Here is Alex Dulfer’s version of sixteen color photos for the Overland Route. Like the Shasta Route photos, they are better quality than the National Color Press photos, or at least they have aged better.

Click image to download a 14.8-MB PDF of this photo packet.

Three of the photos — of the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf, and Bay Bridge — are identical to photos in the Shasta Route set. Other photos correspond to ones in the National Color Press Overland Route set: the Mormon Temple, Lucin Cutoff, Palisade Canyon, Reno, Lake Tahoe, California’s capitol building — but they are taken from different angles and different times of the day. Instead of photos of Yosemite Park and giant sequoias, this packet has photos of San Francisco’s Chinatown, the Truckee River, and Virginia City.

The photo of the City of San Francisco on the Lucin Cutoff is a disappointment as the train is so small. The photographer should have waited for the train to advance another hundred feet or so.

Many of the other photos seem disappointing as they have no foreground subject to focus on. This is particularly true of the pictures of placer workings in the Sierra Nevada, Emigrant Gap, and Virginia City, all of which blur in the mind into the same photo. With the possible exceptions of the San Francisco bridges, I don’t think I’d be inspired to frame any of these pictures and hang them on my wall.