good morning youtube so in this video i wanted to take a closer look at some of these historic
topo maps that i've been using to explore this area you can see all my tracks here so this is the
gaia gps web interface and i'm currently using the usgs topo map that they have i'm not sure
what year that map was made it just says it was made before january 2021
but when so none of the streams that come in to stephen's creek in this area are named so it
makes it a little difficult to switch between maps because there's no name for any of these features
you have to just go by the geography there's this 90 degree turn and then there's a stream here that
comes in from the north and it angles off here to the west and then there's a second stream
here that does the same thing and this is the area where that pond is so this usgs topo map is
quite interesting it's got a lot of structure shown and a lot or some of these old roads here
and what i've found is not every map shows every detail so you have to switch between these various
maps so let's go back to the usgs historical maps this one is 1982. you've got the creek coming here
makes this bend up to the northwest and then you've got a first stream coming in from the north
now this particular map doesn't have a stream shown here but that's where it would be if it were
there now i think this blue blur right here might be the pond or it might be part of that r hard to
tell you have to remember these were paper maps that were run through a scanner they just don't
have the detail when you zoom in but here's the 1961 map and this one definitely shows the pond
yeah so this map shows a lot of these old roads up here on the side of the ridge and they show them
as jeep trails and apparently back in the 60s and 70s people would ride up here dirt bikes and jeeps
all these old roads were open and accessible and that was quite a popular pastime back then
and then in 78 the open space district acquired most of this land up here
the county park owns this area over here and then the open space district has this side of the creek
as the monte bello open space and then this side was the saratoga gap open space but you can see
the the map clearly shows a pond there there's a couple of structures here that i need to try
to find and i think i found this one i need to see if i can get over to that location with this
map one of the problems though is this map in gaia gps is missing this whole area it's blank
if you go 20 miles north there's map and you go a few miles south and there's a map visible
but there's a big hole in the map in this area which is kind of frustrating i can see it in
avenza maps so anyway that's the 1961 map shows a pawn there now if we go back this is 1948. i
don't believe there's a pawn here i think this is their intermittent or seasonal stream symbol the
solid line three dots and they have the same thing here one two three dots and a solid line it's hard
to tell if that's a pond or it just looks like the dot as far as i can tell there was no pond here
in 1948 but there were two structures here up on this bench above the creek here now one other
interesting thing to note about this map is look at this road here's where the creek goes around
the bend and there's a bridge right here and then there's another bridge over here those are the
bridges that were replaced in 2016 and they were there from a long time ago but look at the the way
they've drawn this road in it comes up the side of the canyon and shoots across here it shoots across
this canyon coming in from the side and then here it's way up on this side of the canyon it shoots
down across the creek up this side goes up several hundred feet vertically up the side of the canyon
i mean i don't know who figured the road went there but keep watching that as we go back in time
like here's the road in 1961. here's the bridge here's the other bridge there's a third bridge
there's a fourth bridge so here the road and the creek are very close to each other
versus 1948 the road was going all over so here's 1943 and the roads doing the same
wild thing you know pond there there's these two structures and then this is the interesting map
this is 1941 and you'll see there's the two structures but what's missing
there's no road up here in fact if you zoom out you'll see there's some roads over here
and there's highway 9 right here and this is highway 35 but there's no road up the canyon
those roads aren't shown and i'm thinking that 1941 there was like something going on
so this is interesting prepared under the direction of the chief of engineers u.s army 1940
and then surveyed by the coast and geodetic survey and then starting in 1938 1939 it was the army was
doing the survey and then also photos from the us army air corps that's kind of interesting how that
disappeared they you know they show some roads like here's the montebello road that's
my observation on this one back here this is the oldest map the 1897 map clearly there's no
pond up here there was a bridge and a structure over here and i think this still exists today
and then there's some structures over here this is all private property on on that both sides
here now one thing that this map shows is a road going up here now there's a canyon here that this
map doesn't really show so the 48 map shows this a little bit better here that there's a canyon
going up this side and if you go back here this creek comes in here from the north and there's a
canyon up here that's really not shown so it's hard to use these maps switching between years
because they don't show all the same features but this map does show an old road here that heads off
to the southwest and then heads up the side of the ridge so that's something i need to
try to check out i think i found the bottom part of this road and i showed you that in the previous
video so there's all sorts of things like this road doesn't show up on this map but then there's
a structure over here and i also showed you that on the previous video this structure over here i
think it actually made use of this road that's not shown here you find a road from this map
and it's used to get to this structure that's on a map 70 years later but anyway just thought i'd
show you some of the information you can glean from these old maps you know looking at the
time sequence you know what was there when did something show up when did it disappear
and as you go back in time various things show up so 1948 there's structures there
and then in 1960 the structures are gone but the pond shows up and that coincides with the evidence
i've seen that when they put this pond in the overflow channel from the pond basically took out
the road that came over to access these structures so yeah it's a really interesting going back and
forth between all these different maps and then going out in real life and trying to find some
of these structures and then there's also things that you find in real life that aren't on any of
the maps apparently i was pretty close to this cabin site on this particular hike here i just
didn't know that this particular map showed this particular structure site so i need to go back
and use this usgs topo map under gaia gps and then see if i can get over here there was some brush in
the way at the time i wasn't quite sure there was something over there but now that i see my track
on this map i can see that i was quite close to that area so i want to see if there's actually
any foundations or rubble over here somehow i want to try to get up to this area and see
these old dwellings here and then there's also this old road that goes up this side canyon here
thing to realize is this is one quadrangle that i'm looking at and you can see here here's the
scroll bar in this whole width and then here's the vertical scroll bar so i'm zoomed in on a
tiny tiny portion of one map and there's all that information that you can glean out of that one map
as you zoom in way less than one percent of the area of this map that i'm looking at and there's
so many things you can find there and you could probably find the same things over here and the
same things up here it's just amazing how much information you can glean out of these old maps
makes it kind of hard to follow some of these things because some maps show structures but not
roads and other maps show roads but no structures or the 1961 map is probably one of the better ones
it shows structures and roads but not all the roads and not all the structures if you have
any questions about that post up in the comments section below and as always thanks for watching
you