good afternoon youtube so this is a track recording from gaia gps and this is the
open street map topo map display here and this is the track i recorded back in early september
when i hiked from the creek crossing here at the table mountain trail
up to the creek crossing here on the grizzly flat trail i had just purchased the
subscription to gaia gps to allow me to do this recording and have the maps available
offline and one of the things i really liked about gaia was you can bring in the old map
here's my 1895 or they call it 1900 topo map and you can bring that in on your device as an overlay
yeah so there you can actually have these maps as overlays so i have the 1895 map overlaid on
top of the modern topo map and this is where i walked up the creek here but you can see one of
the issues with this old topo map is it thinks the creek is over here while it's actually up here so
this is three four hundred feet maybe a hundred meters offset here it is what it is so you just
have to live with it anyway i just wanted to show you that feature that's what i really like about
it the other thing i really liked about gaia gps is they have this private lan overlay and that's
these lines here that you can see so you can actually see that this area here is santa clara
county park land and this over here is the open space district so you can really see what land
you're in and in fact this hike all takes part in the county park just barely it gets close to the
open space but it's all in county park territory this is where stevens canyon road ends today
you cross the creek and then this single track trail here was built in 1990
and then it joins up with what appears to be an old road over here that went up
this way and connects up to a road that goes up to the ridge
which was an old dairy farm back in around 1900 and one of the viewers on one of my earlier
videos mentioned that he saw a road coming down here and sure enough there is a road
that comes down here the current trail follows that old road and then there's the old road
that came up the creek the only thing i don't know is if those roads existed at the same time
or did they just happen to be in the same area so that's something i haven't figured out yet
is the timing of these roads because i can't find this road on any map to put a date on it this road
shows up on the 1895 map and i think it also shows up in 1930 but it's gone on the 1940 map
anyway just to show you this this is the track i recorded on gaia gps and then they they give
you this slideshow format and i took some photos on my hike and they show you here
where the photo was taken relative to the track you recorded so this was just through the entrance
of the canyon here it gets really narrow down around the corner and so i basically just hiked up
the stream bad there was really nothing there and then you come around the corner and it opens up
and this is the old road bed on the south side of the canyon this is the road cut and if you
look at the map here the creek is actually up here and this is the south side of the canyon
and the creek is on the north side of the canyon but the map shows it just opposite
but everything's flipped so even the modern maps are not terribly accurate when it comes to details
like this but this road the old 1895 map shows it on the south side of the canyon or south side of
the stream and it is and then i turned around and looked upstream from there and there's a
place where the stream had kind of jumped back and forth in the canyon and it crossed the old
road bed washed it out but there's a flat area upstream i was looking upstream here and if you
get up there there's the road bed again the road the road cut and then the creek is off over here
a little bit upstream from there there was a big boulder that had rolled down and had probably
blocked the creek this thing is the size of a car it's big there's about a 10 foot deep hole
right here in front of me that's caused the creek to go all over the place here you can see how it
zigzags in the track i think i was just walking up the stream bed at that point and you can see how
it's pretty freshly eroded here it's just gravel and dirt where here it was kind of an older more
established stream bed and let's see a little bit up from there just another illustration of how
inaccurate the maps are i am standing here on the north side of the creek this is the main branch
of stephens creek going around this way this is what's called branch c that goes off this way
and i was standing right here the creek is to the south of me but this branch c is coming in
right over here not over here and i don't see any signs of the stream recently being over here
there's a probably a 20-foot tall bank along the creek here and there's no signs of the creek
ever coming through this area at least in recent history it's obviously been in that area before
to make the canyon but it's been a long time that the creek's been over here you can see how heavily
overgrown it is and this whole area in here is just completely covered with trees and brushed
and no way to get up in here it's just a briar patch the next photo was taken up along here and
this is where the map shows the creek coming in from the side even in here i'm looking downstream
and the creek is on my left but according to this map the creek is on my right and the branch
c should be coming in like right here but this is a huge bank like i say it's probably a good
20 feet tall and there's no sign that a creek has been through there in hundreds of years at
least so yeah this is this is the old road and then i think the old dwelling that's on the map
was probably up on this bench up here and that was my hike up the stream bed i did take some video
last year of this section here stay tuned and we'll look at this section of the old road
in a follow-up video and as always thanks for watching