Thousands of miners passed through this town as they crossed the Stanislaus River on their way to the gold diggings during the heyday of California’s Gold Rush. The massive ruins of a flourmill still stand in a field of rusty weeds under a sky that seems to come from a Van Gogh painting. The swirling white clouds in the deep blue sky echo the swirls of pattern in the weedy field below. Effective landscape photographs will often convey meaning by combining ideas expressed by both the land and the sky above. In this case, the repeating swirls on both ends of the image provide a richly textured canvas for the ruins of the old mill.