good afternoon youtube out here on another bike ride so yeah this is one of the
streams that comes down from montebello ridge which is about 1500 vertical feet
up on the ridge there's montebello road comes up and then right before the gate on the road there's
a little trail called the water wheel creek trail and it comes off the road and then it
dips into the headwaters of this creek and then a little farther up there's a second creek that
it goes into and then at the end of the trail it dips into the headwaters of gold mine creek
that one has a name but the creek over there and this creek don't have names but
it's called the water wheel creek trail now this creek here rarely has water only in the wettest
years does this creek or a little stream here have any water going in it this one flows down
to stephens creek it goes across the trail here and down this is the old original canyon trail
this was the branch of the canyon trail they built around 1990 to bypass this section and i believe
this section is an old jeep road or maybe a ranch road that came down from the top of the canyon
because this this is an old road here although it's just called the canyon trail now but it's
obviously an old road according to all the usgs maps and the osm topo map there's this creek
and then the creek up there is supposed to flow down here and into this creek but there's nothing
that comes in from here i'll shoot a couple more clips farther up here if you looked at the topo
map you would swear that there's a creek here because the terrain all runs downhill you know
it's higher up there it's lower down here there's a big gully here but this gully i believe was
caused by two sections of the san andreas fault there's probably a branch that runs up here
and then the main branch runs up where the creek is and i believe this is a block of
bedrock in between there and this whole section has just tilted down and slid off of the hills up
here so this used to be flat across here and the land just sunk here and left this whole
sunken area that looks like it was carved by a stream you can see right here the trail goes up
and then it goes down yeah so you can see up here the trail goes down and then it goes
up here and then it actually goes down another little dip farther up the canyon there's a couple
more of these features and up above there's water in them and they call these sag ponds s-a-g ponds
and it's where the fault has caused the land to drop and create a bowl and if there's a source of
water it'll fill up with water and make a sag pond let's go up there and i'll take a look farther up
okay yeah the canyon trail comes up there and then yeah it drops down in into this little bowl here
if there were a source of water this would be a sag pond this would be full of water in here
there are one or two actual sag ponds up higher on the trail up towards the top at page mill road
this gets to be quite a mud bog in wet years you have to actually go around the outside of it
because it's like about 50 feet of just bottomless mud but according to usgs there's a creek right
here and it flows uphill i think this hillside used to be level and it just tilted down this
face here slid down the fault and left this block here so that's that's the only thing i can think
of here that would cause this because there's this block here that's about a half mile long
and it's pretty high there's kind of a little peak here this is sort of the high point and then it
tapers down that way and runs into the creek and then this goes down to the table mountain trail
and then this whole side up here looks like a lot of slide debris when we get up to the top end here
you can really see the slide debris that has come down so let's go up there and take a look
so yeah here we are at the top of the steep climb here this is a pretty steep section it's like 42
gradient according to all the usgs topo maps there's a stream right there you can clearly
see down at the end that's just a dry trail i mean there's runoff here when it rains but the creek
is actually way over here where it comes down this is where the creek comes down
from montebello ridge but yeah this whole area here kind of looks like there's been
slide debris coming down and just kind of stopping here in this low area there's big boulders and
just piles of dirt and kind of really uneven terrain
this stream here is a fair bit bigger than the one below and you can see it goes that way usgs
says it comes down and makes a turn and goes down this way i don't think it's ever flowed that way
or the only thing i can figure is maybe a long time ago the creek might have flowed
that way and then a slide came down and blocked this here and diverted the stream over there
but that's where that little waterfall that i shot a video of a couple weeks ago is down there the
map that is closest to reality is the 1897 map and that shows the creek coming down the hill
and going that way into stevens creek
there's a big hill in the way but all the modern usgs maps show the creek going that way
1896 shows it going that way and in reality it's going that way
the ironic thing is if you go about 15 or 20 miles kind of in that direction as the crow flies
you will come to the usgs west coast campus in menlo park and i'm sure
people that work there come up on these trails and probably go along here and they they don't
even realize their own maps are in error they need to resurvey their maps i don't know how that gets
done the hill shade map on the other hand shows this canyon going down that way clear as day
so i don't know if they're going to be using that 3d
ep data to redraw some of their maps maybe that's part of the plan
because those two maps if you put the hill shade map on you see this canyon going that way
if you turn the hill shade off you see the creek going down this way yeah i'm hoping with that
3d lidar data that they come in and maybe correct some of these old maps the problem is they can't
really use like satellite imagery in here because you can't see the ground with all the tree cover
i am calling this a water wheel creek because this is the middle creek there's the three creeks that
the water wheel creek trail crosses there's the one back there there's this one and then the one
up here is called gold mine creek it's got a name this one's right in the middle and it's probably
the one that has the most water flowing in it so based on that i will call this water wheel creek
according to usgs this doesn't exist here there isn't a creek here and there isn't a waterfall
down there anyway i thought i'd show you that kind of a mystery so i'll cut in some pictures
of some of the old maps and show you which way the creek flows and then i'll show you this block here
you know a single map doesn't show everything actually that's why i like that hill shade map
because it shows what's on the ground and then you can come out here and see
what's really here or not what the topo map shows so yeah anyway i thought i'd
show you that uh kind of oddity yeah hope you enjoyed that and as always thanks for
watching you