Every Trail Tells a Story
Tower House Historic District
Gold Rush meets green canyon – history and nature woven together in one trail.
El Dorado Mine relics spark the imagination of both kids and history buffs.
Mill Creek crossings and swimming holes make this one of Whiskeytown’s coolest summer walks.
In Whiskeytown, the story of water and gold is inseparable – and nowhere is it told more vividly than at the Tower House Historic District. Here, amid preserved homesteads, shaded orchards, and weathered mine ruins, hikers can walk directly into the Gold Rush era while also enjoying one of the most lush and surprising natural areas around Whiskeytown Lake.
The Camden Water Ditch Trail links this history to the land itself. It carries you past remnants of a 19th-century community and into the green canyon of Mill Creek, where waterfalls, swimming holes, and grapevine-draped trees provide cool relief from the surrounding oak-dotted foothills. In this district, human ambition and natural beauty share the same trail.
The place takes its name from two ambitious pioneers. Levi Tower built the Tower House Hotel in the 1850s, a lively way station for miners and travelers along Camden’s toll road. His business partner, Charles Camden, turned his attention to lumbering, fruit orchards, and the most vital commodity of all: water. He engineered an elaborate irrigation ditch to carry Mill Creek’s flow to his fields. In the Gold Rush, you could strike it rich with ore-or by controlling water. Camden did both, prospering as his farmstead and enterprises grew.
Camden’s handsome two-story house, built in 1852, still stands near the trailhead. Preserved by the National Park Service, it offers tours and gold-panning demonstrations in summer that let families get their hands dirty with history. Nearby, Levi Tower’s grave is a quiet reminder of a man whose hotel once bustled with life until fire destroyed it in 1919.
The story doesn’t end with the pioneers. Hike a little farther and you find the El Dorado Mine, with rusting machinery left behind from the ore-crushing days. Continue into Mill Creek’s canyon and the mood shifts again: suddenly you’re in a cool, jungle-like world where maples and alders arch overhead, grapevines twist between trunks, and the creek runs lively over smooth boulders.
This is Whiskeytown in miniature: a landscape of ambition and adaptation, where miners reshaped the land, orchards flourished along hand-cut ditches, and today’s hikers wander into a canyon where nature has reasserted itself with vigor. One foot on the past, one in the present-that’s the Tower House experience.
From the Visitor Center, drive west 8 miles on Highway 299. Turn right at the signed entrance for Tower House Historic District and park in the lot.
Cross Clear Creek on a footbridge into the historic district. The path passes Camden House, fenced orchards, and the remains of early settlement before reaching a second bridge and the start of the Camden Water Ditch Trail.
This wide, shaded trail first parallels Willow Creek, then follows the hand-dug ditch that once irrigated Camden’s orchards. You’ll pass the old caretaker’s house before reaching a junction: turn right for the El Dorado Mine, where rusting artifacts – a mine car still on its rails, the skeleton of a stamp mill-evoke the Gold Rush years.
Continue straight and the trail transforms into the Mill Creek Trail, entering a cool canyon shaded by oak, maple, and alder. Grapevines drape the trees, lending a jungle-like feel. The path crisscrosses Mill Creek again and again – 19 times in all. In summer you may hop rocks with dry boots; in spring, the crossings can be ankle-deep. Along the way, a couple of swimming holes tempt hot hikers into the creek. Most turn back after two or three miles, but the full trail continues 6.5 miles to Crystal Creek Road.