# A Century at Carson River Resort

Source page: https://carsonriverresorts.com/story/a-century-at-carson-river-resort

The Story

The deeds name a "Welcome Mine," and the flat the cabins stand on most likely takes its name from it. A fishing camp took root here around 1920, and it has outlasted the Depression, a 1947 fire, the 1950 flood and the Tamarack Fire. The families keep coming back.

The property's deeds refer to a "Welcome Mine," the flat here carries the
old name Welcome Flat, and three collapsed mining holes on the grounds are
still there to back the story up. The historian Karen Dustman reports some
evidence of a small Chinese camp near this bend of the river during the
mining era, when the traffic ran over Monitor and Ebbetts passes. The
record holds that thread only lightly so far, and this site will say more
about it when the museum work is done.

Two government documents fix the origin of this ground, and both survive.
In 1877 the United States surveyed the township and drew it onto paper —
Markleeville, the East Fork, and Section 26, which holds the flat where the
cabins now stand. Twenty-seven years later, on the strength of that survey,
the General Land Office granted a hundred and sixty acres within that
section — the south half of one quarter and the east half of another, river
ground — to Thomas Audrain, in the name of President Theodore Roosevelt.

The camp took root around 1920 — "Since 1920," the resort has always said —
in the years when the automobile first made a riverside fishing week an
ordinary family's vacation. By the Second World War the county owned the
flat and leased it out; boarders came and went from the big house beside
the river, and the war years were lean.

The account of what came next is Jim Brune's, who grew up in a cabin up
the road and wrote it down in his memoir, *Simple Balance*. In 1946 Tony and
Jeannette Whitney bought the flat by paying the back taxes, with a mortgage
from a Bakersfield man — a purchase the county's 1949 quiet-title case
bears out. Locals called the place Whitney's after that. The Whitneys ran
it as hunting, fishing and packing guides: they caught wild mustangs in
central Nevada and broke them for the pack string, added a gas station,
assembled kit cabins ordered from Sears, and kept exotic chickens for
fly-tying feathers. Brune remembers Tony inventing a fly for this river,
choosing its colors with a glass prism, and calling it the "Carson King."

The flat was not kind to them. In 1947 a fire came over the hill and
scorched the big house; Brune's father wet the buildings down with river
water, and none burned. Each winter the high water cut further under the
big house, until it was jacked onto poles and moved across the road, where
it became the store. In 1950 an ice jam upriver broke and sent blocks of ice
"like fifteen feet in diameter" down the channel, and in November a long
rain-on-snow flood washed out the pasture and the fishing holes. That
winter the Whitneys left for Stockton.

The place became East Fork Resort — the old store was its store, and the
Whitneys' fly-tying cabin became Cabin #1, which later burned, so the row
today starts at №2 — and by 2004 it was Carson River Resort.

Ownership changed hands in the decades that followed. Phil Elfstrom took
over in February 2018, bringing a Michigan ice-fishing childhood,
seventeen years in banking at MBNA in Florida, a move west when the bank
sold, and a career in the death-care business. He collects local history,
stays off social media and answers his own phone. His line about the place:
"The more you are here, the more you want to be here."

Regulars ask about two things, and Phil settled both at the front desk in
September 2026. The founding year is 1920, exactly as the sign has always
said. And "Todd" — the name longtime guests still drop — was the manager
who ran the place before Phil bought it.

The guest book keeps the rest of the account. People who learned to fish
here as children bring back their own children; the entries
run to third-generation regulars, forty- and fifty-year streaks, and
families who have come every summer since 1985.

When the Tamarack Fire forced the property to evacuate in July 2021,
reached the highway here and jumped it, the cabins came through. The
centennial party, already postponed once by the pandemic, was finally held
in July 2022 — a hundred years, two years late.

The book is open at the front desk, and Phil answers the phone.

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Carson River Resort · 12399 Highway 89, Markleeville, CA 96120 · (530) 694-2229 · store open 8am to 6pm, every day.
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