I first met Luke Rizzuto at the HPOCA summer show in Canandaigua, NY in 1999. The love of Oliver tractors, mostly Cletracs and Oliver Crawlers, started a lasting friendship until this day. Our visits have always included an adventure, and the best one happened in July of 2004 when we went in search of a Cletrac that had tumbled down a California canyon in the mid 1950's.

I went to Luke's ranch in July 2004 to attend the California Oliver Cletrec Club’s summer meet where everyone has a chance to “play in the dirt” with all of his operable tracklayers. I use this term because that's what they call crawlers in California. This year it included the 45,000 pound FDLC. I must mention that in April of that same year I minimally helped Luke get that huge model F logger special with a super-charged Cummins diesel engine moving under its own power for the first time in 25 years. What a thrill it was to operate.

Getting back to the adventure, the story of the “Cletrac in the canyon” had been told for some time, and by now Luke had narrowed the search down to two ranches in the Mount Hamilton mountain range just east of Milpitas, which is east of San Jose. We headed in that direction. After making several inquires we soon learned that the Matroni Ranch had been disbanded, but the Joe Sheer Ranch, of around 5000 acres, was still mostly owned by his descendants. One of the places where we stopped was an old schoolhouse where Luke talked with a gentleman who just happened to be the historian of that area. He directed us a few miles down the road to see an 84-year-old rancher who was native to the area and might know something. Did he ever!

It happened that the rancher, John Covo had lived his entire life on a ranch his father bought in the early 1900's. His ranch bordered the Sheer ranch, and YES, that's where the Cletrac was resting! Without hesitation Luke asked John if he could take us there. John answered that it was too far and would take too long to get there considering the time of day, but he would take us to the opposite side of the valley which was much closer and we could look across the canyon to where the Cletrac was located. So with an old cloudy pair of binoculars and his cane (John couldn't walk very well anymore) we headed out.

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