Boca Townsite, California

Not much left! Looking more or less westward toward the Sierra Nevada, skylined in the distance. The river is the Truckee; the railroad (visible here and there in the upper left quadrant) is the original transcontinental route, now part of the Union Pacific. And the freeway is Interstate-80.
Boca means "mouth" in Spanish, and as in English the word can refer to a river mouth. Here it refers to the confluence of the Little Truckee, coming in from the right beyond the parking lot, with the Truckee. Boca lay about 15 miles east of Donner Summit and got its start as a source of timber for the railroad construction in the late 1860s. Its big claim to fame, however, was in a forgotten 19th-century industry: ice harvesting. A millpond on the Little Truckee originally built for the timber operations would freeze over in winter, and the ice would be sawed into blocks and shipped out. Even the improvised insulation of the day could preserve much of the ice over the summer. But by the 1920s the timber was exhausted and natural ice harvesting was becoming uncompetitive with artificial refrigeration. The town was finally dismantled in 1927. The insets on the left show some of the interpretive signs, with contemporary photos, around the townsite; those on the right show some artifacts that have been gathered.

The dry brown grass is cheat grass, an exceptionally noxious invader weed. For obvious reasons, it has led to an increase in wildland fires!