Re: shay locamotive myth

Well boys looks like Im almost 2 yrs late on this interesting conversation about the missing shay, but I have some good 1st hand experience in the Hume lake area. We have a family cabin there and all my life I have explored all the camps and railroad grades of the old Hume Bennett logging operations. That story of the missing shay has been around for a longtime. Yes theres a section of the old camp 7 grade with a big landslide right after you pass evans grove and as your driving up over the boulders on the grade if you look over the side you can still see some bent rails, at this point the downward slope is extreme steep and unstable, I would say the Kings river is about 1 mile down in the gouge. In the 70s my brothers and I repelled over the side to explore, We had 100' ropes and dropped as far as we could safely we did see about 30' of rail and ties over the side and a set of trucks from a log flat up against a trunk, at this point we still couldnt even see the kings river below. We even tried winching it up with my dads jeep but it was to heavy and we couldnt find anything stable enough to deadnman the jeep off to because the grade is very skinny and rocky at that location. On another note this whole area is still rich in old logging artifact due to the remoteness of the area. The infamous camp 7 donkey is down a abandoned skid trail about 3/4 of a mile on a 60 % incline in windy gulch. In 2ooo Clinton declared the whole area a national monument and the Us Forest service started patrolling and closing down all the old trails. I have talked to the Sequoia Archeologist officer, a few times but all forest service historical information is very tight lipped its all called historical resources and not open for public eyes. Funny thing was I knew of more historical sites than they did