Adventure 003, Site 033 – Pacheco Pass

Capture California, the Game-2013
Adventure: 003, Site 033 – Pacheco Pass
California Landmark Number: 829




Team: YOLT
Date:  August 27, 2013
Location:
Coordinates: 37°3′59″N 121°13′7″W (Location of pass)
37° 4.825′ N, 121° 5.892′ (Location of plaque)
Address: Romero Overlook, San Luis Reservoir, 31770 W Hwy 152 (P.M. 8.0), 15 mi W of Los Banos


Description:

Looking Towards Pacheco Pass

We cannot say that driving into the Romero Center at San Luis Dam is inspiring or even refreshing-it is hot after coming in from the Bay Area. But it does give you a pause to consider what did Morega see when he came this way? What inspired him to establish Los Banos? I suspect that it may have been the fields of golden poppies, stretching from the Coastal Range to the Sierras; the Sierra's looming over this Valley. But today, we can only pause to ponder.



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NO. 829 PACHECO PASS - On June 21, 1805, on his first exploratory journey into the San Joaquin Valley, Lieutenant Gabriel Moraga traversed and recorded this pass. Since then it has been trail, toll road, stagecoach road, and freeway-the principal route between the coastal areas to the west and the great valley and mountains to the east.Location: Romero Overlook, San Luis Reservoir, 31770 W Hwy 152 (P.M. 8.0), 15 mi W of Los Banos From CHL



Looking eastward from the summit of the Pacheco Pass one shining morning, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld. At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, one rich furred garden of yellow Composito. And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city. Along the top and extending a good way down, was a rich pearl-gray belt of snow; below it a belt of blue and lark purple, marking the extension of the forests; and stretching long the base of the range a broad belt of rose-purple; all these colors, from the blue sky to the yellow valley smoothly blending as they do in a rainbow, making a wall of light ineffably fine. Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light. From John Muir, The Yosemite, 1912






A trail nearby, through what is now Pacheco State Park, was used by the Yokuts people to cross the mountains and trade with other native people on the coast.[5] Spanish army officer Gabriel Moraga first recorded the pass in 1805.[1] Since then, it has been a major route between the Santa Clara Valley and the Central Valley. It was the site of one of the stage stations on the route of the Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoach route which connected the Saint Louis, Missouri with San Francisco from 1858 until 1861.[6] Other stage lines used the route thereafter until completion of the railroads within the state. From Wikipedia






References:

• Wikipedia
  
• David Schmitt
  
• NoeHill
  
• HMDB
  
• WAY
  

Overall Landmark References:

• David Schmitt's California State Historical Landmark (Schmitt)
  
• State of California's California Historical Landmarks (CHL)
  
• Wikipedia: California State Landmarks (WCSL)
  
• NoeHill (NOE)
  
• Historical Marker Database (HMDB)
  
• Waymarking (WAY)