Mt. Brow Winery

As California joins ranks with some of the best wineries all over the world, Tuolumne County is no exception. Visitors can sip the pleasures of some of the best wines produced in the region from Ironstone Vineyards, Twisted Oak Winery, to Mt. Brow Winery in Sonora. Our featured winery, Mt. Brow Winery, is located in Sonora, Tuolumne County, California. Tuolumne county is located near the popular Yosemite Valley and Gold Country.

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Dodge Ridge

Dodge Ridge Wintersports Area is a ski & snowboard resort located in Tuolumne County , California just 30 miles (48 km) east of Sonora, California off of Highway 108. The resort in located in the Stanislaus National Forest and operates under a special permit from the National Forest Service. Being that the resort is around 150 miles (240 km) from the San Francisco Bay Area, many skiers in Northern California use Dodge Ridge because of its location to the Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley and Yosemite National Park. The usual running time for the resort is late-November thru mid-April.

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Sonora

Founded by Mexican miners during the California Gold Rush (to remind them of the state of Sonora, Mexico), Sonora still echoes some of its history through preserved architecture. The journal of William Perkins offers an account of Sonora at the height of the gold rush.

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New Melones Lake

The Stanislaus River and environs experienced dramatic changes beginning with the Gold Rush. The site of the reservoir is at the very heart of Gold Country, and development began there with the arrival of the miners in the 1840s. Water was immediately diverted, the riverbeds scoured for gold, and the banks colonized by miners and the businesses that served them. By 1900 the flowing water was used to create electricity. Some of it was channeled out for use in agriculture. The original Melones Dam was built in 1926.

The New Melones Project was authorized in 1944 to create a much larger reservoir and to establish a new hydroelectric plant. It would also be specifically designed to prevent floods. It was a controversial issue. The dam’s opponents argued that its presence would inundate the river valley, eliminate the natural whitewater rapids, flood many of the massive unique limestone cave formations characteristic of the area, and destroy archaeological resources found along the river. Initial archaeological surveys were made by the Smithsonian River Basin Surveys in 1948 (Fredrickson 1949). Further surveys were done by regional universities. The consensus after the surveys was that the dam would be built. Upon the dam’s completion, the valley filled with water, covering the old mining town of Melones and the original Melones Dam.

The lake was constructed by the US Army Corps of Engineers and transferred to the Bureau of Reclamation shortly after its completion in 1980. Cultural resources affected by the project were transferred to the Department of the Interior with the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Services (HCRS, a short-lived organization that was established during the Carter administration) responsible for the archaeological mitigation program. New Melones is a unit of the Central Valley Project.

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Angels Camp

Henry and George Angel were soldiers serving under John C. Frémont during the Mexican-American War. When the California Gold Rush started, they tried their hand at prospecting, but decided they didn’t like the labor involved, so they set up a trading post, which became a camp, and eventually a town. The placers around their camp were very productive but gave out after a few years and the population began to dwindle until Gold-bearing quartz veins were discovered in the town, which brought people back. Those mines operated for the next few decades, producing over $20 million worth of gold, processed by stamp mills in town. It was said that when the last mill finally ceased operations, the townspeople couldn’t sleep, the silence was so loud.

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Groveland

Groveland has always been an important stop on the highway to Yosemite but really grew in the early 1900s with the development of the Tuolumne River Hetch-Hetchy water project for the city of San Francisco. Groveland is adjacent to the Stanislaus National Forest and is known for the historic Iron Door Saloon.

The community of Big Oak Flat was founded by James D. Savage who began mining the area about 1851. In some works, Savage is credited as discovering the Yosemite Valley about 1848. He is also identified as one of the first persons of European ancestry to enter the valley, (March 27, 1851). Others of European ancestry may have seen the valley as early as 1833.

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