For the folks in the mountainous outback of northern California, mail service, and occasionally basic living supplies, have arrived six days a week for more than 70 years via Charlie Snapp.
At age 92, Snapp holds one of the longest-running individual contracts with the U.S. Postal Service. He first won the contract in the Roaring '20s."It's no problem to keep working as long as I have my health," says Snapp, who is now quite hard of hearing and relies on his 62-year-old retired son, Ernie, to drive him on his 110-mile route. "I don't know what I'd do just sitting around."
In the '20s when Snapp started, the contract called for him to take the mail from the tiny town of Gazette on dirt roads through the sparsely populated redwood wilderness, chug up and over steep mountain passes, and stay overnight in another tiny burg called Soames, doing the same route in reverse the next day.
In the winter, with snow occasionally up to 4 feet deep down in the valley, the high mountain roads were impassable by truck. But Snapp's contract required that he get the mail through anyway.
"The contract called for either using skis or a sled, or mules, and I didn't think I could do much with mules," he remembers matter-of-factly.
Snapp ended up using a three-vehicle approach. After driving up one side of the mountain with a tractor, he loaded the mail on a sled, strapped on skis and hauled the sled over the top to a truck parked on the other side, which he used to finish his route.
When the roads were closed, Snapp often delivered groceries and medicine along with the day's mail to snowed-in families on the mountain.
"Sometimes I'd have a ton and a half of groceries with me," says Snapp. And the mail always got delivered.
"I'll always remember when I was a little kid and dad wouldn't get home until midnight, and I would be sitting there wondering if he was lost, who would find him," recalls Ernie Snapp. "And pretty soon he would pull in. He sure worried me a lot."
Snapp had five young children when his first wife died. Instead of sending the children to live with other relatives - common in those Depression years - Snapp raised them alone and frequently took them along on his winding and bumpy dirt-road route.
"My mother died when I was a year old," says Ernie. "So I would ride with dad in the truck quite a bit. I remember sleeping on the mail sacks in the back of the truck."
Today, six decades later, Ernie is back riding the route with his dad. Partly to help out with the driving and partly for something to do, Ernie moved in with Charlie two years ago after retiring from his own job at the Louisiana Pacific lumber mill in Alaska.
"He can drive, but one day he fell down and hurt his leg and I got to thinking that I'd hate for something to happen on a mountain road," says Ernie.
The route today is a fully paved 110-mile loop, going from Snapp's 8-acre ranch in Etna over a 6,000-foot pass down into Forks of Salmon, up over another 6,000-foot pass to Callahan and then back to Etna.
The route, which winds along the Salmon River, takes Snapp about six hours to complete each day, with stops to deliver mail at about 60 places ranging from mountain mining claims to roadside businesses.
Gladys Stanshaw, postmistress of the tiny Forks of Salmon (population 150) for the past 42 years, remembers Snapp as the postman when she was a child. Now, Stanshaw still sees Snapp six days a week when he passes through her office on his route.
"He has a rough route - in the winter it can get awful rough," says Stanshaw, 71. "He's of the old mountaineer breed where you just keep a-going. In the mountains here, I guess we grow tough."
Stanshaw laughs at a suggestion that driving through the rugged mountains might get to be too much for Snapp.
"He still buys his deer license every year and goes out hunting," says Stanshaw, who adds that Snapp grows hay and keeps horses on his property as well. "He knows these mountains."
Roy Hardin, who used to own a bait and tackle shop on Snapp's route, is impressed but not surprised at Snapp's perseverance.
"He delivered mail to us for years - he would deliver my milk too," says Hardin, who, at 77, retired recently for health reasons. "Knowing Charlie, he'll go as long as he can move."