Three sequoia trees, once 3-foot-tall saplings planted by Clark Burnham in the 1930s on the hillside between Olympic Valley and Alpine Meadows, now tower among the trees of Burnham Hill, marking the passing of time for the family who played and fished and lived below them.
Five generations of Burnhams, and some Hills, have summered at Burnham Hill, when Olympic Valley was known as Bear Valley and Alpine Meadows as Deer Park, and the railroad ran along the river. Purchased from the railroad and lumber companies by Clark Burnham in 1914 after years of visiting Tahoe for summers of flyfishing, the hill on which the cabins are scattered still feels like old Tahoe.
Burnham had considered land in Olympic Valley even before the Poulsens became the first to purchase property there in the 1940s, but opted for the natural springs and proximity to the river his plot provided. The family built its first log cabin in 1915 where Highway 89 now runs by the river and called the land Burnham Ridge. Back then, the children would sleep on fir bough beds in tents.
Barely 10 years after the original cabin was built, the state highway department condemned it along with the river frontage road, leaving the family with no access to the land and cutting the highway across it in the late ’20s. As a result, access to the property is up a steep driveway off Highway 89 between Olympic Valley and Alpine.
The property came to be known as Burnham Hill when Burnham’s daughter married his junior partner in medicine, Harold Hill, and the two families purchased more plots of land to connect a total of 20 acres where the standing cabins still rest. The Hill houses, considered by Clark’s great-grandson Chris Burnham to have been the fancy cabins with a butler, are currently boarded up with no one to care for them.
Though the original cabin is long gone, the others have remained through wartime drafts, wood stove fires, attempted burglaries, further highway easements, Bud Jones’ reign in Olympic Valley, bear attacks, and the first Tevis Cup, the annual endurance horseback ride founded in 1955. Decks and doors have been rebuilt, but Chris still pulls his bed onto the sleeping porch each night to lie under a blanket of stars.
“When my dad was a kid, nobody slept inside,” Chris recalled. “Everybody slept outside. I’m the only one who still sleeps outside.”
Chris grew up just like his ancestors, running through the brush, fishing in the river, and fetching newspapers in the early morning for each cabin in exchange for blueberry squares from a bakery once located where the Olympic Valley 7-Eleven is.
He considers the “Hill” akin to camp in the way it brings people together and holds memories. Each summer, Burnham Hill gathers family, friends, and strangers.
“This is what Tahoe used to look like,” Chris said. “Now it’s fancy houses and weekend homes and that, and this property was designed really for a fishing camp and to keep the history alive of the property.”
Chris’ father, named Clark like his grandfather, is the current patriarch of the Hill and three cabins known as lower, upper, and tent cabins. Everything at Burnham Hill is chock-full of history and hand-built, from the swimming pool fed by spring water to the stonework. The chimney is made from Truckee River rocks, built under the watch of the elder Clark’s wife, Eula, who had broken her neck that summer and lay on a cot outside to oversee construction.
“My dad’s up there,” Chris said. “He’s 84 and he was just painting the rails because of the legacy of it.”
Clark sat on the upper cabin’s deck, wearing painting clothes and the scars of a fluke bear attack. The father and son sat with their dogs and jointly told the story of a summer when Clark was opening the cabins as a bear wandered through the front door following the scent of dog food. Clark didn’t even realize he was bleeding from gashes on his face and arm until he cleaned up after the bear. At the time, the hospital had never treated a bear victim.
“And the funny story was that I figured I won the thing because I was cleaning up the bear poop in there,” Clark said. “I startled and so he pooped, I didn’t.”
These days, Chris is the primary caretaker of Burnham Hill, opening it from Memorial Day to Labor Day and welcoming family and friends throughout the summer, just like his relatives.
“There have been hundreds of people, family, and friends that have come to this property and it left a meaningful thing for them,” Chris said.
The Burnham’s big event, started by Chris’ great aunt Betty, is Fourth of July, when Betty would throw a junk food party for the kids. It wasn’t a good party if there wasn’t a kid that threw up, Chris shared. That standard still holds today as Betty’s legacy continues on.
