Phillips (formerly, Phillip's and Vade Post Office) is a small

unincorporated community An unincorporated area is a parcel of land that is not governed by a local general-purpose municipal corporation. (At p. 178.) They may be governed or serviced by an encompassing unit (such as a county) or another branch of the state (such as th ...

El Dorado County El Dorado County (; ''El Dorado'', Spanish language, Spanish for "The Golden ne), officially the County of El Dorado, is a List of counties in California, county located in the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 United States census, ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. It is located on the South Fork of the

American River The American River is a List of rivers of California, river in California that runs from the Sierra Nevada (U.S.), Sierra Nevada mountain range to its confluence with the Sacramento River in downtown Sacramento. Via the Sacramento River, it ...

, west of Echo Summit, at an elevation of 6,873 feet (2095 m). It is the site of the Sierra-at-Tahoe ski resort. The ZIP code is 95720. The community is inside

area code 530 Area codes 530 and 837 are telephone area codes in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) in northeastern and Northern California. 530 was created in 1997 in an area code split of 916 and 837 was added to the same numbering plan area as an ov ...

. Joseph Wells Davis Phillips began cattle ranching here in 1859, and opened a hotel in 1863. The Vade post office operated at Phillips from 1912 to 1961. As of 2020, the Phillips family still owned the townsite, which has long been a site for manual surveys of

Sierra Nevada The Sierra Nevada ( ) is a mountain range in the Western United States, between the Central Valley of California and the Great Basin. The vast majority of the range lies in the state of California, although the Carson Range spur lies primari ...

snowpack.

References

Unincorporated communities in California Unincorporated communities in El Dorado County, California Populated places established in 1863 {{ElDoradoCountyCA-geo-stub