In April 1938 the Piute Railroad logging line sustained major damage from Desmond Meadows to Susanville. The Red River Lumber Company decided to abandon the line.
In 1945 a portion of the abandoned railroad line was resurrected as a log truck road. Red River was going through a dissolution process and Ken Walker took over the company’s Susanville mill, he renamed the Paul Bunyan Lumber Company. Days of railroad logging were on the wane. The abandoned Piute line provided the foundation for a truck logging road. One of the major benefits of a private road, one could bypass the weight limits imposed on county roads and state highways. On September 20, 1945 the first logging trucks made the inaugural voyage.
It should be noted this delighted Susanville’s Main Street merchants since they no longer had to contend with logging trucks interfering with their commerce.
There was pretty steady stream of logging trucks on Paul Bunyan Road when I was a kid growing up in the Cherry Terrace neighborhood in the mid to late 1960s (and maybe into the early ’70s). We used to run to the logging road’s intersection with Paiute Lane and pump our arms to signal the drivers to sound their air horns, which they usually did.
In my memory, the trucks drove full-speed through the intersections with Cherry Terrace and Paiute Lane, but surely the drivers slowed down a little bit….
After the logging road was abandoned, the up-canyon section became the pathway to all sorts of solo and group hiking, camping, fishing and bike-riding adventures. We had to drag our bikes under the orange and black gate at the Cherry Terrace intersection.