Awesome "Off-Trail" Loop Hike on Old Trails

1 year ago

Time to put all this exploring and hill shade map knowledge to the test and see if I can link up a series of old roads and trails to make a loop,

There are signs the trail that forks off of the road on the north side of the GeoCache hill continued up a ridge to where Charcoal Road is today. Only way to know for sure is to drop down the ridge and look for "ground truth".

I'm finding more of these old trails and they all seem to have similar routing. They'll start off following along the side of a creek up a canyon. Then at some point, they'll start ascending a ridge, going straight up, until they join in with another road or trail. There are almost no switchbacks, no grade reversals, no drainage cuts like modern trails have. I suspect these are very old trails, likely from the pre-contact days.

USGS National Map Viewer w/ Hill Shade layers:
https://apps.nationalmap.gov/viewer/

This whole area is part of a single 40 acre parcel of land that the Open Space district purchased around 2001, per the newspaper article. I haven't been able to find out about anything that was located here prior to district clearing the land shortly after acquisition. Here's a demolition project for an adjoining parcel of land, acquired from the same owner in 2013, that was cleared in 2014:
https://www.openspace.org/sites/default/files/CGI-BIN/agendas_minutes/2014.07.23_Lobner_AwardofContract_Demolition_r-14-97.pdf

More to come...
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