On Saturday Catherine O'Riley and I took advantage of a spot of sun and a break in the weather to explore the North Fork canyon in the vicinity of Lake Clementine.
There one can find the flagged route of Placer County's proposed and approved "North Fork American River Trail" (acronym, NFART, which we will shorten to the more graceful NFT, for North Fork Trail), which would run up the canyon from The Confluence to Ponderosa Bridge.
With others (Friends of the North Fork, or, just "Friends") I have filed suit against Placer County to block construction of this trail, and force an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) on the project.
The NFT would be a multi-use trail, four feet wide, with vegetation cleared to allow equestrian use, along with bicycling and hiking. In places it would swell to nine feet wide, for "passing lanes."
With so many historic trails in and around the North Fork canyon already closed or at risk of being closed, I am not much of a fan of building new trails. Take care of our old trails, first, and then let's see where we stand.
There is a bit of a complicated history at work in all this, for the NFT is actually Phase One of Rex Bloomfield's Capital-to-Capital Trail (CCT), which was originally projected to directly parallel the North Fork American, from Auburn, all the way upstream to the headwaters, along Sierra crest.
There the CCT would cross into Squaw Valley and connect across to the Tahoe Rim Trail and thence to Carson City, somehow.
The CCT would be five feet wide and would largely have to be constructed from scratch. As the County began to advance this project, a brochure was made promoting the idea, with a photograph of a waterfall in the Royal Gorge, on the cover. The Secretary of the CA Resources Agency, under Gray Davis, saw this brochure, and approved, in principle, a $1.4 million State grant.
In the Auburn area, the North Fork canyon is within the Auburn State Recreation Area (ASRA), which is administered by CA State Parks. CA Parks advised the County that the CCT would force them into a gigantic and expensive and unwieldy EIR; better to take the CCT a step at a time, and, for instance, treat Phase One, from The Confluence up to Ponderosa, as a "stand-alone" project.
To think was to act, and the County proposed the NFT as a stand-alone project. A Trail Advisory Group (TAG) was constituted from local citizens. Eric Peach of PARC and Terry Davis of the Sierra Club were, it seems, the only members of the TAG who expressed any opposition to this huge new multi-use trail. They lobbied successfully for a higher trail alignment, well back from the river itself. Greg Wells, retired head ranger of ASRA, duly flagged this new, "high" route.
Two principles seem to have guided the placement of the flags (little strips of yellow surveyor's tape, tied to bushes):
1. The NFT should be as level as possible, and follow a contour about 200 feet higher than river elevation.
2. If the NFT nears an old mining ditch, it should avoid it, and pass below it if possible.
Add to these the practical principle (3) that, should the NFT near a traveled road, with motor vehicle traffic, it should avoid that road, rather than follow it.
Also, please note that, if one holds the trail to a given elevation, following a contour line as it were, one might possibly closely parallel a road or existing mining ditch, and be unable to take advantage of these existing "bench cuts" in the canyon wall, and be forced to make a brand new bench cut, four feet wide.
The TAG approved the high trail line of the NFT and the County prepared a "Mitigated Negative Declaration of Environmental Impact" for the project in May 2004. This was approved by the Supervisors and $200,000 of Placer Legacy money was directed to be spent on the NFT, with hopes of obtaining the $1.4 million from the State.
Within 30 days, Friends filed a CEQA-type suit to force an EIR on the NFT.
At this stage in our proceedings it is very important that members of Friends be well-acquainted with the route of the NFT and with possible alternatives. We might possibly find a way to settle with the County, and agree upon an alternate route of some sort. Studying both the NFT and the multiple possible alternate routes is a tall order for 12.6 miles of canyon, much of which is very remarkably wild and beautiful, for all its proximity to centers of population. And, it is not always easy to find and follow the flagged route of the NFT.
Finally please note that it is impossible to exorcise the spectre of the bad old CCT, hanging over all this NFT business. The NFT is in fact Phase One of the CCT, and to reduce environmental hassles, the County pretends it is not Phase One.
So. Catherine and I stopped at the Foresthill Bridge and took photos of the south canyon wall, where the NFT would follow the line of an Old Wagon Road, climbing slowly up the North Fork towards Lake Clementine.
Crossing over the highest bridge in California, we drove up to Lower Lake Clementine Road and followed it down to North Fork Dam. This was built around 1939, to impound future hydraulic mine tailings (it never served its purpose; another story). It diverts no water, the entire flow of the North Fork spills right over the top of the spillway, at elevation 715'; while the 600-foot contour bumps into the base of the dam.
Thus there is a sort of Niagara Falls there, 115' high, boiling up clouds of spray, just thundering along, day and night. It is quite a remarkable place and I have always thought some sort of nice stone overlook terrace should be built, facing the falls.
We admired the falls for a time before turning to business. The Old Wagon Road joins Lower Clementine at a certain hairpin curve, low down towards the dam. The task was to find the flagged route above, or up the canyon, from this point.
A few minutes' scouting revealed yellow ribbons, neatly splitting the gap between the upper and lower legs of the hairpin switchback.
We noted that, while the trail might have availed itself of one of the existing roads above or below, there is some traffic on the narrow winding way, and it would be better not to mix equestrians and bicyclists and hikers, with cars and trucks.
On the other hand, Lower Clementine is already much used by bicyclists, without any apparent problem; we saw several, on a day which threatened rain.
After getting a feel for this area, and for the flagged route, we drove back up top to the Foresthill Road, parked in the area set aside for an existing multi-use trail, and walked down what I call Middle Clementine Road. This is gated closed to motor vehicles, and is seldom used by bicyclists.
We had fine views across the canyon to the cave-ridden marble eminence called Lime Rock or Robbers Roost, with its old quarry-era access-road contouring along the canyon wall beside it. Unfortunately, a large house now glorifies its owner on the hilltop directly above, almost dominating the viewshed, considering that all eyes are drawn to the Roost.
Middle Clem road has quite a gentle gradient at first, and winds gently through oak woodlands with a startlingly large number of Madrone trees in the mix. A brushy knoll rises to the west, showing a mixture of Chamise and Manzanita. Across the canyon to the north another large patch of Chamise is visible, in direct contradiction to the rumor that the northernmost stand of Chamise in the Sierra is right there on the Foresthill Divide.
And now I hear of Chamise in the South Yuba.
Middle Clem steepens and at a hairpin turn left we saw a faint road right. Another couple hundred yards brought us to the intersection between the flagged route of the NFT and Middle Clem Road.
This is quite low, not far above the reservoir. The road itself has quite a gentle grade there, and we could not see why a brand new trail should be cut from the canyon wall, in that area; this road has no traffic. So use it.
We retraced our steps up to the hairpin and investigated the side road. It broke away east and immediately ended at a ravine, with a pretty little stream gurgling along down below. It was easy to pick one's way down and across and back up the far side, where the road reappeared.
Bears often step in the same old spots again and again and make a curious kind of dimpled trail, the dimples six or eight inches across and sometimes inches deep. A very faint dimpled bear trail led down this road. The sign of bobcat and fox was abundant.
The narrow road led down the ravine, and was soon joined by the flagged route. Then it flattened out altogether, and by all my experience of such things, this meant that it almost certainly had been cut into an old mining ditch.
In years past people had kept this old ditch-road lopped open, as a foot trail, but it is now overgrown again. We were not high above the river, in fact, GPS put us consistently on the 800' contour, 85' above the lake, while on the line of the ditch.
In something like half a mile, the bulldozed road=line left the ditch, dropping towards reservoir level. The ditch continued right along, now undisturbed and visibly an old mining ditch. At this point the flagged route suddenly left the line of the ditch and climbed above, slowly.
I knew that the NFT was intended to avoid old mining ditches; here it had followed the line of one, for half a mile; but now that it became obvious that it was, not just a road, but a ditch, the flagging split away high.
We stayed with the ditch, for if it continued, there could be no reason not to align the NFT directly upon it; the bench cut needed for a trail is already there, for goodness' sake. We had to find out.
Flowers were in bloom in many places: Houndstongues, Shooting Stars, and quite a few others; a species of Indian Paintbrush; Madrone and Bay Laurel; the day had a spring-like feel despite the clouds and occasional showers.
After another, more awkward ravine crossing, we followed the ditch into an open grassy glade of Black Oak and Ponderosa Pine. The flagged route had climbed high enough, now, that we could not see it. Below us we could see the boat camping area and its picnic tables and tall Cottonwood trees. From somewhere in the lake a raucous honking dialogue was held in echoing tones by water birds of some sort. The mossy old ditch makes for a magical trail and the canyon is a magical place, even there, even where quenched by a reservoir. The honking birds seemed to speak to this. And, being this low to the river, no more houses gloried over us. It seemed utterly wild.
The ditch became blurred as it crossed this glade, and just beyond, narrowed to a single trail, a foot wide if that; and then there was no trace, just a big patch of steep, rocky terrain which the ditch had crossed in a wooden flume. Game trails threaded everywhere, and seemed for a time to openly avoid the ideal level line of the ditch, carrying us too low or too high by turns.
If there was a way to make money from poison oak ...
At last the trail re-formed almost magically, game threads coalescing into one beaten track, a foot wide, on the one true ideal line of the ditch, that is, at or very near the 800' contour.
Here we stopped. We did not know exactly how close we were to Upper Clementine Road; if we broke through, we could climb it to Foresthill Road and follow that back down the two miles to our car. The showers had been increasing. We decided to return the way we came. Out of curiosity we climbed to the line of the flagged NFT, and reassured ourselves that it was, indeed, a scant 100 feet or so above the line of the ditch.
Later, with the map in hand (actually, on computer), I would realize we had walked within a half-mile of Upper Clem.
The walk back out was delightful, tho high on Middle Clem it began to really rain, and we arrived at the car a little on the wet side of things.
Such were a few hours in the North Fork along Lake Clementine, trying to make sense out of the County's harebrained scheme to build a road up twelve miles of canyon.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Tuesday, February 8, 2005
Ponderosa Bridge
With several others I am pursuing a lawsuit to stop construction of Placer County's proposed North Fork Trail (NFT), from The Confluence, below Auburn, upstream to Ponderosa Bridge. The NFT is actually Phase One of ex-Supervisor Rex Bloomfield's Capital-to-Capital Trail (CCT). The CCT was envisioned to follow the North Fork all the way up from Auburn, crossing the Sierra crest into Squaw Valley, thence on the Tahoe Rim Trail towards Carson City, Nevada.
The CCT was planned to be a five-foot-wide multi-use trail, suitable for horses and mountain bikes at the same time, and hikers, as well. The County went to the State for money; and the State said, "Best divide and conquer. The CCT will be hard to sell. Better to build the first phase of the CCT, and swear up and down it is a stand-alone project, thus avoiding environmental hassles."
Thus the NFT, a multi-use trail up 12.6 miles of the North Fork canyon. It's not built yet.
A Trail Advisory Group (TAG) was constituted to advise the County on matters of route and design. A route was flagged, which only one member of the TAG ever walked. The TAG said, "Build the NFT here," without ever even walking the proposed route themselves!
Well. At any rate. Over the past year I have made several explorations of this part of the canyon. It is remarkably wild and beautiful, for all its proximity to Auburn.
This morning I met Michael Garabedian, who is leading the charge against the NFT, at 9:00 a.m. at the Ponderosa Bridge, the upstream terminus of the NFT. We planned to hike downstream on "use" trails paralleling the North Fork. We sometimes hope that we can persuade the County to settle for a foot trail over (at least) the six miles or so between Upper Lake Clementine and Ponderosa Bridge. So, we aimed to see just how hard or easy it might be to locate a foot trail in this reach of the canyon.
Rain the night before had left everything wet, and the sun would not clear the canyon rim for hours, so it was somewhat dark and dank and cold as we set out, following the south side of the river downstream. A "use" trail leads down a long gravel bar and past huge piles of boulders, dredge spoils from a huge floating dredge used there in the 1920s, and after half a mile, bedrock flank the river, and further progress is impeded.
Here a short, invisible trail leads through poison oak up to an old mining ditch. This is followed for perhaps half a mile, and when directly opposite Codfish Canyon, one leaves the ditch on an old miners' trail, and passing an old mining camp from a century ago, reaches the river just downstream from the bad bedrock.
Here another long gravel bar is followed, also studded with dredge spoils. Then rocks break out again along the river, and a faint trail can again be found climbing up and over the hazardous terrain.
Well. It is perhaps not so hazardous. In the summer, when the rocks are dry, one could scamper like a monkey every which way. Today, with the river running high and cold and fast, the rocks, wet, mossy, and slippery, you would be taking your life in your hands.
So a "high trail" is often needed when going up- or downstream, on the North Fork. At the end of the second gravel bar is just such a trail. It is narrow, but I take it to be an old human trail. Of course, in situations like this, almost all kinds of game face the same choices: stay close to the river and risk your life, or climb up and over the rocks, safely away from the river. So bear and deer and bobcats and foxes and so on all use this same old trail.
It is its continuity which gives it away as an old human trail.
Passing a rock blade, the trail drops to yet another long gravel bar. One can either follow the gravel bar downstream, or stay on the faint old trail in the woods just above. In another quarter-mile one is forced down to the gravel bar in any case. Then, the bar ends, and yet another high trail climbs up into the woods to pass a rocky area. Here the big spur ridge dropping to the river from south to north, about half a mile upstream from Upper Clementine, is finally met. It has a gravel bar at its very toe. However, one must climb into the woods to avoid steep terrain along the river, and sure enough, an old human trail is fairly easily found and followed.
Michael and I were amazed that such an easy ad hoc trail leads so very far downstream from Ponderosa Bridge. In it current condition it is not easy to follow in places; but one could have a passable foot trail with very very little effort and expense; for it is essentially already there.
As we followed the ancient trail through the woods, a forest of much Interior Live Oak, Buckeye, Big Leaf Maple, and some Digger Pine, Douglas Fir, and Ponderosa Pine, we reached the very spine and axis of this spur-from-the-south. And exactly at this point the shrub Chamise (Adenostoma fasciculatum) makes an appearance. My "Sierra Nevada Natural History" calls this the commonest shrub species in Sierran foothills chaparral. However, that is all to the south; this is the northernmost natural stand of Chamise, and Michael and I were within a few yards of the northernmost edge of the northernmost stand: for it stops at the river, not crossing to the north bank; and it also stops exactly on the crest of this particular spur ridge; so let us call this ridge "Chamise Ridge." I wonder what the exact climatic parameters are, which govern the distribution of Chamise, and why that exact spot was the northern boundary.
It was past noon and I had to be in Alta to pick up my kids from school. So I left and Michael stayed. The map suggests that the same pattern may persist all the way to Upper Clementine, of long gravel bars separated by rocky or steep terrain where old "use" trails dating to the mining days lead one to the next bar.
I climbed up Chamise Ridge until nearly 300 feet above the river, and found a nice knoll with a tower of chert standing twenty, twenty-five feet high on top. So this I call Chert Knoll. Here too the Chamise holds to the downstream side of the ridge crest, the boundary almost ruler straight. A faint fire trail was bulldozed down here, by the looks of things.
I had hoped to find another old human trail in the pass south of Chert Knoll, but no, or rather, I found any number of game trails which sometimes looked all too human. After flailing around like that for a while, I pushed back upstream.
I found several species of flowers in bloom or very nearly so. One, with bright red flowers not yet open, had somewhat triangular leaves, coarsely but not sharply toothed, in a rosette at the base; and each leaf had a thin pelt of white hairs, perhaps 1/32" long. A single flower stalk rose a few inches from each rosette. I have no idea.
At one lovely terrace I found a well, dug a century or more ago, lined with stones around the top. Just below, a long row of large boulders evoked at least the notion of a mining ditch. At another place I found a spring in the woods, the water just flowing instantly from the ground, all dry slopes above, but many maples around the spring.
I must have been about four trail miles downstream, for it took a couple hours to reach Ponderosa Bridge, without wasting much of any time.
I am amazed that this four-miles-at-least-long trail is not in constant use. It is mostly level, never far from the river, and is in what can only be the prettiest and wildest part of the North Fork canyon between Ponderosa and the Confluence.
But the canyon was deserted. We had to whole thing to ourselves.
Clouds thickened and thinned and the sun was never very strong, but it was quite a nice hike, quite a nice day on the North Fork.
The CCT was planned to be a five-foot-wide multi-use trail, suitable for horses and mountain bikes at the same time, and hikers, as well. The County went to the State for money; and the State said, "Best divide and conquer. The CCT will be hard to sell. Better to build the first phase of the CCT, and swear up and down it is a stand-alone project, thus avoiding environmental hassles."
Thus the NFT, a multi-use trail up 12.6 miles of the North Fork canyon. It's not built yet.
A Trail Advisory Group (TAG) was constituted to advise the County on matters of route and design. A route was flagged, which only one member of the TAG ever walked. The TAG said, "Build the NFT here," without ever even walking the proposed route themselves!
Well. At any rate. Over the past year I have made several explorations of this part of the canyon. It is remarkably wild and beautiful, for all its proximity to Auburn.
This morning I met Michael Garabedian, who is leading the charge against the NFT, at 9:00 a.m. at the Ponderosa Bridge, the upstream terminus of the NFT. We planned to hike downstream on "use" trails paralleling the North Fork. We sometimes hope that we can persuade the County to settle for a foot trail over (at least) the six miles or so between Upper Lake Clementine and Ponderosa Bridge. So, we aimed to see just how hard or easy it might be to locate a foot trail in this reach of the canyon.
Rain the night before had left everything wet, and the sun would not clear the canyon rim for hours, so it was somewhat dark and dank and cold as we set out, following the south side of the river downstream. A "use" trail leads down a long gravel bar and past huge piles of boulders, dredge spoils from a huge floating dredge used there in the 1920s, and after half a mile, bedrock flank the river, and further progress is impeded.
Here a short, invisible trail leads through poison oak up to an old mining ditch. This is followed for perhaps half a mile, and when directly opposite Codfish Canyon, one leaves the ditch on an old miners' trail, and passing an old mining camp from a century ago, reaches the river just downstream from the bad bedrock.
Here another long gravel bar is followed, also studded with dredge spoils. Then rocks break out again along the river, and a faint trail can again be found climbing up and over the hazardous terrain.
Well. It is perhaps not so hazardous. In the summer, when the rocks are dry, one could scamper like a monkey every which way. Today, with the river running high and cold and fast, the rocks, wet, mossy, and slippery, you would be taking your life in your hands.
So a "high trail" is often needed when going up- or downstream, on the North Fork. At the end of the second gravel bar is just such a trail. It is narrow, but I take it to be an old human trail. Of course, in situations like this, almost all kinds of game face the same choices: stay close to the river and risk your life, or climb up and over the rocks, safely away from the river. So bear and deer and bobcats and foxes and so on all use this same old trail.
It is its continuity which gives it away as an old human trail.
Passing a rock blade, the trail drops to yet another long gravel bar. One can either follow the gravel bar downstream, or stay on the faint old trail in the woods just above. In another quarter-mile one is forced down to the gravel bar in any case. Then, the bar ends, and yet another high trail climbs up into the woods to pass a rocky area. Here the big spur ridge dropping to the river from south to north, about half a mile upstream from Upper Clementine, is finally met. It has a gravel bar at its very toe. However, one must climb into the woods to avoid steep terrain along the river, and sure enough, an old human trail is fairly easily found and followed.
Michael and I were amazed that such an easy ad hoc trail leads so very far downstream from Ponderosa Bridge. In it current condition it is not easy to follow in places; but one could have a passable foot trail with very very little effort and expense; for it is essentially already there.
As we followed the ancient trail through the woods, a forest of much Interior Live Oak, Buckeye, Big Leaf Maple, and some Digger Pine, Douglas Fir, and Ponderosa Pine, we reached the very spine and axis of this spur-from-the-south. And exactly at this point the shrub Chamise (Adenostoma fasciculatum) makes an appearance. My "Sierra Nevada Natural History" calls this the commonest shrub species in Sierran foothills chaparral. However, that is all to the south; this is the northernmost natural stand of Chamise, and Michael and I were within a few yards of the northernmost edge of the northernmost stand: for it stops at the river, not crossing to the north bank; and it also stops exactly on the crest of this particular spur ridge; so let us call this ridge "Chamise Ridge." I wonder what the exact climatic parameters are, which govern the distribution of Chamise, and why that exact spot was the northern boundary.
It was past noon and I had to be in Alta to pick up my kids from school. So I left and Michael stayed. The map suggests that the same pattern may persist all the way to Upper Clementine, of long gravel bars separated by rocky or steep terrain where old "use" trails dating to the mining days lead one to the next bar.
I climbed up Chamise Ridge until nearly 300 feet above the river, and found a nice knoll with a tower of chert standing twenty, twenty-five feet high on top. So this I call Chert Knoll. Here too the Chamise holds to the downstream side of the ridge crest, the boundary almost ruler straight. A faint fire trail was bulldozed down here, by the looks of things.
I had hoped to find another old human trail in the pass south of Chert Knoll, but no, or rather, I found any number of game trails which sometimes looked all too human. After flailing around like that for a while, I pushed back upstream.
I found several species of flowers in bloom or very nearly so. One, with bright red flowers not yet open, had somewhat triangular leaves, coarsely but not sharply toothed, in a rosette at the base; and each leaf had a thin pelt of white hairs, perhaps 1/32" long. A single flower stalk rose a few inches from each rosette. I have no idea.
At one lovely terrace I found a well, dug a century or more ago, lined with stones around the top. Just below, a long row of large boulders evoked at least the notion of a mining ditch. At another place I found a spring in the woods, the water just flowing instantly from the ground, all dry slopes above, but many maples around the spring.
I must have been about four trail miles downstream, for it took a couple hours to reach Ponderosa Bridge, without wasting much of any time.
I am amazed that this four-miles-at-least-long trail is not in constant use. It is mostly level, never far from the river, and is in what can only be the prettiest and wildest part of the North Fork canyon between Ponderosa and the Confluence.
But the canyon was deserted. We had to whole thing to ourselves.
Clouds thickened and thinned and the sun was never very strong, but it was quite a nice hike, quite a nice day on the North Fork.
Monday, February 7, 2005
BLM Planning Process
The Folsom Area Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is engaged in revising its management plan. Below please find a letter to
John Scull
with regard to this plan, in which I used a "comment form" devised by the BLM.
I hope all of you will send similar letters (emails). The BLM needs to hear from us! Please copy me if possible.
(***)
Dear Mr. Scull,
I have heard that Folsom BLM will be forming a new Resource Management Plan for the lands it administers. I wish to make some comments and suggestions, in this email, and will use your "Comment Form" as a template. I understand that I should limit myself to one topic per Comment Form; so here is one topic.
I also wish to be added to your mailing list.
Here then, are my comments:
(***begin Comment Form***)
Topic/Issue: North Fork American River
Watershed: American
I think the BLM ought to:
The BLM ought to protect the wildness, beauty, and public access to the North Fork American Wild & Scenic River, including the entire canyon and canyon rim. Use land acquisition as a principal tool. That is, continue the BLM's past efforts to purchase private inholdings in the North Fork canyon, but expand the scope of these efforts, and increase the pace of the acquisitions.
In particular, in 1978 Congress created the Gold Run Addition (GRA) to the NF W&SR. The BLM was ordered to pursue land acquisitions in the GRA. No lands have been purchased. Private lands within the GRA are currently for sale, making some 250 acres, part of 800 acres which extend through the Diggings, north, to I-80.
The BLM ought to *buy all 800 acres for sale at Gold Run*.
The BLM ought to *close BLM lands in and around the GRA to mineral entry and quiet all existing claims*. That would include the 800 acres mentioned above.
The BLM ought to *post an OHV closure on the GRA*.
The BLM ought to *restore public access, if only by foot, horse, and bicycle, to the Fords Bar Trail at Gold Run*.
The BLM ought to *restore public access to the Paleobotanist Trail, near Garrett Road, within the GRA*.
The BLM ought to *seek to acquire every private parcel on both canyon rims, from Lovers Leap on the east to (at least) Secret Canyon on the west, to protect the viewshed, maintain open space, and preserve public access to old trails and scenic overlooks*.
The BLM ought to *acquire private inholdings on the Blue Wing Trail, northeast of Iowa Hill*.
The BLM ought to *employ a full-time resident Ranger at Gold Run*.
The BLM ought to *perform a Wilderness Study on the North Fork canyon from Green Valley on the east to Fords Bar on the west, and seek Wilderness designation*.
The BLM ought to *close the Truro Mine Road to motorized access*. This road could be used as a mountain bike trail.
The BLM ought to *restore public access to the Roach Hill Road, through to Giant Gap Ridge, if only by foot, horse, and bicycle*.
Because:
The North Fork American River is quite rarely wild and beautiful, and should stay that way for the enjoyment of future generations. Already a W&SR, it could well become a National Park. Folsom BLM has done some wonderful things to preserve the North Fork, and should do more. It was frankly realized in the W&SR studies of the 1970s that the North Fork is in a rapidly growing area, and that special care would be needed to preserve the viewshed and protect public access. What was true then is only so much more true now, with millions and millions more people in California. There was urgency then, there should be even more urgency, now. Public access to our historic trails is a critical part of the future of the North Fork. Scenic values are exceptional and irreplaceable. Wild lands and open spaces are of great importance to our quality of life in California.
Optional (in order to be added to the BLM mailing list):
Russell Towle
P.O. Box 141
Dutch Flat, CA 95714
(***end Comment Form***)
Thanks for your consideration of these matters.
Sincerely,
(***)
Cheers,
Russell Towle
John Scull
with regard to this plan, in which I used a "comment form" devised by the BLM.
I hope all of you will send similar letters (emails). The BLM needs to hear from us! Please copy me if possible.
(***)
Dear Mr. Scull,
I have heard that Folsom BLM will be forming a new Resource Management Plan for the lands it administers. I wish to make some comments and suggestions, in this email, and will use your "Comment Form" as a template. I understand that I should limit myself to one topic per Comment Form; so here is one topic.
I also wish to be added to your mailing list.
Here then, are my comments:
(***begin Comment Form***)
Topic/Issue: North Fork American River
Watershed: American
I think the BLM ought to:
The BLM ought to protect the wildness, beauty, and public access to the North Fork American Wild & Scenic River, including the entire canyon and canyon rim. Use land acquisition as a principal tool. That is, continue the BLM's past efforts to purchase private inholdings in the North Fork canyon, but expand the scope of these efforts, and increase the pace of the acquisitions.
In particular, in 1978 Congress created the Gold Run Addition (GRA) to the NF W&SR. The BLM was ordered to pursue land acquisitions in the GRA. No lands have been purchased. Private lands within the GRA are currently for sale, making some 250 acres, part of 800 acres which extend through the Diggings, north, to I-80.
The BLM ought to *buy all 800 acres for sale at Gold Run*.
The BLM ought to *close BLM lands in and around the GRA to mineral entry and quiet all existing claims*. That would include the 800 acres mentioned above.
The BLM ought to *post an OHV closure on the GRA*.
The BLM ought to *restore public access, if only by foot, horse, and bicycle, to the Fords Bar Trail at Gold Run*.
The BLM ought to *restore public access to the Paleobotanist Trail, near Garrett Road, within the GRA*.
The BLM ought to *seek to acquire every private parcel on both canyon rims, from Lovers Leap on the east to (at least) Secret Canyon on the west, to protect the viewshed, maintain open space, and preserve public access to old trails and scenic overlooks*.
The BLM ought to *acquire private inholdings on the Blue Wing Trail, northeast of Iowa Hill*.
The BLM ought to *employ a full-time resident Ranger at Gold Run*.
The BLM ought to *perform a Wilderness Study on the North Fork canyon from Green Valley on the east to Fords Bar on the west, and seek Wilderness designation*.
The BLM ought to *close the Truro Mine Road to motorized access*. This road could be used as a mountain bike trail.
The BLM ought to *restore public access to the Roach Hill Road, through to Giant Gap Ridge, if only by foot, horse, and bicycle*.
Because:
The North Fork American River is quite rarely wild and beautiful, and should stay that way for the enjoyment of future generations. Already a W&SR, it could well become a National Park. Folsom BLM has done some wonderful things to preserve the North Fork, and should do more. It was frankly realized in the W&SR studies of the 1970s that the North Fork is in a rapidly growing area, and that special care would be needed to preserve the viewshed and protect public access. What was true then is only so much more true now, with millions and millions more people in California. There was urgency then, there should be even more urgency, now. Public access to our historic trails is a critical part of the future of the North Fork. Scenic values are exceptional and irreplaceable. Wild lands and open spaces are of great importance to our quality of life in California.
Optional (in order to be added to the BLM mailing list):
Russell Towle
P.O. Box 141
Dutch Flat, CA 95714
(***end Comment Form***)
Thanks for your consideration of these matters.
Sincerely,
(***)
Cheers,
Russell Towle
Thursday, February 3, 2005
In Search of Garbage
Wednesday morning I met Catherine O'Riley for a ramble down to Euchre Bar, in search of garbage. With quite a few others we have been cleaning up garbage sites scattered up and down the North Fork American between Euchre Bar on the east and Canyon Creek on the west. Rumor had it that one of the larger sites lay hidden near Euchre Bar, and, as hope is entertained that a helicopter can be found soon to haul it all away, we needed to find and evaluate the thing.
The Euchre Bar Trail (EBT) is one of the more popular trails in Tahoe National Forest (TNF), within the Foresthill Ranger District. Despite its popularity, TNF does not regularly maintain the EBT, nor do TNF rangers ever patrol the area, except, perhaps, once in a blue moon. Hence miners and squatters and marijuana growers of every stripe have a free rein down there, and some of the more horrendous piles of garbage I have ever seen, grow unchecked from year to year, with new ones developing almost every year.
TNF is sympathetic to the problem and they cite budget constraints in excusing the complete absence of rangers and complete lack of trail maintenance. They do have time and money to manage an extensive OHV trail system over on the Foresthill Divide, near Sugar Pine Reservoir, China Wall, and Humbug Canyon, etc. The roar of these motorcycles and OHVs can be heard every summer and fall weekend, from all the way across the North Fork canyon, miles to the north. But that is only parenthetic.
From the Alta exit on I-80 one takes Casa Loma Road east and south to the trailhead at Iron Point. We continued past, driving down the Rawhide Mine Road to the locked gate, and then walking down the Lucky 3 Claim road to the North Fork of the North Fork American River (NFNFAR). Our destination was not far from the EBT itself, but approaching from this side, we had less than 1000 feet of elevation loss/gain, versus around 1800 feet on the EBT.
Incidentally, it would be wonderful if TNF could purchase the 40-acre parcel of the Lucky 3 Claim. The road-trail from dropping to the NFNFAR is of great recreational value. Of course, as often mentioned here, the Rawhide itself seems to be for sale, and like the Lucky 3, governs, as it were, public access to important trails, such as the Rawtooth, from the mine, up to the crest of Sawtooth Ridge. It too should be purchased by TNF.
The river was in shadow, running high and fast and cold, and The Sidewalks, lovely polished plane surfaces of Shoo Fly Complex metasediments, were all wet with dew and slippery. We picked our way downstream, around a rocky point, to the big mining ditch, and followed the Ditch Trail down to River Camp, the garbage site a few of us worked on last Halloween, preparing it for the helicopter. Then as now shade enveloped all, and a damp chill settled quickly into us. We noted that all the garbage bags we had used had developed holes, as tho clawed by bears, but the garbage has not yet been scattered at all.
Continuing southwest along the Ditch Trail, into the sunshine again, we looked for a trail climbing up and westward. Neither of us had ever seen this site before. We tried on one promising trail and wound along higher and higher, eventually striking an even better trail, which then seemed to end. However, above us we glimpsed some sort of flat or bench on the canyon wall, and investigating, found a lovely grove of Canyon Live Oak with talus fields lapping into the area from above. Here some 5-gallon plastic buckets and other marijuana cultivation paraphernalia appeared, and an odd old steel wire ran far up the steep slopes above us.
We retreated to the Ditch Trail, followed it farther down towards the Confluence of the NFNFAR and main North Fork, and found "the" trail to the garbage site.
The trail climbs steeply to a little flat 100 feet above the Ditch Trail, quite near the Confluence. Here we found a cubical cabin, perhaps eight feet on a side, all tightly wrapped in tarps. A faint odor of wood smoke told us someone had been there that very morning. A large pile of garbage, covered in still other tarps, was ten feet away from the cabin. The general appearance of the area was fairly neat.
A trail led away south and west towards the EBT, which could only have been a quarter-mile away, and would intersect it, I am sure, at the old cabin site on the EBT itself.
So, we found our garbage, with a squatter thrown in for good measure. This complicates the matter.
All in all, it was a pleasant hike, on a remarkably warm day for early February.
The Euchre Bar Trail (EBT) is one of the more popular trails in Tahoe National Forest (TNF), within the Foresthill Ranger District. Despite its popularity, TNF does not regularly maintain the EBT, nor do TNF rangers ever patrol the area, except, perhaps, once in a blue moon. Hence miners and squatters and marijuana growers of every stripe have a free rein down there, and some of the more horrendous piles of garbage I have ever seen, grow unchecked from year to year, with new ones developing almost every year.
TNF is sympathetic to the problem and they cite budget constraints in excusing the complete absence of rangers and complete lack of trail maintenance. They do have time and money to manage an extensive OHV trail system over on the Foresthill Divide, near Sugar Pine Reservoir, China Wall, and Humbug Canyon, etc. The roar of these motorcycles and OHVs can be heard every summer and fall weekend, from all the way across the North Fork canyon, miles to the north. But that is only parenthetic.
From the Alta exit on I-80 one takes Casa Loma Road east and south to the trailhead at Iron Point. We continued past, driving down the Rawhide Mine Road to the locked gate, and then walking down the Lucky 3 Claim road to the North Fork of the North Fork American River (NFNFAR). Our destination was not far from the EBT itself, but approaching from this side, we had less than 1000 feet of elevation loss/gain, versus around 1800 feet on the EBT.
Incidentally, it would be wonderful if TNF could purchase the 40-acre parcel of the Lucky 3 Claim. The road-trail from dropping to the NFNFAR is of great recreational value. Of course, as often mentioned here, the Rawhide itself seems to be for sale, and like the Lucky 3, governs, as it were, public access to important trails, such as the Rawtooth, from the mine, up to the crest of Sawtooth Ridge. It too should be purchased by TNF.
The river was in shadow, running high and fast and cold, and The Sidewalks, lovely polished plane surfaces of Shoo Fly Complex metasediments, were all wet with dew and slippery. We picked our way downstream, around a rocky point, to the big mining ditch, and followed the Ditch Trail down to River Camp, the garbage site a few of us worked on last Halloween, preparing it for the helicopter. Then as now shade enveloped all, and a damp chill settled quickly into us. We noted that all the garbage bags we had used had developed holes, as tho clawed by bears, but the garbage has not yet been scattered at all.
Continuing southwest along the Ditch Trail, into the sunshine again, we looked for a trail climbing up and westward. Neither of us had ever seen this site before. We tried on one promising trail and wound along higher and higher, eventually striking an even better trail, which then seemed to end. However, above us we glimpsed some sort of flat or bench on the canyon wall, and investigating, found a lovely grove of Canyon Live Oak with talus fields lapping into the area from above. Here some 5-gallon plastic buckets and other marijuana cultivation paraphernalia appeared, and an odd old steel wire ran far up the steep slopes above us.
We retreated to the Ditch Trail, followed it farther down towards the Confluence of the NFNFAR and main North Fork, and found "the" trail to the garbage site.
The trail climbs steeply to a little flat 100 feet above the Ditch Trail, quite near the Confluence. Here we found a cubical cabin, perhaps eight feet on a side, all tightly wrapped in tarps. A faint odor of wood smoke told us someone had been there that very morning. A large pile of garbage, covered in still other tarps, was ten feet away from the cabin. The general appearance of the area was fairly neat.
A trail led away south and west towards the EBT, which could only have been a quarter-mile away, and would intersect it, I am sure, at the old cabin site on the EBT itself.
So, we found our garbage, with a squatter thrown in for good measure. This complicates the matter.
All in all, it was a pleasant hike, on a remarkably warm day for early February.
Friday, January 28, 2005
Visit to Canyon Creek
Thursday morning I met Ron and Catherine for a visit to Canyon Creek, near Gold Run. From the Gold Run exit on eastbound I-80, we doubled back west a short distance on the frontage road to Garrett Road, which leads south two miles to the edge of the North Fork canyon.
The heavy rains of the day before, and light showers throughout the night, had kept Canyon Creek high. There is still a lot of snow in its upper basin. And, with the passage of the air-mixing storm, the atmosphere had stratified, cold air sinking lower, warm air rising higher, and a river of fog had formed in the great canyon.
This happens the first night and morning after almost every storm. We reached our trailhead, at the BLM gate, just before 9:00 a.m. Cirrus clouds above slowed warming by the sun, and every leaf and needle sparkled with water droplets.
The red clay road follows the rim of the canyon east towards Canyon Creek, with the Diggings adjacent on the north, but hidden by a screen of heavy manzanita. Here grows the California Ground Cone, a startling plant which looks like a Douglas Fir cone growing erect from the light duff of manzanita leaves. In the Broomrape family, it has no chlorophyll whatsoever, instead relying on the roots of the manzanita for its nutrients. It is a parasite. But it is too early for these ground cones, yet.
Turning in and out around the head of Sheldon Ravine, we reached the unmarked Pickering Bar Trail, and just to the east, stopped at the wonderful scenic overlook. Black Mountain and Quartz Mountain stood fifteen miles upcountry, freshly dusted with snow, and in the middle ground, the tremendous gorge of Giant Gap etches its profile against those distant ridges and forests. Fog wreathed the canyon in many places, here, still flowing slowly west, like a river, there, warmed by the sun, rising into towers and disjoint masses of many hues. In the foreground one can see Canyon Creek's own gorge, more by implication than directly, and the Blasted Digger is easily picked out, on the ridge dividing Canyon Creek from the North Fork.
Continuing down the road we crossed Indiana Ravine and passed the Stone Cabin, which has suffered even more damage in recent months. A bit of a scramble up the steep banks of this old hydraulic mining pit brought us to the dry reservoir at the end of the Indiana Hill Ditch. We took a shortcut across the Diggings and reached the ditch just where the trail to Diving Board Ridge forks away into the unseen depths. A few steps east along the ditch brought us to another fine overlook, where one can see directly down Canyon Creek to the North Fork, only about 1400' below. Parts of the Canyon Creek Trail could be seen. The waterfalls were roaring in their hidden chasms and recesses. We took a longish break and admired the views, and the fog, rising everywhere now in writhing phantoms and ghostly shards, merging with The Void. We watched it happen, watched as the fog lifted and evaporated in the warmth of the sun.
The Big Waterfall was directly below us, 600' or so below us, and therefore, certain non-native pigeons were surely down there as well, silent sentinels perched on some crag. I gave a suitable rock a tremendous heave, hoping, cruelly, to scare them, to make them flutter away from the cliffs, and circle endlessly, which always amuses Catherine. It is important to keep Catherine amused. But my ruthless rock reaped no rewards, that is, no pigeons circled in endless deliberation about just when and just where to land and settle into yet another sustained vigil.
Duty beckoned, having left Point A, one must actually reach Point B, so we followed the old mining ditch around the corner into Canyon Creek's own proper canyon and took an unmarked shortcut down to the trail, reaching it just above the tiny bridge. Crossing the little inner gorge on wet two-by-sixes, we ambled around the corner and took yet another break, where a fine view of The Leaper opens from the trail. The Leaper was in fine form, shooting out from hidden source in a narrow jet, and crashing against the cliff face opposite (for it enters a kind of vertical rectangular chasm), free-falls into a round pool, from which yet another waterfalls spills into a lower pool. In the meantime, the main, large waterfall is partly visible, a more massive cylindrical region of raging white water plunging into its own pool.
Many kinds of roarings and hissings and thunderings could be heard from the falls and cascades up and down the creek, but The Leaper makes its own special slapping sound as it crashes into its chasm wall. We spent quite a while there and took some photographs.
Then down and down, past Spike Point to Gorge Point, where the Brewer's Rock Cress's purple blooms have been joined by the yellow of Biscuit Root. Yet again, for all its storms and all the supposed excess of snow and precipitation of every kind, this winter has somehow nurtured the earliest bloom I have ever seen. Biscuit Root in January? You surely jest.
I saw the pigeons, and followed up with another rock aimed their way, which scattered them into their usual gyrations, so all was well on that count, anyway. I only hope Catherine appreciates my sacrifices.
We turned away from the trail and followed a steep but easy cross-country route down to the Big Waterfall. Again the cameras came out. Then it was down Big Waterfall Trail to The Terraces, where some dozens, or hundreds, of California Milkmaids were not only in full bloom, but had actually started to set seed. Lower Terraces Trail took us back to the main trail almost exactly where the High Old Upriver Trail, or HOUT, secretly forks away east.
The HOUT is a tenuous little track, often enough blasted right from the very cliffs, and runs along a nearly level line east into 2400'-deep Giant Gap. It is hard to find. Having found it, it is hard to follow. It is a lovable little trail and we are quite devoted to it.
In many reaches of the North Fork canyon there are no tributaries worth the name, and a strongly insular quality obtains: there is The Canyon, and then there is, at least, they say there is, somewhere, out of all view, The Rest of the World. No little valleys enter from the side, offering one a route out and away to The Rest of the World. This reach of the North Fork, from Canyon Creek to Green Valley, is much like this. Yes, the canyon walls are scored by minor ravines and gullies, but (from across the canyon, say) one can see every inch of the "basins" of these "tributaries," for they are entirely within the canyon.
The only exception is Lovers Leap Ravine, in the heart of Giant Gap, which heads up in a little valley on the gentle summit uplands of Moody Ridge, west of Lovers Leap itself. But it approaches the North Fork in a series of high waterfalls amid very steep cliffs. Since it carries little water, it has not deeply incised itself into the canyon wall. I interpret the bend in the canyon wall there, the "inside corner" Lovers Leap Ravine follows down to the river, to be more an artifact of gross structural relations in the bedrock, than an artifact of incision by that tiny stream.
The bedrock here is all the metavolcanic member of the Calaveras Complex, several thousands of feet, more than a mile, of lava flows and volcanic ash beds and mudflows, all laid down perhaps in a subaqueous environment, that is, on the flanks of some oceanic volcano or chain of volcanos, and underwater; and some very disrupted strata exist, too, which may represent turbidity flows, mixing already heterogeneous volcanic strata into chaotic jumbles. And pretty much all of it seems quite mafic, poor in quartz, rich in iron and magnesium, roughly basaltic in composition, say, dark, and often fine-grained. Occasionally some lighter stuff is seen. Bogus Spur has some strange orange-weathering rock. Sometimes there is chert, or at least cherty "stuff" of uncertain provenance.
And these several thousands of feet of strata of volcanic quasi-sediments, were originally, let's suppose, roughly horizontal, but now are all tipped up on edge, nearly vertical. They were smashed down under the margin of North America 150 million years ago, and at last, uplifted and exhumed by long erosion, in their new, vertical, orientation.
And metamorphosed, along the way.
But this metavolcanic part of the Paleozoic Calaveras Complex (one of the more strongly-marked "terranes" within the Northern and Central Sierra block) is not uniform in composition, for some parts are very massive, other parts, more platy and divided. The most massive parts are in Giant Gap, where they are organized into a series of huge parallel slabs, and the river turns in tortuous sharp angles, around the bases of these (vertical) mega-slabs. Lovers Leap and The Pinnacles seem to be founded from one and the same mega-slab, for instance.
One might have quite a bit of trouble trying to climb up and out of the canyon, following Lovers Leap Ravine. I've never tried, but I do hope to at least roughly parallel the thing, from rim to river, someday.
We reached Bogus Spur a little after noon and took lunch on a mossy lawn two hundred feet above the river. The North Fork was running moderately high for this time of year, apparently because rather warm temperatures have melted much snow in the last two weeks, and this in turn has been followed by rain up to high elevations. The water looked quite clear, where one could even see at all, for all through Giant Gap there is white water, lots and lots of white water. There are even some low falls, in the Gap.
Fair-weather cumulus clouds had been reincarnated from the vanished, evaporated fog, and above them, cirrus clouds continued to filter the sunshine. It was sometimes cool.
Later, we had time for a portion of wandering out along the HOUT (a fourth species of flower was observed in bloom), but at 2:30 we saddled up and made the long march out. We followed quite a circuitous route which took us back up the Canyon Creek Trail, past the great tunnel of the Gold Run Ditch & Mining Co. (GRD&M, 1873), then up the Old Wagon Road (also 1873) to the Indiana Hill Ditch (1852, now that I'm doing dates), where we followed someone's secret route over Judd Pass (at the head of Judd Ravine, a tributary of Canyon Creek, on Indiana Hill) into The Diggings, where some roads seemed to lead us in circles down into the huge pit of the GRD&M, which we immediately left on yet another road, climbing to the west and south, back to our vehicles, at the BLM gate.
Such was an especially fine day in the North Fork canyon.
The heavy rains of the day before, and light showers throughout the night, had kept Canyon Creek high. There is still a lot of snow in its upper basin. And, with the passage of the air-mixing storm, the atmosphere had stratified, cold air sinking lower, warm air rising higher, and a river of fog had formed in the great canyon.
This happens the first night and morning after almost every storm. We reached our trailhead, at the BLM gate, just before 9:00 a.m. Cirrus clouds above slowed warming by the sun, and every leaf and needle sparkled with water droplets.
The red clay road follows the rim of the canyon east towards Canyon Creek, with the Diggings adjacent on the north, but hidden by a screen of heavy manzanita. Here grows the California Ground Cone, a startling plant which looks like a Douglas Fir cone growing erect from the light duff of manzanita leaves. In the Broomrape family, it has no chlorophyll whatsoever, instead relying on the roots of the manzanita for its nutrients. It is a parasite. But it is too early for these ground cones, yet.
Turning in and out around the head of Sheldon Ravine, we reached the unmarked Pickering Bar Trail, and just to the east, stopped at the wonderful scenic overlook. Black Mountain and Quartz Mountain stood fifteen miles upcountry, freshly dusted with snow, and in the middle ground, the tremendous gorge of Giant Gap etches its profile against those distant ridges and forests. Fog wreathed the canyon in many places, here, still flowing slowly west, like a river, there, warmed by the sun, rising into towers and disjoint masses of many hues. In the foreground one can see Canyon Creek's own gorge, more by implication than directly, and the Blasted Digger is easily picked out, on the ridge dividing Canyon Creek from the North Fork.
Continuing down the road we crossed Indiana Ravine and passed the Stone Cabin, which has suffered even more damage in recent months. A bit of a scramble up the steep banks of this old hydraulic mining pit brought us to the dry reservoir at the end of the Indiana Hill Ditch. We took a shortcut across the Diggings and reached the ditch just where the trail to Diving Board Ridge forks away into the unseen depths. A few steps east along the ditch brought us to another fine overlook, where one can see directly down Canyon Creek to the North Fork, only about 1400' below. Parts of the Canyon Creek Trail could be seen. The waterfalls were roaring in their hidden chasms and recesses. We took a longish break and admired the views, and the fog, rising everywhere now in writhing phantoms and ghostly shards, merging with The Void. We watched it happen, watched as the fog lifted and evaporated in the warmth of the sun.
The Big Waterfall was directly below us, 600' or so below us, and therefore, certain non-native pigeons were surely down there as well, silent sentinels perched on some crag. I gave a suitable rock a tremendous heave, hoping, cruelly, to scare them, to make them flutter away from the cliffs, and circle endlessly, which always amuses Catherine. It is important to keep Catherine amused. But my ruthless rock reaped no rewards, that is, no pigeons circled in endless deliberation about just when and just where to land and settle into yet another sustained vigil.
Duty beckoned, having left Point A, one must actually reach Point B, so we followed the old mining ditch around the corner into Canyon Creek's own proper canyon and took an unmarked shortcut down to the trail, reaching it just above the tiny bridge. Crossing the little inner gorge on wet two-by-sixes, we ambled around the corner and took yet another break, where a fine view of The Leaper opens from the trail. The Leaper was in fine form, shooting out from hidden source in a narrow jet, and crashing against the cliff face opposite (for it enters a kind of vertical rectangular chasm), free-falls into a round pool, from which yet another waterfalls spills into a lower pool. In the meantime, the main, large waterfall is partly visible, a more massive cylindrical region of raging white water plunging into its own pool.
Many kinds of roarings and hissings and thunderings could be heard from the falls and cascades up and down the creek, but The Leaper makes its own special slapping sound as it crashes into its chasm wall. We spent quite a while there and took some photographs.
Then down and down, past Spike Point to Gorge Point, where the Brewer's Rock Cress's purple blooms have been joined by the yellow of Biscuit Root. Yet again, for all its storms and all the supposed excess of snow and precipitation of every kind, this winter has somehow nurtured the earliest bloom I have ever seen. Biscuit Root in January? You surely jest.
I saw the pigeons, and followed up with another rock aimed their way, which scattered them into their usual gyrations, so all was well on that count, anyway. I only hope Catherine appreciates my sacrifices.
We turned away from the trail and followed a steep but easy cross-country route down to the Big Waterfall. Again the cameras came out. Then it was down Big Waterfall Trail to The Terraces, where some dozens, or hundreds, of California Milkmaids were not only in full bloom, but had actually started to set seed. Lower Terraces Trail took us back to the main trail almost exactly where the High Old Upriver Trail, or HOUT, secretly forks away east.
The HOUT is a tenuous little track, often enough blasted right from the very cliffs, and runs along a nearly level line east into 2400'-deep Giant Gap. It is hard to find. Having found it, it is hard to follow. It is a lovable little trail and we are quite devoted to it.
In many reaches of the North Fork canyon there are no tributaries worth the name, and a strongly insular quality obtains: there is The Canyon, and then there is, at least, they say there is, somewhere, out of all view, The Rest of the World. No little valleys enter from the side, offering one a route out and away to The Rest of the World. This reach of the North Fork, from Canyon Creek to Green Valley, is much like this. Yes, the canyon walls are scored by minor ravines and gullies, but (from across the canyon, say) one can see every inch of the "basins" of these "tributaries," for they are entirely within the canyon.
The only exception is Lovers Leap Ravine, in the heart of Giant Gap, which heads up in a little valley on the gentle summit uplands of Moody Ridge, west of Lovers Leap itself. But it approaches the North Fork in a series of high waterfalls amid very steep cliffs. Since it carries little water, it has not deeply incised itself into the canyon wall. I interpret the bend in the canyon wall there, the "inside corner" Lovers Leap Ravine follows down to the river, to be more an artifact of gross structural relations in the bedrock, than an artifact of incision by that tiny stream.
The bedrock here is all the metavolcanic member of the Calaveras Complex, several thousands of feet, more than a mile, of lava flows and volcanic ash beds and mudflows, all laid down perhaps in a subaqueous environment, that is, on the flanks of some oceanic volcano or chain of volcanos, and underwater; and some very disrupted strata exist, too, which may represent turbidity flows, mixing already heterogeneous volcanic strata into chaotic jumbles. And pretty much all of it seems quite mafic, poor in quartz, rich in iron and magnesium, roughly basaltic in composition, say, dark, and often fine-grained. Occasionally some lighter stuff is seen. Bogus Spur has some strange orange-weathering rock. Sometimes there is chert, or at least cherty "stuff" of uncertain provenance.
And these several thousands of feet of strata of volcanic quasi-sediments, were originally, let's suppose, roughly horizontal, but now are all tipped up on edge, nearly vertical. They were smashed down under the margin of North America 150 million years ago, and at last, uplifted and exhumed by long erosion, in their new, vertical, orientation.
And metamorphosed, along the way.
But this metavolcanic part of the Paleozoic Calaveras Complex (one of the more strongly-marked "terranes" within the Northern and Central Sierra block) is not uniform in composition, for some parts are very massive, other parts, more platy and divided. The most massive parts are in Giant Gap, where they are organized into a series of huge parallel slabs, and the river turns in tortuous sharp angles, around the bases of these (vertical) mega-slabs. Lovers Leap and The Pinnacles seem to be founded from one and the same mega-slab, for instance.
One might have quite a bit of trouble trying to climb up and out of the canyon, following Lovers Leap Ravine. I've never tried, but I do hope to at least roughly parallel the thing, from rim to river, someday.
We reached Bogus Spur a little after noon and took lunch on a mossy lawn two hundred feet above the river. The North Fork was running moderately high for this time of year, apparently because rather warm temperatures have melted much snow in the last two weeks, and this in turn has been followed by rain up to high elevations. The water looked quite clear, where one could even see at all, for all through Giant Gap there is white water, lots and lots of white water. There are even some low falls, in the Gap.
Fair-weather cumulus clouds had been reincarnated from the vanished, evaporated fog, and above them, cirrus clouds continued to filter the sunshine. It was sometimes cool.
Later, we had time for a portion of wandering out along the HOUT (a fourth species of flower was observed in bloom), but at 2:30 we saddled up and made the long march out. We followed quite a circuitous route which took us back up the Canyon Creek Trail, past the great tunnel of the Gold Run Ditch & Mining Co. (GRD&M, 1873), then up the Old Wagon Road (also 1873) to the Indiana Hill Ditch (1852, now that I'm doing dates), where we followed someone's secret route over Judd Pass (at the head of Judd Ravine, a tributary of Canyon Creek, on Indiana Hill) into The Diggings, where some roads seemed to lead us in circles down into the huge pit of the GRD&M, which we immediately left on yet another road, climbing to the west and south, back to our vehicles, at the BLM gate.
Such was an especially fine day in the North Fork canyon.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
The Blue Wing Trail
Wednesday I joined Ron Gould, Catherine O'Riley, and Gay Wiseman for a hike on the Blue Wing Trail. I was up well before dawn and noted that the overnight temperature never dropped below 50 degrees, unusually warm for a winter night at 4000' elevation. When it grew light I saw clear skies and relished the thought of a day outdoors in full sun.
Near Iowa Hill, the Blue Wing Trail forms the southern half of the historic trail from Gold Run to Iowa Hill. On the Gold Run side it is called the Fords Bar Trail, and public access has been blocked at Garrett Road for about twenty years now. In the 19th century a toll bridge crossed the river at Fords Bar, the bridge at first belonging to Ford himself, later to someone named Warner.
We met at Colfax and piled into Catherine's muscular Land Rover for the long and intricate drive across the North Fork canyon. Iowa Hill boomed in the early middle 1850s and briefly had a population of something like five thousand people, with swank saloons and hotels and, for miles on every side, gold mines. Hydraulic mines, drift mines, river mines, ground sluicing claims, tailings claims, every kind of placer mine, and probably a few hard-rock claims were being worked as well. The south fork of the Eocene-age "Ancestral" Yuba River flowed north through this area, on its way to Gold Run, Dutch Flat, and Nevada City. It was a lazy river meandering through a landscape long softened and reduced by erosion; unable to transport its own sediments, a broad floodplain developed in its shallow valley. A rich subtropical forest covered the land and flanked the rivers. This was, let's say, 55 million years ago.
Then this old landscape was buried beneath a long succession of volcanic effusia, at first, rhyolite ash, in many layers, followed by andesitic mudflow, in many more layers. Sometimes these are called the "young volcanics," because the bedrock of the Sierra, granites and metamorphic rocks, is so very much older.
A vast volcanic plateau developed. To the east, the volcanics were a thousand feet thick and more, to the west, they thinned, and parts of the foothills seem to have escaped burial altogether, but here and there the mudflows extended all the way down into the Central Valley. In this part of the Sierra, only a few islands of the old bedrock land surface stood above the volcanic plain: Banner Mountain, near Nevada City, is one such island; and a whole line of ancient bedrock summits is found to the east, running from Snow Mountain north through Signal Peak, Old Man Mountain, the Black Buttes, and Grouse Ridge. These too were not buried.
The andesitic mudflows ended about five million years ago, and a new drainage pattern began to be incised into the mudflow surface, but still younger basaltic lava flowed into these nascent valleys. We find these lavas at places like Devils Peak and Lyon Peak.
The Sierra Nevada began to uplift and tilt to the southwest at this time. A brand new dendritic drainage pattern took shape on the volcanic surface, with most streams aiming directly downslope to the southwest. These, over a period of five million years, deepened into our present-day canyons. Like rivers to the north and south, the North Fork cut quickly through the volcanic veneer and into the bedrock beneath. And then, while uplift continued, steepening the new stream gradients even more, and therefore accelerating downward incision, glaciation began in the Sierra.
We might imagine an average glacial event (there were many) to have covered everything above 5000' under ice, with valley glaciers extending down the various canyons to around 2500'. The Sierra Nevada icefields were not physically connected to the great continental glaciers, but waxed and waned by much the same inscrutable schedule. The last major glaciation ended a short ten or twelve thousand years ago. There is no reason to suppose the Ice Ages have stopped.
The glaciers added even more water to the young rivers flowing in their steepening channels, and the bottom line is that we have today a set of deep canyons, which are actively cutting deeper yet into the landscape.
So. A mature landscape was buried, a youthful landscape has replaced it. The flat-topped ridges we see everywhere in middle elevations are remnants of the andesitic mudflow plateau. And beneath the crests of those flat-topped ridges are fragments of the old river valleys of the Ancestral Sierra.
As at Iowa Hill.
So we drove through the tiny town, and about a mile east hove left and followed a muddy road around the base of the mining bluffs at the southwest end of Roach Hill.
Suddenly flagging appeared on both sides of the road, and continued to the large clearing at the trailhead, where we were startled to see new-looking "No Trespassing" signs. This does not bode well for the future of the Blue Wing Trail.
The upper end of the trail was ruined by logging some years ago, and an ad hoc alternate route is being kept open by volunteers, notably, Evan Jones and his gang.
One of the several mines near the trailhead seems to have been called the Blue Wing Mine, hence the name of the trail. The red bluffs above the trailhead can be seen from a long distance, and illustrate the somewhat unusual case of hydraulic mining through a thick sequence of volcanic ash and andesitic mudflow, to reach a relatively thin stratum of gold-bearing river gravels underneath. That is, the red bluffs themselves are made of the young volcanics.
We grabbed packs and loppers and started down the trail. Soon we were in a shady Douglas Fir forest, on well-graded switchbacks. The trail looks as though it was fully three feet wide, in its heyday.
This trail, from Iowa Hill to Gold Run, is older than the Stevens Trail, and was moreover of greater importance to the local communities of the day; for the late-coming Stevens Trail provided but an alternative to an existing wagon road, while the Fords Bar/Blue Wing Trail was the one and only good way to travel between Dutch Flat and Gold Run on the north, and Iowa Hill on the south.
Therefore the Blue Wing Trail is even more historic than the Stevens Trail. It is older, and of more pointed utility. Yet the Stevens Trail has received designation on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) at Folsom is entrusted, and has been since 1978, with management of this part of the North Fork of the American Wild & Scenic River (W&SR); they know full well that the Fords Bar Trail has been blocked to the public, they know full well that the Blue Wing Trail heads up on private property.
In fact, this has all been clear for some time. Now, I myself expect that an agency (the BLM) entrusted with management of a W&SR (the North Fork American) will take every possible care that historic trails giving access to the river remain open to the public.
I am not aware that the BLM has taken any care at all with the Blue Wing Trail.
Near the river, one can take a fork right to the Truro Mine, where a trail leading upriver two miles to Pickering Bar is found. Here too is the Ford/Warner bridge site. A road descends to the Truro Mine from Roach Hill. This road should be gated, well above the river. Or is it a part of the management of a W&SR, that 4WDs and motorcycles and OHVs should make the river their playground?
No, it is not part. Yet I am not aware that the BLM is taking any care at all with the Truro Mine Road.
We took the left fork, which drops gently to a cabin site above the river. It had been a few years, I guess, since I had hiked the Blue Wing; the cabin is now gone, only a few blackened hunks of wood show that it burned.
The river was fairly high and fast, full of snowmelt from these warm days.
The air was colder near the river, and the sun would take a long time to rise clear the ridge to the southeast, so to escape the shade quickly, we continued along on the downriver trail. The trail was marred in many places by the tracks of OHVs gaining access via the Truro Mine Road.
Half a mile brought us to the "other" cabin, a dilapidated combination stone and log structure, the roof collapsed. It looks to date from the Depression. By no accident, the cabin was in full sun. If one is to spend a winter in that deep deep canyon one takes care to garner every scrap of sunshine. We took a break before continuing on the downriver trail.
Ron said that a side trail led up and over the ridge to the west, and I had never explored the thing, so we elected to give it a try and found it quite a nice path, a definite artifact of the 1860s if not the Gold Rush itself; like so many of the trails which follow the river itself, it does not follow the river itself, but stays rather high above it, often 100 to 200 feet.
Gaining the west side of the ridge, we enjoyed a more favorable geometry with respect to the sun, and began to shed layers. Half a mile or so brought the old trail low and near the river, so we took lunch on some sunny polished rocks, metasediments, I would guess, of the Calaveras Complex. Our elevation was about 1300'.
A pair of ouzels could be heard singing and chattering somewhere upstream, and they soon arrived nearby, diving into the rapid river and foraging for food on the bottom before popping up like corks. Then they would flutter to a boulder and dip up and down, up and down. It was a warm day and the ouzels were glad of it.
Now, it was warm, and birds were singing, so I took my shirt off, and was getting a fine tan, when it occurred to me that I had never been to this place in my life, and, after all, the trail did continue. So I re-shirted, grabbed the loppers, and set off exploring.
Suddenly the trail seemed of a lower caliber, and a number of trees had fallen across its course, helping blur its course along the canyon wall. Quite a few California Milkmaids were in bloom. But I stayed with it, and in a time Catherine appeared, and together we forged ahead into a small ravine, where a good-sized terrace was buttressed by large dry-laid stone walls. It was an old cabin site, certainly from more than a century past. Not one stick of lumber remains. It is a flat lawn supported by walls of mossy rocks.
The ravine itself split into two branches there, each cut deeply into bedrock so prettily sculptured I felt sure that it must be limestone, or at the least, limy metasediments. The deep polished chasms were quite remarkable, adorned with moss and ferns. In fact, the whole ravine was fair a wonderland of moss and ferns.
We marveled at all this and explored this way and that. I picked up a continuation of a downriver trail, which became too faint too soon. Something was wrong, and only the mystic trail sense of Ron Gould could make it right. So I tramped the quarter-mile back to our lunch terrace, informed Ron and Gay of great and momentous discoveries, and soon we were all on the scene of the Twin Chasms and cabin terrace.
I should say that this Twin Chasms Ravine received the tailings of several hydraulic mining claims, once upon a time; it may well have been worked as a "tailings" claim, all fitted up with sluice boxes like Canyon Creek and Indiana Ravine once were, and the cabin may have had to do only with that, with the guarding and maintaining of sluice boxes, not with the older, Gold Rush era of mining down along the North Fork itself.
Scouting higher than I had before, Ron detected a trail line, and sure enough, it acted as though it were "the" continuation of the downriver trail. Following it, we found that it became fainter yet a ways along, and, retreating, our eye was caught by another trail climbing away above.
We had already guessed that whoever had once lived at the cabin would have had some kind of trail climbing the ridge just west of the Twin Chasm Ravine, which ridge topped out quite near where we had parked. Catherine had caught us up and we decided to give the climbing trail a try. We found a neat series of switchbacks and I for one am sure that we were, in truth, on an old human trail.
It seemed just the thing to follow this old trail back up to the top and make a grand loop. So I went back after Gay, and soon enough we were all climbing the ridge, and soon enough our faint switchbacks melted away, and an increasingly heavy growth of Deerbrush, Ceanothus integerrimus, began to turn us this way and that. There was no question of detecting a lone human trail amidst a welter of game trails; it was simple survival, finding whatever small gaps in the brush and lurching another few yards higher.
We climbed to a thousand feet above the river before the brush finally tightened up completely and barred our way. It was nearing four in the afternoon when we finally conceded defeat and retreated back down to Twin Chasms, back to the north and then south on the river trail (for the river makes a tremendous 180-degree turn around a ridge, in this area), reaching the base of the Blue Wing as the last red light of sunset lit up the forest, high above Wolverine Canyon, to the east.
The slow trudge up the trail was actually quite nice. For a time I saw the faint ghosts of my own shadow flitting beside me, cast by fading twilight of the northern sky (for all the main part of the Blue Wing is on a north-facing slope), and then the light of the waxing moon became stronger, my ghosts were reincarnated as real shadows, and then the stars were out as well, and then we were back on top.
So, what had seemed like such an innocent and moderate hike, the descent and reascent of a mere 1600', became, somehow, some way, a Monster, with something a lot more like 3000' vertical to contend with, all told.
But it was after all another great day in the great canyon.
Near Iowa Hill, the Blue Wing Trail forms the southern half of the historic trail from Gold Run to Iowa Hill. On the Gold Run side it is called the Fords Bar Trail, and public access has been blocked at Garrett Road for about twenty years now. In the 19th century a toll bridge crossed the river at Fords Bar, the bridge at first belonging to Ford himself, later to someone named Warner.
We met at Colfax and piled into Catherine's muscular Land Rover for the long and intricate drive across the North Fork canyon. Iowa Hill boomed in the early middle 1850s and briefly had a population of something like five thousand people, with swank saloons and hotels and, for miles on every side, gold mines. Hydraulic mines, drift mines, river mines, ground sluicing claims, tailings claims, every kind of placer mine, and probably a few hard-rock claims were being worked as well. The south fork of the Eocene-age "Ancestral" Yuba River flowed north through this area, on its way to Gold Run, Dutch Flat, and Nevada City. It was a lazy river meandering through a landscape long softened and reduced by erosion; unable to transport its own sediments, a broad floodplain developed in its shallow valley. A rich subtropical forest covered the land and flanked the rivers. This was, let's say, 55 million years ago.
Then this old landscape was buried beneath a long succession of volcanic effusia, at first, rhyolite ash, in many layers, followed by andesitic mudflow, in many more layers. Sometimes these are called the "young volcanics," because the bedrock of the Sierra, granites and metamorphic rocks, is so very much older.
A vast volcanic plateau developed. To the east, the volcanics were a thousand feet thick and more, to the west, they thinned, and parts of the foothills seem to have escaped burial altogether, but here and there the mudflows extended all the way down into the Central Valley. In this part of the Sierra, only a few islands of the old bedrock land surface stood above the volcanic plain: Banner Mountain, near Nevada City, is one such island; and a whole line of ancient bedrock summits is found to the east, running from Snow Mountain north through Signal Peak, Old Man Mountain, the Black Buttes, and Grouse Ridge. These too were not buried.
The andesitic mudflows ended about five million years ago, and a new drainage pattern began to be incised into the mudflow surface, but still younger basaltic lava flowed into these nascent valleys. We find these lavas at places like Devils Peak and Lyon Peak.
The Sierra Nevada began to uplift and tilt to the southwest at this time. A brand new dendritic drainage pattern took shape on the volcanic surface, with most streams aiming directly downslope to the southwest. These, over a period of five million years, deepened into our present-day canyons. Like rivers to the north and south, the North Fork cut quickly through the volcanic veneer and into the bedrock beneath. And then, while uplift continued, steepening the new stream gradients even more, and therefore accelerating downward incision, glaciation began in the Sierra.
We might imagine an average glacial event (there were many) to have covered everything above 5000' under ice, with valley glaciers extending down the various canyons to around 2500'. The Sierra Nevada icefields were not physically connected to the great continental glaciers, but waxed and waned by much the same inscrutable schedule. The last major glaciation ended a short ten or twelve thousand years ago. There is no reason to suppose the Ice Ages have stopped.
The glaciers added even more water to the young rivers flowing in their steepening channels, and the bottom line is that we have today a set of deep canyons, which are actively cutting deeper yet into the landscape.
So. A mature landscape was buried, a youthful landscape has replaced it. The flat-topped ridges we see everywhere in middle elevations are remnants of the andesitic mudflow plateau. And beneath the crests of those flat-topped ridges are fragments of the old river valleys of the Ancestral Sierra.
As at Iowa Hill.
So we drove through the tiny town, and about a mile east hove left and followed a muddy road around the base of the mining bluffs at the southwest end of Roach Hill.
Suddenly flagging appeared on both sides of the road, and continued to the large clearing at the trailhead, where we were startled to see new-looking "No Trespassing" signs. This does not bode well for the future of the Blue Wing Trail.
The upper end of the trail was ruined by logging some years ago, and an ad hoc alternate route is being kept open by volunteers, notably, Evan Jones and his gang.
One of the several mines near the trailhead seems to have been called the Blue Wing Mine, hence the name of the trail. The red bluffs above the trailhead can be seen from a long distance, and illustrate the somewhat unusual case of hydraulic mining through a thick sequence of volcanic ash and andesitic mudflow, to reach a relatively thin stratum of gold-bearing river gravels underneath. That is, the red bluffs themselves are made of the young volcanics.
We grabbed packs and loppers and started down the trail. Soon we were in a shady Douglas Fir forest, on well-graded switchbacks. The trail looks as though it was fully three feet wide, in its heyday.
This trail, from Iowa Hill to Gold Run, is older than the Stevens Trail, and was moreover of greater importance to the local communities of the day; for the late-coming Stevens Trail provided but an alternative to an existing wagon road, while the Fords Bar/Blue Wing Trail was the one and only good way to travel between Dutch Flat and Gold Run on the north, and Iowa Hill on the south.
Therefore the Blue Wing Trail is even more historic than the Stevens Trail. It is older, and of more pointed utility. Yet the Stevens Trail has received designation on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) at Folsom is entrusted, and has been since 1978, with management of this part of the North Fork of the American Wild & Scenic River (W&SR); they know full well that the Fords Bar Trail has been blocked to the public, they know full well that the Blue Wing Trail heads up on private property.
In fact, this has all been clear for some time. Now, I myself expect that an agency (the BLM) entrusted with management of a W&SR (the North Fork American) will take every possible care that historic trails giving access to the river remain open to the public.
I am not aware that the BLM has taken any care at all with the Blue Wing Trail.
Near the river, one can take a fork right to the Truro Mine, where a trail leading upriver two miles to Pickering Bar is found. Here too is the Ford/Warner bridge site. A road descends to the Truro Mine from Roach Hill. This road should be gated, well above the river. Or is it a part of the management of a W&SR, that 4WDs and motorcycles and OHVs should make the river their playground?
No, it is not part. Yet I am not aware that the BLM is taking any care at all with the Truro Mine Road.
We took the left fork, which drops gently to a cabin site above the river. It had been a few years, I guess, since I had hiked the Blue Wing; the cabin is now gone, only a few blackened hunks of wood show that it burned.
The river was fairly high and fast, full of snowmelt from these warm days.
The air was colder near the river, and the sun would take a long time to rise clear the ridge to the southeast, so to escape the shade quickly, we continued along on the downriver trail. The trail was marred in many places by the tracks of OHVs gaining access via the Truro Mine Road.
Half a mile brought us to the "other" cabin, a dilapidated combination stone and log structure, the roof collapsed. It looks to date from the Depression. By no accident, the cabin was in full sun. If one is to spend a winter in that deep deep canyon one takes care to garner every scrap of sunshine. We took a break before continuing on the downriver trail.
Ron said that a side trail led up and over the ridge to the west, and I had never explored the thing, so we elected to give it a try and found it quite a nice path, a definite artifact of the 1860s if not the Gold Rush itself; like so many of the trails which follow the river itself, it does not follow the river itself, but stays rather high above it, often 100 to 200 feet.
Gaining the west side of the ridge, we enjoyed a more favorable geometry with respect to the sun, and began to shed layers. Half a mile or so brought the old trail low and near the river, so we took lunch on some sunny polished rocks, metasediments, I would guess, of the Calaveras Complex. Our elevation was about 1300'.
A pair of ouzels could be heard singing and chattering somewhere upstream, and they soon arrived nearby, diving into the rapid river and foraging for food on the bottom before popping up like corks. Then they would flutter to a boulder and dip up and down, up and down. It was a warm day and the ouzels were glad of it.
Now, it was warm, and birds were singing, so I took my shirt off, and was getting a fine tan, when it occurred to me that I had never been to this place in my life, and, after all, the trail did continue. So I re-shirted, grabbed the loppers, and set off exploring.
Suddenly the trail seemed of a lower caliber, and a number of trees had fallen across its course, helping blur its course along the canyon wall. Quite a few California Milkmaids were in bloom. But I stayed with it, and in a time Catherine appeared, and together we forged ahead into a small ravine, where a good-sized terrace was buttressed by large dry-laid stone walls. It was an old cabin site, certainly from more than a century past. Not one stick of lumber remains. It is a flat lawn supported by walls of mossy rocks.
The ravine itself split into two branches there, each cut deeply into bedrock so prettily sculptured I felt sure that it must be limestone, or at the least, limy metasediments. The deep polished chasms were quite remarkable, adorned with moss and ferns. In fact, the whole ravine was fair a wonderland of moss and ferns.
We marveled at all this and explored this way and that. I picked up a continuation of a downriver trail, which became too faint too soon. Something was wrong, and only the mystic trail sense of Ron Gould could make it right. So I tramped the quarter-mile back to our lunch terrace, informed Ron and Gay of great and momentous discoveries, and soon we were all on the scene of the Twin Chasms and cabin terrace.
I should say that this Twin Chasms Ravine received the tailings of several hydraulic mining claims, once upon a time; it may well have been worked as a "tailings" claim, all fitted up with sluice boxes like Canyon Creek and Indiana Ravine once were, and the cabin may have had to do only with that, with the guarding and maintaining of sluice boxes, not with the older, Gold Rush era of mining down along the North Fork itself.
Scouting higher than I had before, Ron detected a trail line, and sure enough, it acted as though it were "the" continuation of the downriver trail. Following it, we found that it became fainter yet a ways along, and, retreating, our eye was caught by another trail climbing away above.
We had already guessed that whoever had once lived at the cabin would have had some kind of trail climbing the ridge just west of the Twin Chasm Ravine, which ridge topped out quite near where we had parked. Catherine had caught us up and we decided to give the climbing trail a try. We found a neat series of switchbacks and I for one am sure that we were, in truth, on an old human trail.
It seemed just the thing to follow this old trail back up to the top and make a grand loop. So I went back after Gay, and soon enough we were all climbing the ridge, and soon enough our faint switchbacks melted away, and an increasingly heavy growth of Deerbrush, Ceanothus integerrimus, began to turn us this way and that. There was no question of detecting a lone human trail amidst a welter of game trails; it was simple survival, finding whatever small gaps in the brush and lurching another few yards higher.
We climbed to a thousand feet above the river before the brush finally tightened up completely and barred our way. It was nearing four in the afternoon when we finally conceded defeat and retreated back down to Twin Chasms, back to the north and then south on the river trail (for the river makes a tremendous 180-degree turn around a ridge, in this area), reaching the base of the Blue Wing as the last red light of sunset lit up the forest, high above Wolverine Canyon, to the east.
The slow trudge up the trail was actually quite nice. For a time I saw the faint ghosts of my own shadow flitting beside me, cast by fading twilight of the northern sky (for all the main part of the Blue Wing is on a north-facing slope), and then the light of the waxing moon became stronger, my ghosts were reincarnated as real shadows, and then the stars were out as well, and then we were back on top.
So, what had seemed like such an innocent and moderate hike, the descent and reascent of a mere 1600', became, somehow, some way, a Monster, with something a lot more like 3000' vertical to contend with, all told.
But it was after all another great day in the great canyon.
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Visit to Canyon Creek
Happy New Year!
There's been a ton of snow around these parts, and scarcely an ounce of hiking. The last fair weather in December found me visiting Green Valley with friends, and packing out the last of the garbage gathered up from an old marijuana grower's camp last winter.
Then came the storms. Snow and then rain, snow and then rain. Heroics of shoveling snow. The building of igloos and arches and sculptures only to see them melt in the rain. The shoveling of hundreds of feet of driveway only to see it buried all over again. There came a final snow storm, with no rain afterward, a final igloo was built, with the visage of a wild and mighty mouse glaring from one corner (my igloos can have sharp corners, spires, windows of any shape, buttresses, and so on, including, perhaps, the hundred-times-life-size bust of a mouse).
And then there was at last one sunny day. Wednesday. So the intrepid Catherine O' Riley and I dared to hike through the snow into Canyon Creek and wander a mile or so down the old trail.
The Diggings were only lightly frosted with snow, and dotted with crystalline icy puddles, and walking the Paleobotanist Trail, we saw many interesting ice patterns, as we crunched along. Snow almost obliterated by rain had frozen hard under the stars, Tuesday night. Reaching the Canyon Creek Trail, we soon dropped below the snow, and continued quickly down past the little bridge to the sunny side of things, where first big waterfall comes into view, The Leaper almost hidden beside it.
The Leaper needs middling high water to even exist. Water surges into a narrow polished channel which plunges over the top of a cliff. The channel leads into a shallow pothole which makes the water shoot out and up with great force. It sails across a narrow chasm and hits another cliff before falling to a deep pool at the base.
Yesterday The Leaper was in good form.
We decided to visit the Blasted Digger Overlook, and took the side trail from Waterfall View. Arriving at the spur ridge dividing Canyon Creek from the North Fork, we followed down the ridge, which narrows to a single sharp blade of rock, and suddenly one is at this ancient lightning-struck Digger Pine, and Giant Gap is in view, and the river, and in fact, one can look far upstream and far downstream.
Gazing through the Gap, two snow peaks floated like clouds above distant dark forests. These were Monumental Ridge and Quartz Mountain. Rarely are they so white.
We explored some other viewpoints, cliffy spots where the sun beat hard on bare rock and a glorious warmth and light embraced us. This is California in the winter. One day after a snowstorm, and even at 2600' elevation, one gets a tan, or looks for shadows to hide in.
A bird appeared in Giant Gap, with small white things dropping away from it. After a moment, we realized these were feathers. It took a while to grasp what was going on. The feather-dropping bird flapped vigorously east, a thousand feet above the river, and behind it five, ten, twenty, who knows, fifty little feathers sparkled downward in the sun, easily seen against the shadowed cliffs of the far canyon wall.
Suddenly a second bird, much like a hawk, shot out from the side of the canyon and chased the first bird out of view, in the vicinity of Big West Spur. We realized that the first bird had been attacked just before we'd seen it, and had probably just been attacked again.
Retreating to the main trail, we walked on down in the sunshine, to the Inner Gorge and Gorge Point and the Six-Inch Trail. The rock doves or pigeons were circling about, perhaps fifteen in all, and I counted nine pure white. A couple of Brewer's Rock Cress were in bloom at Gorge Point, which is second only to The Terraces in priority of bloom.
We'd had a late start and while lazing around down there next to those wild cliffs and chasms and waterfalls, the sun slowly lowered toward Diving Board Ridge, to the west. The faintest hint of the ridge's blurred shadow-edge touched us, and that was all it took, we were on the trail immediately, slogging back up to the Diggings, and crunching across the snow and ice.
It was another great day in the North Fork.
There's been a ton of snow around these parts, and scarcely an ounce of hiking. The last fair weather in December found me visiting Green Valley with friends, and packing out the last of the garbage gathered up from an old marijuana grower's camp last winter.
Then came the storms. Snow and then rain, snow and then rain. Heroics of shoveling snow. The building of igloos and arches and sculptures only to see them melt in the rain. The shoveling of hundreds of feet of driveway only to see it buried all over again. There came a final snow storm, with no rain afterward, a final igloo was built, with the visage of a wild and mighty mouse glaring from one corner (my igloos can have sharp corners, spires, windows of any shape, buttresses, and so on, including, perhaps, the hundred-times-life-size bust of a mouse).
And then there was at last one sunny day. Wednesday. So the intrepid Catherine O' Riley and I dared to hike through the snow into Canyon Creek and wander a mile or so down the old trail.
The Diggings were only lightly frosted with snow, and dotted with crystalline icy puddles, and walking the Paleobotanist Trail, we saw many interesting ice patterns, as we crunched along. Snow almost obliterated by rain had frozen hard under the stars, Tuesday night. Reaching the Canyon Creek Trail, we soon dropped below the snow, and continued quickly down past the little bridge to the sunny side of things, where first big waterfall comes into view, The Leaper almost hidden beside it.
The Leaper needs middling high water to even exist. Water surges into a narrow polished channel which plunges over the top of a cliff. The channel leads into a shallow pothole which makes the water shoot out and up with great force. It sails across a narrow chasm and hits another cliff before falling to a deep pool at the base.
Yesterday The Leaper was in good form.
We decided to visit the Blasted Digger Overlook, and took the side trail from Waterfall View. Arriving at the spur ridge dividing Canyon Creek from the North Fork, we followed down the ridge, which narrows to a single sharp blade of rock, and suddenly one is at this ancient lightning-struck Digger Pine, and Giant Gap is in view, and the river, and in fact, one can look far upstream and far downstream.
Gazing through the Gap, two snow peaks floated like clouds above distant dark forests. These were Monumental Ridge and Quartz Mountain. Rarely are they so white.
We explored some other viewpoints, cliffy spots where the sun beat hard on bare rock and a glorious warmth and light embraced us. This is California in the winter. One day after a snowstorm, and even at 2600' elevation, one gets a tan, or looks for shadows to hide in.
A bird appeared in Giant Gap, with small white things dropping away from it. After a moment, we realized these were feathers. It took a while to grasp what was going on. The feather-dropping bird flapped vigorously east, a thousand feet above the river, and behind it five, ten, twenty, who knows, fifty little feathers sparkled downward in the sun, easily seen against the shadowed cliffs of the far canyon wall.
Suddenly a second bird, much like a hawk, shot out from the side of the canyon and chased the first bird out of view, in the vicinity of Big West Spur. We realized that the first bird had been attacked just before we'd seen it, and had probably just been attacked again.
Retreating to the main trail, we walked on down in the sunshine, to the Inner Gorge and Gorge Point and the Six-Inch Trail. The rock doves or pigeons were circling about, perhaps fifteen in all, and I counted nine pure white. A couple of Brewer's Rock Cress were in bloom at Gorge Point, which is second only to The Terraces in priority of bloom.
We'd had a late start and while lazing around down there next to those wild cliffs and chasms and waterfalls, the sun slowly lowered toward Diving Board Ridge, to the west. The faintest hint of the ridge's blurred shadow-edge touched us, and that was all it took, we were on the trail immediately, slogging back up to the Diggings, and crunching across the snow and ice.
It was another great day in the North Fork.
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