Another day on the Madera Sugar Pine Grades

Spent yesterday exploring more of the Madera Sugar Pine operations focusing on several locations. My friend, Larry Brickell arrived at my house at 6 am and by 9:30 am we were in MSP country. The first order of business was trying to figure out how the railroad got to Roundtree Saddle (as seen in the excerpt of Donald DeVere's map in Thunder in the Mountains:


Here's a pic of Roundtree Saddle yesterday:


The current road entering and exiting Roundtree Saddle is too steep for a railroad grade. We spent about 30 minutes trying to find a railroad grade that entered (& exited the area). We had no luck. We then decided to head up to the bottom of the incline off Crow Peak and see if we could backtrack by locating the railroad grade coming out of the bottom of the incline (about 3 miles to the east) and heading towards Roundtree Saddle. Here's a pic showing my truck at the bottom of the Crow Peak incline:


To be continued...