Carson River ResortSince 1920 · MarkleevilleCheck datesCall (530) 694-2229
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Carson River Resort · Welcome Flat, Alpine County, CaliforniaEst. 1920Road & river conditions
Carson River ResortCabins · RV Row · Camping · A Mile of Trout Water
From the sources

The Story

“My family, my friends, and I have been coming here for twenty years. We always knew this was a special place. It wasn’t until I learned the history of this bend in the river that I understood why we keep coming back.”

— twenty years a guest

The East Fork runs past the cabins at 5,530 feet. Silver fever built a county here in 1864 — eleven thousand people, by the claims of the day; the census of 1870 counted six hundred and eighty-five. From 1867 to 1895 the log drives ran cordwood down this water to the Comstock mills. A Norwegian farmer crossed these mountains on ten-foot oak skis for twenty winters to carry the mail, and Congress never paid him a dollar.

A fishing camp took root on the flat around 1920, and it has outlasted the Depression, the 1950 flood and the Tamarack Fire. The eight stories below are drawn from the record that survives — a survey, a land patent, census returns, the newspapers of the day — and their dates are collected in the ledger beside them.

01The People Who Never LeftThis valley is Wá∙šiw country — before the county, the mines, and the resort, and still today. The Washoe are not a chapter of local history. They are the neighbors, eight miles up the road at Woodfords.Read02Silver FeverIn 1864 silver fever built an instant county — eleven thousand people, by the claims of the day — expecting to rival the Comstock. Within four years, nine of ten were gone. What the fever left behind is the county you drive through today.Read03The River of LogsFor nearly thirty years — 1867 to 1895 — the quiet river in front of the cabins was an industrial highway. Every spring it ran brown with Alpine County cordwood bound for the mills and mines of the Comstock.Read04The Trout That Came BackA 41-pound world record, railcars of iced fish, a dam, a declared extinction, and a rediscovery in a desert trickle a person can step across. The comeback of the Lahontan cutthroat ends in the water in front of the cabins.Read05Fire and RebuildAlpine County has been burning and rebuilding since the 1880s — the Great Fire that took Markleeville's Main Street in 1885, the Acorn Fire at Woodfords in 1987, and the July in 2021 when the fire reached the highway at these cabins and jumped it.Read06Snowshoe ThompsonFor twenty winters, a Norwegian farmer carried the trans-Sierra mail on ten-foot oak skis — ninety miles through the storms, mailbags of fifty to a hundred pounds, no compass, never paid. He lived and died in this county.Read07Hangman's BridgeA mile downstream of the resort, Highway 89 crosses the East Fork at a bridge with a rope in its name. The name comes from a lynching there in 1874, and below the crossing the river runs to Nevada with no dam and no road.Read08A Century at Carson River ResortThe 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.Read
A mile of trout water
Stocked out front · Wild below the bridge