely not remove what clothing he
already had on.

But official explanations are often intended to simply close a case;
not necessarily make sense of it. And perhaps those leading the search
did not want to raise questions they couldn’t answer. Eerily, the
disappearance of young Richard McPherson in 1934 proved to be an
uncanny premonition of the disappearance of Theresa Bier in 1987. They
both disappeared in the same area near Shuteye Peak, literally within
a stone’s throw of each other, and just a few miles from where Doug
Pearce’s truck was found; just a few miles from where James Arthur
walked off onto the mountain and disappeared forever.

None of these individuals who disappeared near Shuteye Peak was
physically infirm or mentally unstable. None had any known enemies.
And none of them had any reason to want to intentionally disappear.
Yet they all did disappear, and they all did so within the same
closely defined geographic area; all very close to roads, campgrounds,
and other people. All of them were reported as Missing Persons within
a very short time of their last being seen and searches for all of
them then began immediately, so all four of them should have still
been within a short distance of where they’d last been seen. Yet none
were. One died quickly; three were never seen again. Shuteye Peak took
them, and did so in ways which defy logic and reason. It took them in
numbers which stretch the laws of probability for such a relatively
small and remote area; a mountain with not nearly the high volume of
visitors as Yosemite to the north and Kings Canyon to the south. And
it took them in ways which make one wonder if some unknown component
of their disappearances still lies waiting to be discovered. It took
them in ways which are unsettling, and leave many of those who walk
the trails of Shuteye Peak with a feeling of restless uneasiness. And
it has likely taken others, for the challenge of the peak and the
beauty of its vistas would have beckoned countless others throughout
the centuries before people thought of recording such stories with
paper and ink.

Shuteye Peak has its ghosts - the Good Ones, who watched over the
mountain when it was part of their lives and wished a part of
themselves to stay after their deaths; the Restless Ones, who came
innocently to the mountain and suddenly lost their lives, their souls;
leaving their memories and spirits wandering the forest paths. When
you visit the lookout and walk these mountain trails you can feel the
presence of all of them around you; the happy and the sad; the
Restless Spirits of Shuteye Peak whispering to you through the trees;
their shades just visible to you; flitting through the forest just on
the edge of your vision; beckoning you.

Listen; look; but keep walking.
4 Comments
    Picture

    Author

    With a degree in Anthropology and an avid interest in history, Tim Christensen has lived in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for many years. He has no cell phone or television, but manages, when not chopping firewood or shoveling snow, to keep himself entertained with a library of several thousand books. 

    Tim has worked for Sequoia Parks Conservancy since 2010 in the Kings Canyon Visitor Center and also as a naturalist for the Sequoia Field Institute.  COPYRIGHT 2016 T.E. CHRISTENSEN

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Sequoia Parks Conservancy, the official 501(c)(3) nonprofit partner of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (National Park Service) and Lake Kaweah (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), uses tax-deductible contributions to support these parks. ​
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​Sequoia Parks Conservancy
47050 Generals Hwy Unit 10
​Three Rivers, CA 93271
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