Re: Another day on the Madera Sugar Pine Grades

Here's a view looking down the incline:

The incline had a trestle at its upper end. You can see the dugouts for the bents in the hillside. There appears to have been around 10 bents on this trestle. It looks to be about 100 feet long and about 30 feet high.

Here's a view from the edge of the trestle looking back along the incline track:

It almost appears as if the grade is wide enough here for two tracks.

I originally was going to hike down the incline, but it was very steep, with loose soil, and thick with brush, so I decided to pass. The map shows no extensive track at the bottom anyway...

We backtracked to the main spur and headed out towards the end. Here's a look a the grade a little further out where it appears there may have been a siding:

We're about 1/4 mile from the end...

About 1/2 mile after the incline site we reach the end of the main spur:

This location corresponds quite well with the location Donald DeVere indicates on his map...

Here's a view looking towards the west from the end of track:

Gary's logging the point in his GPS. In the distance you can see the far side of Granite Creek Gap. This is where the MSP logging line reached in 1931 and from there it was 32 miles back to Sugar Pine...

From here we retraced our steps back to Gary's Jeep. One detail I found interesting on our hike was the near absence of artifacts. The entire area had very little in the way of metal anywhere. Since this area was the last place MSP logged and wasn't scrapped until 1934, it appears that the high scrap price encouraged the scrappers to take nearly everything. In fact, there was not even one piece of wire rope at the top of the incline and that stuff is usually everywhere.

To be continued...