An eclectic Sierra compound is for sale for $4.75M

Ivan Coffman followed the serpentine road up the Feather River Canyon and into the Sierra Nevada foothills to the historic outpost of Belden . It was 1970, and Coffman, a young craftsman who did masonry work in Fresno, had the week off. He pulled off the road and parked his truck at a bend where the Yellow Creek, a small tributary, feeds into the Feather River. He walked upstream. Sure enough, he found what he was looking for: nuggets of gold, resting in the creek, everywhere.

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"That year, we had a terrific flood that washed a huge bar of gravel off down into this hole, and that's what left all that gold layin' there," Coffman said, with a slight twang in his voice. He went back to his truck, grabbed a 5-gallon bucket and nearly filled it with pebble-sized nuggets. "It'd been hidden for all them years," he said.

During the Gold Rush, fortune seekers mined millions of dollars' worth of gold in the Feather River Canyon, and Belden, one of the booming mining camps in the canyon, had a thousand residents in its heyday. After the gold came the railroad and tourism - fishing was plentiful on the Feather River, and mining camps turned into resorts. In the 20th century, however, a series of dams constructed on the Feather River created a "stairway" of hydroelectric power. Fish populations declined. The landscape was altered. The economy faltered. But once in a while, someone still found a life-changing stroke of luck in Belden.

That week in 1970, Coffman said, he found about 50 ounces' worth of gold in the riverbed near Belden. At the time, gold was worth around $35 an ounce. Today, the price is around $4,400 an ounce.

Coffman called his business partner in Fresno to tell him he'd be staying in Belden longer than he'd originally planned. He never went back to masonry.

At 87 years old, Coffman still mines for gold in the Feather River almost every day and the riches he's found led to other ventures. He's a jewelry maker and a loan lender and, in 1989, he bought Belden.

By then, Belden was on the verge of becoming a ghost town: A fire in the 1970s had destroyed most of the ramshackle buildings. Coffman rebuilt what was left, turning the compound into an eclectic destination in the woods, a stopover for travelers hiking the Pacific Crest Trail or cruising on motorcycles through the Lost Sierra . Belden has also become a well-known venue for music festivals, a place far from any neighbors, where people can rave at all hours of day and night.

Change is once again coming for Belden. After 56 years, Coffman is finally getting ready to leave Belden for good. He's selling the town for $4.75 million and Belden is looking for its next leader.

Belden, population 15, isn't an official town - Portola, about an hour away, is the only incorporated town in Plumas County - but it has the makings of a definitive place, surrounded by lush forest, shaded by steep mountains and bordered by the river on one side and the railroad on the other. Coffman is selling it all.

Turning off Highway 70, Belden's main street crosses a steel bridge over the Feather River and leads to the village center, where the two-story Belden Town Resort and Lodge stretches down the riverbank. Inside are a restaurant, a bar, a general store and hotel rooms. On the far side of the building is a private apartment.

Coffman unlocked the double wooden doors on a recent midweek morning and stepped inside the lodge. Morning sun streamed in through the windows overlooking the river, brightening the long shadows inside. A wood-burning stove faces the bar. The restaurant is a vault full of antiquities: taxidermy, artwork, an old slot machine, a leather saddle, rows of glass bottles and vases, a human-sized rooster.

Outside, murals and painted wooden signs adorn the property, welcoming visitors to "Belden Town." Colorful cabins dot the property, many with trees planted by the front door or vines climbing the porch. There's a mechanic's garage built in the mid-20th century and a long-shuttered schoolhouse overgrown with bushes and vines, reclaimed by nature. Trailers and RVs are parked on the property grounds, homes to people who work in the area, Coffman said.

Author Cheryl Strayed wrote about her first impressions of Belden when she arrived, midway on her journey along the Pacific Crest Trail, in her bestselling 2013 memoir "Wild."

"I dragged into Belden Town limping in agony, observing that, in fact, it wasn't a town. It was a rambling building near a railroad track," Strayed wrote. She took off her infamous hiking boots, retrieved a package she'd sent for a resupply with a $20 bill and purchased a couple of Snapple lemonades she'd been fantasizing about for days. In Belden, she met other women who were hiking the trail. Her brief stay here became a turning point in the book.

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Whatever definition of town Belden fits into, Coffman is the unofficial mayor, though he insists nobody has ever called him that in his life. In the summer, when a couple thousand music fans arrive for a festival, Coffman's role is to unlock the door and greet people, said Josie Litchfield, a friend of Coffman's who is helping him list and market the property.

"Who wants to be the next mayor of Belden Town?" Litchfield wrote in an email.

'All the people you meet over the years'

Outside the lodge, a traveler asked Coffman for a bottle of water. "Is the store open?" he asked. Coffman replied that it wasn't and directed him to a water fountain, but the traveler explained he was a cancer survivor, and after rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, he drank bottled water exclusively.

"Well, even though we're not open now, I can grab you a bottle of water if you need something right now," Coffman told him, ducking back inside the lodge. A moment later he handed him a bottle of water, still dripping with condensation. Coffman refused the man's attempts to pay. "I'll just give it to you, how's that?" he said.

Over the years, Coffman said he's met "tens of thousands" of travelers.

"Everybody is a different character, just like this fella here," he said, continuing, "... I even met a gal a couple years ago who was carrying her baby the full length of the [Pacific Crest] Trail and the baby was probably only about a year old."

He walked across the property, pointing out the swimming hole and the abandoned phone booth, now covered in stickers. A garden was in full bloom near a gazebo and a footbridge, where a creek spilled down rocks and ferns.

The greenery was a sharp contrast to the charred stems of trees on the steep hillsides surrounding Belden. The Dixie fire in 2021 burned all around Belden. Coffman and residents in the Feather River Canyon were among the first to evacuate in what would become California's largest single-source wildfire. Down the highway, the Dixie Fire burned the entire town of Greenville . The fire could have destroyed Belden, too, but Coffman's son and some of his employees stayed behind to fight the flames.

Coffman's son died earlier this year of health complications. That's one of the reasons Coffman decided to sell. The flowers by the gazebo were planted as a memorial. The garden is just a few steps from where Coffman parked his RV when he first moved to Belden, back in the 1970s.

What does he love most about Belden? "Oh, I guess all the people you meet over the years," Coffman said. "And you know, as time goes on, you look back on a lot of things." His voice wavered at the end of his thought. Sometimes, when he was talking about different spots on the grounds, Coffman closed his eyes for a long while, remembering the different layers of memories stacked on top of this place over the decades.

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