While gold dredging on Canyon Creek between Downeyville and Laporte back in the early '70's, we came across a pair of very old pines whose limbs were intertwined in such a way as to give the shape of a verticle ladder. The rungs were the limbs and were nearly a foot in diameter. A little ways away along the mountain side was a tree trunk with a saddle bow shape in a horizontal section . The rest of the trunk extended on up vertically. Also nearby, a few trees had huge knots tied in the limbs. An old gold panner named Lee Hill, in his mid 80's, from the nearby town of Cleo, said the trees were knotted up that way by the miners from the late 1800's. It was just their way of leaving something behind for future generations to see. As he spoke, he demonstrated by deftly tying a gentle knot in the tip of a small sapling limb. "A hundred years from now, that will be a large knot like you see on trees up the mountain side", he said.