Re: One more day on the Madera Sugar Pine grades....
| October 19, 2018 04:09PM |
Since I purchased a copy of Thunder in the Mountains in my youth nearly 40 years ago, I have always wondered where the fabulous cover photo of #5 with a log train by Pop Laval was shot:
The only clue was a date of 1924.
Here's the whole photo from inside the book:
After the 2017 Railroad fire, I began extensively exploring the woods that were logged between 1918-1925. Every old grade I drove or hiked I would stop at a trestle location and see if any features lined up. By September of this year I'd nearly come to the conclusion that the photo location was on a part of the grade that was inaccessible, or the date was wrong and it was taken on one of the earlier logging grades that were in a different location than I was searching. I was pretty much ready to give up...
One night I was sitting at the computer looking at Google Maps both with the terrain feature and the satellite images. Suddenly this location popped out at me:
The location by the arrow possibly looked like a railroad grade. The angle of crossing seemed to line up. When I looked more carefully at Pop Laval's photo I noticed there was a railroad grade on the hillside above the train. That grade seemed to line up with today's 6S07 road. I decided that this location along Big Creek (that I had driven past twice already on previous trips) deserved a fresh look.
When I finished with the 1924 Incline, I drove about a mile down the road to where the railroad grade diverged down Big Creek Canyon near Big Sandy Campground. My plan was to hike down the grade about 3/4 of a mile and if it was the trestle site I would be on the right side of the bridge to make a "Then and Now" photo.
I parked the truck and headed out on the grade. A few feet in to the trip I found this broken casting laying on the grade:
It looks like some sort of queenpost.
After about 500 feet on the grade I encountered a nearly solid wall of brush and fallen trees. There was no clear way around this. The only option left would to be to hike in from the opposite side of the bridge and hope that I could ford the creek and climb up to the grade to get to the photo location. Drat!
To be continued...
The only clue was a date of 1924.
Here's the whole photo from inside the book:
After the 2017 Railroad fire, I began extensively exploring the woods that were logged between 1918-1925. Every old grade I drove or hiked I would stop at a trestle location and see if any features lined up. By September of this year I'd nearly come to the conclusion that the photo location was on a part of the grade that was inaccessible, or the date was wrong and it was taken on one of the earlier logging grades that were in a different location than I was searching. I was pretty much ready to give up...
One night I was sitting at the computer looking at Google Maps both with the terrain feature and the satellite images. Suddenly this location popped out at me:
The location by the arrow possibly looked like a railroad grade. The angle of crossing seemed to line up. When I looked more carefully at Pop Laval's photo I noticed there was a railroad grade on the hillside above the train. That grade seemed to line up with today's 6S07 road. I decided that this location along Big Creek (that I had driven past twice already on previous trips) deserved a fresh look.
When I finished with the 1924 Incline, I drove about a mile down the road to where the railroad grade diverged down Big Creek Canyon near Big Sandy Campground. My plan was to hike down the grade about 3/4 of a mile and if it was the trestle site I would be on the right side of the bridge to make a "Then and Now" photo.
I parked the truck and headed out on the grade. A few feet in to the trip I found this broken casting laying on the grade:
It looks like some sort of queenpost.
After about 500 feet on the grade I encountered a nearly solid wall of brush and fallen trees. There was no clear way around this. The only option left would to be to hike in from the opposite side of the bridge and hope that I could ford the creek and climb up to the grade to get to the photo location. Drat!
To be continued...
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488 stops for water at Los Pinos tank on closing day Oct. 1979. Photo courtesy Don Richter
The NGDF was started by Don Richter and is currently operated in his memory by Nathan Holmes and others. Others who have contributed to the upkeep of this board are (in no particular order): Charles McCandless, Everett Lueck, Ted Wilton, Cole Adams, James Bane, John Moellmer, Jon Bentz, Linn Moedinger, lloyd lehrer, Rod Jensen, John Craft, Steven Forney, Herb Kelsey, Bill Ramaley, Russ Sperry (El Russo Loco), Josh McNeal, John West, Jim Armstrong, Bob Bergstrom, Greg Scholl, Blake Forbes Doug van Veelen and Mark Fuller.