About halfway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe is the Yuba River.

It's one of California's prettiest.

It is also synonymous with greed and destruction in the form of hydraulic mining and in the devastation brought upon the indigenous people that call this place home.

It was all done in the name of opportunity and of course, gold.

The indigenous Nisenan Tribe, regarded the Yuba River as a life giving force, and rightly so.

And although they have different ends in mind, a shared appreciation for this river between the tribe and the newcomers may have in fact been an unexpected commonality.

The mining ditches that were cut into these canyons in the late 1800s would be the only blueprint needed for a charismatic naturalist named John Olmstead, who discovered the abandoned ditches and built the first wheelchair nature trail in the United States, and was my father.

I'd like to tell you the Independence Trail is thriving, is enjoyed by many, and though John is gone, how it remains a testament to vision, stewardship and community.

But if you've studied the natural world, you know the only true constant is change.

And although a fire like this is truly devastating from a forest perspective, life always follows death.

This is A Wild Independence.

The Jones fire has scorched more than 650 acres and continues to burn for a second night through a canyon near the south Yuba River.

You see those planes dropping fuel retardant onto this heavy terrain.

Homes, barns and greenhouses lost to the Jones fire that's spitting ash into the air.

Jones Bar is one of the early crossings along the South Yuba River, and is also the point where Rush Creek flows in during spring runoff.

For those who heard the location of this particular fire, the inevitable was assumed.

Flume 28, the centerpiece of the Independence Trail, was gone.

In the wake of the Jones fire and the almost complete destruction of the Independence Trail, many people began asking how and when did this trail come to be?

I'm glad you asked.

And as Dad would have done, let's start at the beginning.

This idyllic region known as Alta or Upper California, was bursting with resources which could not stay hidden forever from opportunists from the east.

And in 1848, a shiny, heavy mineral was discovered by James Marshall in a creek outside of Sacramento in the town of Coloma.

Marshall- and the entire West, for that matter- had struck gold.

When the gold rush happened, tens of thousands of people came from all over the world.

So, all this clashing of cultures from everywhere.

This discovery would eventually destroy the Nisenan way of life, would decimate their population, and would lay out like a red carpet the very destiny of California.

The native tribes within what we now call "Gold Country," they're some of the tribes that have experienced the most devastating blows to their numbers.

The Declaration of Eureka- "We have found it" - would, in just a few short years, kill off 98% of the Nisenan people, and would leave scars on the land that are still visible today.

What, characteristically, happened around here is you had small hydraulic mining operations and they wouldn't have enough water.

So, water companies appeared as early as 1850.

These became huge corporate ventures.

Hydraulic engineering in Nevada County was the equivalent of, uh, Silicon Valley, uh, in terms of a world perspective.

The overwhelming success of hydraulic mining would prove to be its very undoing.

All this gravel that used to be here, the hill that used to be here is now down in the valley somewhere.

Eventually, in 1884.

Judge Lorenzo Sawyer, who was a miner himself, put out what's known as The Sawyer Decision, which effectively put an end to hydraulic mining.

Following The Sawyer Decision, hydraulic mining continued, albeit on a smaller scale, and by the time World War Two hit, the few remaining working mines were shuttered for good.

The gold rush brought such destruction, the complete devastation of the environment here because of the gold discovery and the complete annihilation of an old and ancient culture that had this amazing relationship with the land.

The scars left behind by the gold rush are real.

And yet a glimmer of hope, a repurposing of the very ingenuity that created those scars would come in a very unlikely form.

John Olmstead was born on March 2nd, 1938, to Jack and Ruby of West Los Angeles, California.

At a young age, he and brother Bill would begin a spiritual love of the mountains, fueled by family trips to Mammoth Lakes and by the writings of a Scottish naturalist named John Muir.

Following his graduate studies in Southern California, John was offered a botanist position in Golden Gate Park and headed north, not to put flowers in his hair, but to put them in books.

Two events in the Bay Area of the mid 1960s would shape John's life forever.

The first was an across California exhibit he created at the brand new Oakland Museum of California, which would lead to countless trips with schoolkids along the old Lincoln Highway across the valley at ecological and historical stops, always ending at Donner Summit.

But John's heart was in education, and so the second event could not have been more perfect, when he met Mills College student and wheelchair activist Gay Blackford, who implored John with a simple request.

I want you to somehow look real careful and find me or build me a level trail in the mountains.

John took her request to heart, but would not be able to fulfill it immediately.

First, he had to save a forest of pygmy trees from development in Mendocino and begin laying out his dream of a necklace of parks across California.

It was on the laying out of this necklace that John's travels led him to the town of Nevada City into an abandoned hydraulic mining ditch, a forgotten marker of California's golden greed.

I said to the realtor, "Show me some land.

It may touch river- the river and, or government, BLM land."

And he said, "Oh, you mean you plan?

He brought me out here and he said, In this parcel, you're for sale for $300 an acre as a piece of river around the corner.

But it also has a wonderful trail that is made out of the abandoned Chelsea or.

South Yuba Canal.

And we will walk it.

We all got in the car and drove out to the what's now the Independence Trail.

And John was showing us every flower and every little weed and telling us what they were.

And John was really enthused about being able to use the ditch as the trail.

So as soon as I got 20 feet from the highway, I could see.

Here is a black for sale by Edison's light bulb.

There is, you know.

John's relentless pursuit of his vision of a wheelchair trail in the wilderness is why the Independence Trail got built.

But the howl was all about community.

And when it came to requesting labor, no one was spared from a John Olmstead phone call.

He was a master at manifesting finding every possible source, and then he would contact everyone he could who could in some way manifest that dream with him.

He would get lumber donated.

He talked with state parks.

He talked with bureau land management.

No one else could have done that.

No one else could have.

John could not be told he couldn't do something.

And for the most part, he was right.

John was extremely good at finding resources, whatever sort of specific resource he needed, and he needed someone to write a bill.

And he found a person in Sacramento whose job it is professionally to write bills.

John success in Mendocino in creating jug handle State Reserve gave him the blueprint he would use for the Independence Trail by land on the cheap develop a nature center or in this case, a wheelchair nature trail and sell it back to the state as a park.

It sounds simple enough.

John is the eternal optimist and a person who gave everyone around him not just the benefit of the doubt, but the feeling that they could do whatever it was they needed to get done.

When he needed to build something and create something, he first had his dream with his head up and his eyes closed, and then he would contact everyone he could who could in some way manifest that dream with him, and he would talk them into it.

I would have to say that the number of people who helped in building that trail has to be in the hundreds.

And they were from all different types of people in the community.

I would say hundreds.

I really do think so.

Along the way, we picked up a lot of contacts to get help, physical help and monetary help.

With hammers, shovels, lumber and sweat.

The local community delivered with John entrenched as the duly elected Pied Piper with a partly finished trail.

It was time for a test run.

The first time that I went on to the trail, it was 1978.

I met John and there was another woman by the name of Gay who had the idea for it.

And they started talking to me and they said, We need somebody that actually can move this trail while it is being built.

So I went up there and John said, Well, we want you to go cross the trestle.

Okay, that sounds great.

So I got to the section right before the trestle and looked out and I was just a little apprehensive about this trestle.

All it had was some big sheets of plywood going the whole way across.

And I said, Well, John, you want me to go across?

I said, Well, yes, we'd like to have you go across and I'm going to film you going across it, and let's see how it works.

So I started going across the trestle very slowly and I got about halfway out there and I said, John, are you sure that this is okay to be cross?

Why, sure, Robert.

We just placed the plywood down.

Wait, wait.

I was wondering if that trestle was going to come down with me on it, but it didn't.

Hooray!

Everybody clapped.

Everybody applauded.

He had the vision of looking at these old hydraulic mining canals and said, well, this could be a trail for gay Blackford.

As he says, you know, the gal that said, if you ever find a place where I can hike into the wild, let me know about it.

And he created it.

Yes.

It's really remarkable what he did.

By engaging with the disability rights community.

He was linking this project with a national movement for equality, for people with disabilities, which is really the groundwork for the American Disabilities Act.

Right.

John Olmsted understood that public space needs to be accessible.

This shouldn't be just a one off thing that, you know, is this special thing in northern California.

We need accessible trails and access to the outdoors for people of all abilities.

And I think there was a clear understanding that this symbolized a change in how we view disability and that we all are stakeholders in our state parks, and that creating access is a responsibility of the entire society.

Trails like the Independence Trail allow people like myself, our community, to connect with nature.

It's one of the few places that I can get out into nature and really be able to go down a mile into the woods and be able to connect with the wildlife, the flora, fauna.

And so it's really unique.

I don't know if it's one of a kind, but it's remarkable.

And the guy that made it remarkable, the guy that created it was John Olmsted.

You know, without John, there's no independent trail.

To establish the independence trail.

John created Sequoia Challenge, an organization that lasted for 30 years until John's passing in 2011.

As with John's first park in Mendocino, the goal had always been to transition the entire trail to state parks ownership.

But the process had been dragging on for over ten years.

And with John's health declining and the wheels of bureaucracy dragging, a new organization would be needed.

The new organization was Bear Yuba Land Trust, a group formed with John's blessing and a specific mission to protect and steward lands within the watersheds of the Bear and Yuba Rivers.

Sequoia Challenge approached the Land Trust and asked if we would be willing to be the interim holders of this land, which we accepted.

So the intention was always to transfer those properties to state parks.

You had these private entities, a couple of public entities.

What the U.S. Forest Service.

And that gradually came over to us because it sat within this watershed, as we know is the South Yuba River State Park.

We have seven parcels now that are interspersed with state park land.

Most people have no idea when you're walking along the trail that you're going through state parks property and then you're on land trust property.

So how the parcels are set up along the West Trail, most of those wooden structures were on land trust property.

The majority of California's 282 state parks work in partnership with local nonprofits.

So sharing responsibilities with state parks is nothing new.

But not many parks or trails are as unique as this one.

When the trail was developed, it was very important that it had these historic features and that the boards on the flumes were of a certain dimension.

And it was very specific and a lot of that lumber was things that we couldn't even acquire.

So they were able to order that special lumber to restore the flumes.

And we were out there replacing boards with them a lot.

When you have a trail that's built on an old mining ditch system, there's historical components, there's structural components.

And all of those items have to be kept to a certain level in order to make them safe for the public and also to keep their historic integrity intact.

One of the challenges of rebuilding the Independence Trail is that Flume takes over Rush Creek, the centerpiece of the entire trail and fish ramp that winds down to the creek are also its most vulnerable.

Both were lost in the Jones fire.

Neither one are on state parks property and therefore both are 100% the responsibility of bear.

You will entrust.

At this point, we've been denied funding for FEMA on the Land Trust Property, whereas state parks has been approved for FEMA funding.

But that creates a huge problem because the trail is one cohesive unit and it's really hard to tell where one starts and one ends.

So we're in the appeal process right now with FEMA trying to either get the land trust eligible for funding or have state parks be able to take the whole project under their ownership.

We want to fold those private pieces into our state park.

We're looking to do that in the process with FEMA also as to make this one project, because we know that it's a contiguous land ownership.

Even with that FEMA funding in place, that's still only 75% of the cost covered.

And we're anticipating it to be about a $6 million rebuild project.

So no matter what, we're going to have to come up with that other 25% of funding, you know, about $1,000,000.

Securing the funds is one thing.

Designing and rebuilding a trail that is wheelchair accessible and fire resistant is a completely new challenge.

Do we want it to look exactly the same as it did before?

Or do we want to make improvements while keeping the general concepts the same?

All of the conversations so far have been around keeping that historic element of it while trying to use a more fire safe material, whether it's whether it's steel or something like that, that could actually maybe withstand a fire in the future.

If we've learned anything about this community and the legacy of John Olmstead, it's that there's no shortage of passionate supporters and willing volunteers who love the trail and want to see it live again.

We were given this gift from Sequoia Challenge and from John Olmstead, and we took it on knowing that we need to uphold that legacy.

We need to ensure that it continues.

So yeah, we're committed to making that happen.

He had this vision that he wanted to see things happen for more people.

He wanted to see disabled people and everybody use a trail.

It was a vision that you couldn't pass up.

It was a vision that you had to participate in.

John's persistent phone calls and unique requests are easy to look back on with a smile, but they served a greater purpos The house was kind of given over on certain weekends.

He always talked me into doing a little bit of something and then it would be this big and there was lumber stacked up and all of this.

He'd be in the house calling people all the time.

But I can say absolutely.

There was never a time when I regretted it.

Not not for a moment, because of what he created.

It really was a walk through history and a connection with nature that people loved and cherished.

And just having that access for all is something that we need so much more of.

And it's just so important.

Going down Independence Trail, Flume Creek, the switchback ramps was one of the first opportunities I had to independently actually get to the water and put my feet and my hands in the water.

And it's already been proven that this was a thing that was not only beautiful, but it was a way for people who don't live in the forest and who don't live in nature to come and be able to have access.

There needs to be access into nature.

Nature is there.

Waiting for us.

Maybe getting locals involved on a crazy, ambitious vision did more than just build a trail and fulfill a promise.

Maybe to build a community.

And maybe it's time to do it again.

That's that's the way you save a wild place is people connect to it.

They put their heart into it, and it just rallies, support and just brings the community together.

And that was that was the whole idea was to get the community together.

John Olmstead wasn't always around when my brother and I were growing up and that's a reality will always live with passion does have a cost but to try to explain or put boundaries on a visionary like John is to miss the point that when passion and vision are bolstered by a community, nothing is impossible.

Not even building a wheelchair trail of an old mining ditch, or even rebuilding it.

Pretty sure Dad would agree.

♪♪ It burned the valley and it blackened the trees.

It took Flume 28 and it brought me to my knees.

The flames burned high and hot and the birds flew away.

We watched our history burn out on the Independence Trail, on the Independence Trail.

Hammer in hand, penny in the can, from ash and bones, this trail will rise again.

It'll rise again.

It will rise again.

It'll rise again.

It'll rise.