good afternoon youtube so we're back up here this is the 1897
road and i came up here i guess about two years ago in fact and i was uh thinking i might try
getting past the point i stopped at last time i think i was pretty close to where it cuts up
this creek over here and then it follows out up a ways and then it does a switchback and comes out
up on top of this ridge here but the other thing i wanted to see
was looking at the usgs map with the hill shade you can see this road and right over here
just like 10 yards 10 meters away from that switchback
this is where the big landslide starts i mean it's right here
because you can see that landslide scar on the hillshade map just plain as day
so i was reading this geology paper from the 1970s and they were talking about this slide
and that it had been triggered partially in the 1906 earthquake which happened on the san
andreas fault right here but i'm thinking this probably predates the road because the road was
here you know it was on the 1895 or 1897 map when it was surveyed and this would have been
10 years after that and so they either got really lucky with the placement of that road or
this was here already i'm thinking it was probably an active slide and it might have just triggered
a little bit with the earthquake but yeah that's that is just a straight up drop down there
and that goes all the way down to the creek it's this way all the way down to where those
wrecked cars are and a little farther past there this whole side of the hill here is just sliding
i'm thinking i will try to get up here and we'll see if i can get past that really overgrown spot
yeah we made it past that's really overgrown from where i stopped two years ago but i was looking
on the topo map and the contour lines are turning and there we were finally at the bend it shows up
on the the old map and yeah here's the uh little canyon so this is the creek that comes down right
where the road crosses stevens creek i was hoping i could make it up here because i think this might
not be quite so bad because it's a little more shaded in here the road behind me is a little more
exposed and yeah so hopefully i can shoot up here and then a ways up here it makes a 180 switchback
and then comes out on top of this bench up here so cool i'm going to head up here and see how
far i can get it was pretty clear down below as we get up a little higher here i think the
trees are starting to thin out here we're probably getting close to the ridge top and unfortunately
the brush is getting a little thicker i guess a little more sunlight gets in here but
then i ran across this old thing i don't know looks like a you might have had a gate over here
and a lock of some sort heavy construction and you can see it's fairly overgrown there i don't
see uh anything on the other side here remains of a gate they probably removed that for scrap iron
kind of slow going on the way up because you gotta figure each way to get through all this stuff but
we'll keep on going it was really overgrown down here so what i found was a if you backtracked up
the bank there was sort of a clearing through the brush and you could get around here came
around this big oak tree here and expecting to see the road going there and there's no road
this is basically the the top of the the little canyon here there's a ridge right there
and it's a little bit wet here so there must be a spring but this is the switchback you can see how
wet it is here a lot of greenery and i made it so now the road goes back down that way out onto that
bench so i guess i'll keep going i didn't think i'd make it to here i was thinking i was getting
pretty close to this turn but it was getting denser and denser okay there's a bunch more
brush here i had to go there's actually almost a little user trail that runs up the side of
the hill here and kind of skirts around all that brush looks like somebody's been up there before
kind of followed some footprints and then this is i think is the second let's see the third one two
yeah this is the third switchback and i think it goes off this way but yeah this this seems
to be the bench because when i was going around here this top area here is all flapped as far as
i recall the cabins are a little bit farther down or the old dwellings that were up here
it was getting really brushy up here so i had to drop back down to the road
and then i come around the corner and it gets brushy again
definitely a change here you've got all these uh different trees up here
yeah i checked uh on gaia and it looks like we're about 1650 feet more or less
okay yeah i poked around a little bit it doesn't look very passable there
and and down here it gets pretty overgrown and when i was up above the road over here it was
pretty brushy i've got this point and this track marked on gaia gps so i can try to
line it up with the hillshade map the hillshade map shows this road pretty clear and it's accurate
and then it's also on the 1897 map and that shows where the dwellings or structures are there's
two structures over there someplace that's a thing you know on the uh topo map and on the shell shade
map it looks like oh there's a nice clear road but when you get up here that's what you see and that
nice clear road is not passable i have to do a little more studying on this one but
i did confirm you can get up this far and it's getting a little bit late it is 5 30
first day of uh daylight savings time so i've got about an hour and a half to get home
and it's going to take me a while to get back down this hill so i think i will call it quits
right here yes i'm following my track down because i had to find the way around this uh
brush pile and came out here and you can see i'm just headed right down my track where i was
coming up the road on that long straight line and i made a 90 degree turn and came up the side here
to get around that brush and i came right out on my footprints here like i showed you on the map
i just followed my track and there's the road right down there and here's my footprints from
coming up yeah that's really handy being able to follow your track on the topo map because you can
just find exactly where to get down because it was a little bit tricky here the bank is really steep
so yeah definitely having that uh tracking app is nice and then also having the fanny pack
which i didn't have two years ago that's also nice because i've drank about half my water and i might
actually stop and have a snack before i get to the bottom here certainly a little hungry there's a
big clearing up here right on top of the ridge here which i was hoping the rest of the ridge
or the rest of this bench was clear but it's just right here nice clearing couple big trees
so i'm wondering if there was maybe something in here back in the day
but yeah there we go you can see here the road is a pretty nice shape but then right there it
turns to just dense brush for about a hundred feet or so anyway i gotta wrap it up here and
head on down the hill so hope you enjoyed that uh hike today and as always thanks for watching