I’d previously tried to find the property address for the parcel number I’d found in Yardley’s file. The number fit a property in Placer county. But the address for that parcel number was Rural Route Creek View Terminus, which did not show up on Google Maps.
I wondered what would come up if I plugged the address into a regular search page rather than a map page.
That brought up no exact match to my search. But it did give me some possible connections. I clicked on several with no good result. So I varied my search, taking out some words, then taking out other words. I came to a hiking website that had faint copies of topo maps, the old kind that showed mine locations, information that has been removed from newer government maps.
Below the image of one map was a description of a hike. Part of the description said to hike up the old Ward Creek View Rural Route. Several of those words were on the address I found for the parcel number.
This time, I went back to Google Maps, found the general location, then expanded it, comparing it to the old topo map on the hiking website. Sure enough, there was a single road on a background of dark green like one would find for National Forest land.
I searched on a topographical map of the area and studied the topo lines for elevation.
The property appeared to be situated on a ridge to the southwest of Tahoe City. The access was a study in privacy. There was a trail on the topo map that appeared to be a Forest Service road. The road went near the Granlibakken Resort, one of Tahoe’s earliest ski hills, which was now a resort with an adventure park for people who wanted to test their physical skills, with bridges through the treetops and multiple zip line rides. Outside of the Granlibakken Resort was an area of vacation homes unseen from the highway on Tahoe’s West Shore. From that neighborhood emerged a smaller road that twisted around back on itself as it climbed up the slope. And from that road, there was a turnoff to an even smaller road that zig-zagged in switchbacks up to a ridge. The road, a driveway, went along the ridge to a house.
I switched to the satellite view. After it loaded, I zoomed in on the photo.
The house looked sizable from above. It had a roof line with multiple small gables as if each projected over a window on the second floor. The pattern was uniform, with none of the unusual angles common to modern mansions. I switched over to the horizontal view. Nearly all of the house was obscured by trees. But I could make out enough to sense that the house was large and sided with a mosaic of different gray tones, like stone.
I went back to the overhead view and saw that the house had some small yard areas free of trees. It also had a large companion building positioned like a garage. Using the trees for scale, the garage would probably hold three or four vehicles. Zooming to the maximum magnification, I saw a faint fence line tracing an irregular shape in the forest around the house. In places, the line seemed to disappear, obscured from satellite view under the trees. The fence formed a perimeter around the property and crossed the drive at a long distance from the house. At the sides of the driveway crossing were columns, large enough to be visible from the satellite. Anyone who drove up would be blocked well back, possibly distant enough that they couldn’t even see the house.
Next, I plugged the address into the Zillow property website. No sales records were available. Yardley had probably acquired the property in a private sale, no multiple listing service, no realtor advertising it with a video tour posted online.
The property appeared to be one of the old summer Tahoe lodges, elegant but rustic, kept in steady private ownership for decades such that almost no one knew it even existed. Even the closest neighbors down below in the Granlibakken area likely weren’t aware of its presence on the ridge above. Perhaps they wondered where the occasional vehicle crawling up the rural road was headed. And if a neighbor hiked up the road, they would find everything gated and fenced.
I tried several different kinds of searches using the house’s address and also using generic descriptions such as ‘stone house on mountain above Granlibakken.’
Nothing came up that was close. I kept varying my search terms, but with no more success. Then I wondered if the Granlibakken Resort existed when the house was built. I searched its history and found out that it only went back to about the late 1940s. Before that, the area was a ski hill and ski jump run by the Tahoe Tavern over on the shore of the lake. So I typed in ‘stone house on the mountain above Tahoe Tavern ski hill.’
Scanning down the results, I came to a link highlighting almost those exact words. I clicked on it. It was from a memoir published in 1957, written by Sylvia R. Blomburg. The passage was in a chapter titled Our Magnificent Summers At Tahoe. The passage with the highlighted words said:
One of our favorite activities back in the 1920s, and even before, was to hike up to Stone Lodge on the mountain behind the Tahoe Tavern ski jump. It was a hideaway built by the banker Isaiah Hellman, the first president of Wells Fargo Bank.
Of course, everybody knew Hellman built Pine Lodge, the mansion on the West Shore of Tahoe just south of Homewood. Unlike Pine Lodge, few people knew about Stone Lodge because Hellman wanted it private, his own nirvana away from all of his acquaintances and family except his faithful valet and caretaker, an old man named Ignatius.
I should point out here, that this information comes from Ignatius himself. So if he presented it in a self-serving way to us young girls, that is to be both accepted and excused.
Stone Lodge was a fraction the size of the lakeshore palace. However, it had amazing views! As far as we could tell, Mr. Hellman was never around.
Ignatius let us girls wander around. We would carry sandwiches up the mountain and picnic on Stone Lodge’s veranda. We even played on the tire swing just off the patio. Swinging out from the mountain, it felt as if you could drop directly into the magnificent blue of Lake Tahoe.
Sylvia’s memoir continued:
Later, we found out that Isaiah Hellman was more than just the president of Wells Fargo. He was also the biggest banker in Los Angeles and ran several banks in San Francisco. He brought the railroad to Los Angeles and owned a huge quantity of land there. More than anyone else, Hellman was responsible for starting USC. And, just like those other Tahoe businessmen, Lucky Baldwin and D.L. Bliss, Hellman also bought a great deal of land in Tahoe.
My friend and I met Ignatius, the caretaker of Stone Lodge, the first time we climbed up the mountain and discovered the house. I remember the date because it was shortly after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, the summer of 1919, at the end of June.
I think it was because the Great War was formally ended that Ignatius - normally a reticent man - was willing to speak of Germany and Bavaria, where Isaiah Hellman and his siblings and cousins were from.
Ignatius explained that Hellman was a Jew, and, like so many Eastern European Jews, had emigrated to America hoping to find a more tolerant place to live, where they could escape the continuous anti-semitism in their homeland. This was back just before the Civil War. According to Ignatius, Hellman thought America great, and he prospered mightily.
It was Ignatius who let us in on one of Hellman’s secrets, what Ignatius called Hellman’s Ahab fixation.
I should back up and say that during Hellman’s early years in this country, he had reportedly taken interest in the novelist Herman Melville. The reason, Ignatius said - or maybe surmised - was that Melville was one of the few American novelists of any substance who seemed not to harbor any anti-semitism. And when Hellman learned that Melville had even traveled to Jerusalem in pursuit of a greater understanding of Judaism in particular, and of all religion in general, that further piqued Hellman’s interest in Melville.
So Hellman read Melville’s Moby Dick. In addition to great entertainment, it was useful in helping an immigrant polish his English.
In the novel, a vengeful, crazy, sailing man named Captain Ahab is on a mission to kill Moby Dick, the whale that bit off Ahab’s leg a long time before.
Of course, we asked Ignatius what an Ahab fixation was, and he rambled on about how it had something to do with a stereotype called The Wandering Jew. Captain Ahab was Melville’s representation of a Wandering Jew, a man who, despite his craziness, has impressive focus and drive and, in his hunt for the whale that maimed him, tenacity. This apparently made Hellman fascinated with the character of Ahab.
Because of our young age and our naiveté, we girls didn’t really understand what Ignatius was telling us. But his excitement was obvious. And when he said he’d show us something amazing, but only if we promised to never tell anyone, we became equally excited. So we eagerly said yes.
With his eyes sparkling, Ignatius said that Hellman had little phrases based on Ahab’s name. One of them was Alway Have A Backup. If you take the first letters of each word, they spell Ahab. Ignatius said that Hellman had many of these Ahab phrases.
So we asked what Always Have A Backup meant. Ignatius said that it meant never create anything that doesn’t have a separate way out, which, I suppose, could also mean another way in.
Of course, as smart young girls, we took this to mean a metaphorical backup as much as anything.
Then Ignatius, eyes sparkling even more, turned and looked at Stone Lodge and said, “Now imagine how an “Ahab” would apply to his lodge!”
We were of course flummoxed.
“Here’s a clue,” Ignatius said. “Imagine that Mr. Hellman has ridden his horse up the mountain to Stone Lodge. He reaches into his pocket for the key to the door only to discover that he left it down at the lake.” Ignatius pointed at the lodge’s front door. “As you can see, the door is heavy planks of wood, much too sturdy to force open. Either you’d have to break in a window or consider your trip a loss.”
“So the Ahab backup was a spare key?” I said.
Ignatius shook his head. “Consider the scope of the character of Captain Ahab. His mission was huge. Life or death. If Ahab had been searching for a bee that stung him instead of a whale that bit off his leg, then Mr. Hellman might have conceived of hiding a spare key. But Captain Ahab was sailing the world looking to kill the giant whale that maimed him! That kind of scope would suggest that Mr. Hellman’s backup was something grand!”
At this, my friend and I were bouncing on our toes. Mr. Hellman’s Always Have A Backup concept would have to be very exciting. Something extraordinary.
So we walked over and started looking at Stone Lodge very closely. Its doors and windows and the actual stone walls. My friend even stared up at the roof.
But after a long search, we had no ideas.
“Do you give up?” Ignatius asked.
“Yes, yes,” we said.
At that, Ignatius walked over to the wall of the lodge and pointed at one of the windows.
The windows had wooden frames set in the stone wall. All the windows in the lodge had panels of cedar shakes above and beneath the window frames. It was an architectural element to make them stand out from the stone wall. Ignatius motioned us over to one of the windows. With a grand, sweeping gesture like that of a magician, he reached under the window and moved some kind of hidden catch and then pulled out on the cedar shakes below the window.
The cedar shakes swung out all together. They were the covering on a small door!
Ignatius bent over, and stepped under the door as if he were Alice in Wonderland going through the Looking Glass. He seemed to disappear.
My friend and I followed and found ourselves in the living room of the stone house! As Ignatius witnessed our amazement, he made the largest grin. I’ll never forget it. He showed us how the inside of the door blended into the woodwork of the living room wall. Then he ushered us back outside and reminded us we were never to tell a soul.
I thought about the implications suggested by a house Yardley had bought but that no one in the company besides Yardley seemed to know about. His wife Lucy had told me Yardley often disappeared for hours at a time.
My guess was that Stone Lodge may have been Yardley LaMotte’s personal hideaway just as it had been for Isaiah Hellman. The lodge would provide great privacy even as it perched on the end of a ridge and had a great view of the lake and surrounding mountains.
I decided to see if I could find Stone Lodge.
I got out my topographical maps of the Tahoe Basin. Comparing the Google satellite picture to the topo map, I was able to find the Stone Lodge’s likely location on my paper map. By studying the topo lines, which are areas of equal elevations, I could see how steep or shallow the nearby slopes were. It seemed that there was another Forest Service trail a good distance away from the Granlibakken neighborhood. The trail came off the Ward Creek Canyon, a valley where Ward Creek flowed out of the base of Alpine Meadows ski resort. I could park near there, walk up the trail, then bushwhack up the ridge below the house.
Before I left for Stone Lodge, which required another trip around the lake, I wondered if I should detour through Reno and see if I could learn something about Anders Henriksson, the investor/lender who provided financing for Yardley.
William Lindholm had said that Anders’ company was Reno Discovery Group. I looked up the number and dialed. A man answered.
“Reno Discovery, Robert speaking.”
“Hello. My name is Owen McKenna. I’m an investigator looking into a missing persons case involving a man named Yardley LaMotte. I understand that Anders Henriksson made a substantial investment in Mr. LaMotte’s company before Mr. Henriksson died. I wonder if I could…”
“Whoa, Mr. McKenna. Slow down, please. Anders Henriksson didn’t die.”
“I’m sorry. Maybe I have the names switched. I thought Anders was the one who died. Is Anders the brother?”
“Anders is alive and well. And he has no brother.”