Drakesbad Guest Ranch: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Lassen Volcanic National Park, National Park Service

Fitzgerald, Kathleen

The Drakesbad Guest Ranch, a 440-acre historic vernacular landscape within the Warner Valley, is located in Plumas County, California. The district is located ten miles northwest of Chester and fifty miles east of Red Bluff and Redding. The park is located at the southern end of the Cascade Range of northern California. Recent volcanic activity has erased some of the evidence of Pleistocene glaciation and is the dominant natural force influencing the landscape of the park. The period of significance for Drakesbad Guest Ranch is from 1900 to 1952, representing the early developments of the guest ranch. The historic district boundary includes both a 400-acre parcel incorporating Edward Drake's original cash entry and homestead claims and a non-contiguous forty-acre parcel purchased by Sifford from the state of California in 1901 which contains most of Boiling Springs Lake. In addition to defining the area of legal ownership, these boundaries incorporate the core area of use during the period of significance and include landscape elements central to the visitors' experience: the primary guest ranch building cluster, Devil's Kitchen to the west, Dream Lake to the south, Boiling Springs Lake (with its spectacular view of Lassen Peak) to the southeast, and Indian Rock to the east. The historic Boiling Springs Lake Trail, built by Alex Sifford during the period of significance, links the two discontiguous parcels. The 400-acre parcel contains the primary cluster of guest ranch buildings used for accommodating guests and for keeping saddle horses. This cluster of improvements grew around Edward Drake's "big house," a building constructed specifically for use as a hotel. Located within the forest margin at the north edge of the Drakesbad meadow, the "big house" occupied a slightly elevated spit of land that stood above the surrounding meadow. After 1913, the focus of the operation changed from supplying services to self-sufficient campers, to offering full accommodations to guests. New buildings included a separate kitchen, twenty board tent platforms to support new canvas wall tents, as well as a new hay barn to support an expanded string of saddle horses to be rented to guests. Over the course of decades (1936-1960) the tent cabins would be replaced, in part, with small frame cottages and duplexes. In addition to improving and adding to the primary building complex, Alex Sifford and son Roy worked continuously on improving the access road into the site, and, for twenty years, on draining and improving the "bog and willow swamp" that originally surrounded Drake's homestead buildings. Expanding upon Drake's original 20 acre field of timothy hay, eventually created the meadow that supported the ranch's saddle horses and later, cattle. The Siffords constructed and/or improved a series of hiking and bridle trails that radiated out from the lodge, leading to the thermal areas located within their own property (Devil's Kitchen and Boiling Springs Lake) and to other scenic areas within the boundary of what is now Lassen Volcanic National Park. In order to provide fishing and boating opportunities, R. D. Sifford dammed a natural drainage in the hill slope above the south bank of Hot Springs Creek to form "Dream Lake,” with an area of roughly three acres. Drakesbad Guest Ranch is significant on a state level under Criterion A for the connection to the broad history of recreation and conservation, retains integrity and is in fair condition. Those landscape characteristic associated with the significance of the site include; Natural Systems and Features, Spatial Organization, Land Use, Circulation, Buildings and Structures, and Constructed Water Features.

Drakesbad Guest Ranch: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Lassen Volcanic National Park, National Park Service

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