Re: Another day on the Madera Sugar Pine Grades

Continuing our trip on the Madera Sugar Pine. We made our way to Crow's Foot stopping to explore at several locations. After lunch at Crow's Foot we deciced to explore some of the 1908-1918 grades that had been burned off by the fire. Here's a map of the area we explored:


The grade from where it crosses the dotted road marking in the lower center (next to the "star" symbol for a peak) up to the 1917 camp is now forest access roads. We drove down to the beginning of the spur that heads out towards the incline and 1917 camp. On the way down the hill we saw a can dump off the side of the grade:


Shortly beyond this the grade reached the bottom of a canyon and a curved trestle site where the grade began heading in a northwest direction following Rush Creek:

Amazingly, there is one burnt partial bent still standing from a trestle that is over 100 years old! It is the first time I have seen any significant trestle remains in all of the MSP country. The other side of the bent was laying on the ground.

We continued driving up the grade to the site of the 1915 incline. It was located next to a creek drainage. This is the best shot of the bottom of the incline:


You can barely make out a trace of a grade heading uphill. Trying to explore this it quickly became apparent that parts of the incline were probably on log cribbing and that combined with the lack of fire in this region made it very difficult to trace.

Just to the right of the incline was a log chute that led down to a log loading area:


We are looking up the log chute (which I first mistakenly thought was the logging incline). The log loading area was behind me. The footprint of a cold deck was still visible, but the brush made it impossible to get a decent photo...

To be continued....



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/2019 09:20PM by Dave Peterson.