Finding The Roads

In later posts, I'll talk in more details about the individual roads and, still farther down the road, I'll get in to the other old roads in the Park (primarily the Old Tioga Road, Old Glacier Point Road and old Foresta Road but I'll also touch on some of the more obscure ones that I've come across).  For now, let's start with where the "big three" ended.  (I have to apologize, by the way, I'm very surprised to find that there are a few spots I wanted to illustrate here but I find I don't have pictures.  I'll rectify this at some point but if you happen to have photos of the things I mention in [red italics] in this article and you're willing to let me post them here, please feel free to send me copies.)

The Coulterville and Big Oak Flat Roads entered the Valley from the North Rim and the Wawona Road came in from the south.

From the National Park Services publication (you'll want to select this one and zoom in for detail) Yosemite: the Park and its Resources (1987) by Linda W. Greene

The Coulterville and Big Oak Flat roads are not at all conspicuous but they're easy to find if you know where to look.  First the Coulterville Road:

If you start to head out of the Valley through the Arch Rock entrance, check your mileage when you get to the point where the current Big Oak Flat Road hits the Valley floor.  In another 1.7 miles, you'll be at the base of Cascade Falls (usually referred to as "The Cascades").  Look closely and you'll see a small sign with white lettering at about waist-level which says "M1."  Go another 0.6 miles, and you'll see a similar sign marked "M2."  Believe it or not, this is the bottom of the old Coulterville Road.

It looks like nothing but a bunch of overgrown grass

[need picture of M2 road marker but here it is on Google Maps (that short sign on the right is the M2 marker) ]

Push through the grass a bit and you'll be on the bottom of the old road.

Bottom of old Coulterville Road.  Just beyond that small opening in the vegetation is CA-140 coming in from the Arch Rock entrance station.

However, turn around from that point and go a dozen yards or so and you're facing this:

Might not look like too bad (I know I tried to get over it the first time I saw it) but if you go back out to the main road, you'll realize there's a LOT of it.

[picture of 1982 rockslide from El Portal Road]

The trick is to go a bit further down the El Portal Road and look for a small path going up the hill immediately west of the rockfall.

[picture of the footpath bypassing the rock slide]

Head up this path and you'll soon get to a level section that looks like it could be the continuation of the road

but follow it and you'll find yourself at a dead end very quickly.  Cross over this section through a slightly more forested section of hill.  The path's a little (but only a little) less clear here but keep looking up until you see this:

That's a retaining wall for the old road.  Go past that tree on the left and you'll see that enough of the wall is down (not sure if this is natural decay of if somebody (or somebodies) did this to make access easier) but it's an easy scramble back up to the road from here:

We'll pick up the trail in a later post when we track this road out of the Park.


OK, how about finding the bottom of the old Big Oak Flat Road?  You're not far from there but because the Northside and Southside drives around the Valley Floor are mostly one-way, it's easier if we start at Yosemite Lodge, heading westward out of the Valley.

From the Lodge, go about 3.5 miles, watching for those little markers.  When you come out of Yosemite Lodge, you may catch marker V4.  Shortly after you pass El Capitan bridge (the side road merging in from the left, you'll see marker V9.  Here's where we start.

(By the way, for a few bucks ($3.50 as of this writing), you can pick up a copy of a little booklet called Yosemite Road Guide which will describe the many dozens of these markers posted along all the major roads in the Park)

Some trail guides that talk about this road will tell you to take that dirt road just beyond where my car is parked in the picture.  Some even tell you to drive up this road a ways and park closer to the wall.  This is not the bottom of the old road.  You can drive up and you'll get to a spot where the park service disposes of a lot of downed trees and people can often be seen here dumping the debris off or carting it away.  For historical purism and because you probably don't want to leave your car in that area, park here turn 90-degrees to the right of the V9 sign and you'll see where the actual road comes down to the current road (those two dark-gray rocks in the right of the picture lie along the left-hand side of the old road as you're facing the north wall of the Valley).

It's pretty straight-forward from here (except for a lot of rock-scrambling which I'll talk about when I review this route in detail).  However, that  area with a lot of the downed trees piled up may extend across the road and you'll probably have to traipse through something like this.

The old road is pretty obvious at this point (the blacktop is still fairly intact in this stretch) and very quickly the road bends to the left and starts heading up the Valley wall.

You're on your way.  Again, I'll talk about the rest of the hike in more detail in a later post.

Our third trailhead, the old Wawona Road, is much easier to find.  Head over towards the Bridalveil Fall parking lot.  This is probably where you want to park (unless it's very off-season, this lot can be a zoo so get there very early).  Go back out to the main road and start walking west (up the hill towards Tunnel View.  (Note to purists: you're walking on CA-41 South at this point but the road doesn't actually head south until it rounds Turtle Back Dome, a mile on the other side of the Tunnel).  In 0.3 miles, you'll see a dirt road head off to the left.

[need picture of start of Wawona Road but here it is on Google Maps (may need to pan the view to the left a little)]

That's the old road.  Note that some of the trail books that mention this route ignore this lower portion of the road.  They tell you to go up to the Tunnel View overflow lot and start up the Pohono Trail.  That trail does intersect the old Wawona Road 1.6 miles up from it's beginning but it's a very steep 0.7 miles that misses a particularly peaceful and easy section of the old Road.  It also bypasses the famous "Artist Point" view.

That's all for this entry.  I'll work on getting those missing pictures (I might have to update this after my next trip out to Yosemite) but I'll be back in a couple of weeks to start talking about these hikes in more detail.

My Interest In The Roads

I'm not sure I can point to any one thing that sparked my interest in the old roads.  I'm enough of a history buff that, whenever I fall in love with a place, I want to know what it looked like 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 500 years ago.  Who was there before me?  How did they live?  Was the area less built-up or more?  All of these questions jostled around in my mind beginning with my first couple of visits to the Park.  If there's any one thing that really got my juices flowing on this one, though, it started with our first winter visit to the Valley.

We were in California to visit some friends in Palo Alto (in a particularly lovely December) and decided to run out to Yosemite for a few days.  That particularly lovely December was producing such particularly lovely weather the day we headed out there that, as we approached the final cut-off where I had to make the decision to enter the Park on CA-120 (at 6000 feet elevation...the most direct route from San Francisco and the way we normally go) or take the less direct route through Coulterville and enter on CA-140 (at 4000 feet elevation), I figured we'd get there that much faster via our usual route.  All was fine until we started making the final ascent.  We'd already climbed enough that the temperature had dropped from the mid-to-upper 70's down to around 60.  Our car had an outside temperature indicator.  As we began to climb the final 2000 feet of elevation, I wasn't surprised to see it start reading in the 50's.  As it dropped in to the 40's, I was none too amused but not alarmed.  I was definitely not happy to see it drop in to the 30's at the same time the sky was becoming overcast and getting concerned as it hovered in the low 30's and we started to get some light precipitation.

Finally, we got to the entrance station where, they kindly informed us, the road was closed due to white-out conditions ahead.  No problem, they said, here's the detour route...it's only another 70 miles!  Now, it's not that I think the area around Yosemite is awful...far from it.  In fact, once the temporarily northbound CA-120 turns east at Yosemite Junction and enters the historic old village of Chinese Camp, things get quite lovely.  This particular detour (which we've since done intentionally on one occasion) takes you through the historic town of Coulterville...starting place of the first completed stage coach road in to the Valley.  Also, the weather got really nice again as we dropped back down to 4000 feet.  However, a man on a mission is a man on a mission and I was anxious for my first experience of Yosemite Valley in the winter.

By the time we got in to the Valley, it was too late that day to do much other than check in to our room at the Lodge, drive around the Valley floor a bit, get some dinner and settle in for the night.  With  most of the higher elevations were iffier bets (both on foot or by car) than I cared to take, we used this as an excuse to examine more of the Valley than we normally get to see.  On day 1, we did what some hiking books call the West Valley Loop.

Starting at the Bridalveil Falls parking lot, you head east where you climb over the terminal moraine deposited by the final advance of the glacier which once (actually, repeatedly) filled Yosemite Valley.

After crossing over the moraine, the trail descends in to a beautiful, dense forest where little snow actually made it to the ground.

Eventually, you come back out to the Southside Drive and cross over El Capitan bridge to get to the North side of the Valley floor.  As we approached the bridge, we engaged in a short staring match with a coyote out for a stroll (a bit hard to make out in this shot but look just below the railing on the far side of the bridge):

He soon trotted off and we continued our trek.  A few miles in to our hike now, we took a quick lunch break in the woods below El Capitan

While Lonna rested, I did a bit of exploring.  The trail starts to get pretty confused here as everything from a short logging road to hiking trails to various water run-off channels all cross at various angles.  Looking around, I was intrigued by what seemed to be the faint outlines of a broad trail:

I began to follow it.  I quickly lost it as it went under the snow cover in that clearing up ahead.  A bit of poking around, however, and I found what appeared to be the continuation:

Turns out I was wrong (this is actually just a small gulley cut by year-after-year of water run-off) but, climbing through those trees I saw this gentle curve onto a long-ago paved road up the side of the Valley:

Now, OK, call me geeky but this was a pretty exciting moment for me!  Here was a part of Yosemite's past which I had read about but never thought to see (I had read enough to know the road used to be there but not enough to know it was still accessible).  In a moment, I was transported back in time.  I walked a short ways up the road, up until I encountered the first bit of downed trees and overgrowth.  Lonna was waiting back at our rest stop and I wasn't really dressed for a trek so I simply soaked in the excitement and made a note to get back here as soon as possible.

If any one thing kicked off my fascination with the old stage roads, it was this chance encounter.  Back in the Yosemite Visitor's Center later that day, I came across Irene Paden and Margaret Schlichtmann's 1955 book The Big Oak Flat Road, a brilliantly detailed account of the history of this road, the people who lived along its route and wonderful maps showing the old route in relationship to the current Big Oak Flat Road.  Now I was hooked.

As is often the case when one throws oneself in to some pursuit, further connections started to pop up as if by magic.  In addition to a number of other books about the old roads (a particularly good overview of the roads is in the article "The Great Yosemite Roadbuilding Race" in vol. 2 of Hank Johnston's Yosemite's Yesterdays), I discovered that Tom Bopp, the brilliantly talented and entertaining pianist who plays at Yosemite's historic Wawona Hotel most nights of the year, is not only a Yosemite historian but has a particular interest in, yes, old stage roads in to Yosemite Valley (although his primary focus is on the old Wawona Road).  These sorts of chance encounters continue and, years later, I continue to come across the old roads in unexpected places and associations.

Would I have begun this fascination with these routes were it not for stumbling across something which looked like it might once have been a road on a rainy, overcast day?  Perhaps, perhaps not.  I do know that, nowadays, a visit to Yosemite is more likely to find me tracking down segments of these old roads rather than frequenting the more popular (and crowded) trails (although I still do my share of those!).

In coming entries, I'll go in to more detail about my hikes up the various roads, what I know about the parts of yet to get to and tips on how to find the roads if you're interested.

Yosemite's Old Roads

One of the great passions in my life is Yosemite National Park along with its natural, social and political history.  I have an especial interest in the old stage coach roads which were built to access the Yosemite Valley in the late 19th century.  While this blog will no doubt have its share of digressions , the focus, at least initially, will be increasingly detailed examinations of these roads and what they meant to people.  I'll try to keep this generally interesting but it's a specialized topic and probably not for everyone.  No problem...at last count, there were well over 100 million blogs available so please don't feel obligated to read one more!

When American settlers first discovered Yosemite Valley (perhaps as early as 1833 by the Joseph Walker party, fairly certainly by William Penn Abrams in 1849 and most definitely seen and entered by the Mariposa Battalion in 1951), it had already been used by local Indians for thousands of years.  At that time, there were a handful of crude trails used by the Indians to enter and leave the Valley.  Difficult to follow (by white men) and mostly suitable to foot travel only, these remained the only routes in or out of the Valley for the first several years of visitation by a slowly but surely growing number of tourists.

In August, 1856, brothers Andrew, Milton and Houston Mann, who ran a livery stable in Mariposa (approximately 40 miles south of Yosemite Valley), completed a now largely obliterated horse trail in to the Valley.  It is said to have closely followed an old Indian trail in to the Valley and it's final descent was precipitous and downright scary for all but the most seasoned mountaineers.  At about the same time, two other Indian trails which approached the Valley from the North rim were widened in to horse trails.  These trails merged at Crane Flat and continued on to make an equally frightening descent in to the Valley.

Although relatively few people had actually seen Yosemite Valley (throughout the 1850's, an average of 85 people a year made the intimidating and expensive trek), word of it's astonishing beauty (which most thought fantastically exaggerated at first) grew and, on June 30, 1864, President Lincoln signed a bill which designated Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees [i.e., Giant Sequoias] as lands of such exquisite natural beauty that they should be preserved in perpetuity for the enjoyment of all Americans.

With the country in the midst of the Civil War, the number of visitors remained small but did begin to grow...enough so, that by the 1870's, businessmen in the nearby towns of Big Oak Flat, Coulterville and Wawona (all along the existing crude horse-trails to the Valley), began to recognize that there was big money to be made if they were along the first major carriage road in to the Valley.  The competition was often fierce and frequently cut-throat but, in close succession, three major carriage routes were completed:  On June 17, 1874, the route from Coulterville was opened.  Just 29 days later, on July 17, the somewhat shorter but higher-elevation route from Big Oak Flat was opened.  A year later, on June 24, 1875, the 27-mile route from Wawona opened.  Although all three routes offered bone-crunching rides in a sea of dust (the first person to greet travelers as they arrived at their Valley hotels was an employee with a large feather duster to brush off the worst of the dust) along routes where armed bandits held up the stages with some frequency, this was both comfortable and economical compared to what had come before.

Things changed again with the advent of the automobile.  The first documented entry of a car in to the valley was on June 23, 1900 by Oliver Lippincot in his brand-new Locomobile.  Seven years later, automobiles, still considered a new fad and a general nuisance were banned from the Park.  In 1913, automobiles were again permitted but only on a single road (the poorly-maintained Coulterville Road) and subject to SIXTY-FIVE restrictions ranging from speed limits to stopping places to how to handle encounters with horse-drawn carriages.  Within a few years, these rules were rescinded and, before the decade was over, horse-drawn carriages were a thing of the past.

The advent of the automobile also demanded that the dirt roads be tamed.  Around the turn of the 20th century, the roads were oiled and, eventually, paved with asphalt.  By the 1920's, this was inadequate and all three roads were replaced by (almost) completely different alignments which took parallel routes (although at generally lower altitudes).  Today, there are still 3 roads in to the Valley:

• The current Big Oak Flat Road.  This begins as CA-120 in Manteca and makes it's way up to the tiny village of Chinese Camp (the official starting point of the Old Big Oak Flat Road).  It then climbs gradually upward to the Park's Western entrance at approximately 6200 feet elevation.  Shortly after entering the Park, CA-120 veers to the East and becomes the Tioga Road (roughly paralleling the Old Tioga Road which, in turn, even more roughly parallels the old Great Sierra Wagon Trail of 1883).  The Big Oak Flat Road becomes CA-41 and descends 2000 feet in to Yosemite Valley.
• The Old Coulterville Road is still a maintained, public road of various designations whose original route is largely intact although, once it nears the Park, it becomes increasingly unpassable to all but serious off-road vehicles.  After passing through Big Meadow, the old road is completely blocked to travel except on foot and the final few hundred feet were forever obliterated by a massive rockslide in 1982.  The roughly corresponding modern road, the  "All-Weather Highway" (so-called because it's much lower elevation  makes it more consistently useable in the winter than the 2000-foot higher Big Oak Flat Road), mostly follows the Merced River as it flows out of the Valley.  Designated as CA-140, it begins in the San Joaquin Valley near the town of Gustine and terminates at the intersection of CA-41 at the west end of Yosemite Valley.
• The current Wawona Road is part of CA-41 which begins on the coast near Munro Bay.  It enters Yosemite at its southern entrance, continues in to the Valley, constitutes the lower part of the Big Oak Flat Road and then terminates at Crane Flat (where the Big Oak Flat Road becomes CA-120).  The Old Wawona Road, to a greater extent than the other two roads, was simply widened and modernized in many places.  That is to say, in many places, the Old Wawona Road IS the New Wawona Road, although much improved.  Many stretches of the old road are, however, separate from (although mostly fairly close to) the modern road.  Although some of these stretches are heavily overgrown, several miles are easily passable on foot, including the entire stretch from the Valley Floor to the famous Inspiration Point.  

The old roads are still there.  All are hidden to varying degrees but none are hard to find.  Some stretches are beautifully relaxing walks, others involve taxing scrambles over and around rockslides and bushwhacking through extremely dense overgrowth.  One thing that they all share is that you'll rarely meet another soul here...at least from this world.  Give your imagination a bit of free rein, however, and you'll find yourself expecting to see a stage coach come around the bend or hear the pounding of hoofs as they make their steep descents down to the Valley floor.  Even on the busiest holidays, when the roads in the Valley are virtual parking lots, you can enjoy not just this total solitude but views which equal (and often surpass) those available from the currently popular locations.

The above is just a capsule history of roads into the Valley.  Every week or so, I'll be posting increasingly detailed essays (with both historic and modern photographs) about specific aspects of the old and new roads along with questions about things I've not yet found the answers to.  Comments are welcome and I'll do my best to answer questions that people may have.  I hesitate to call myself any kind of expert on the subject but I have researched things fairly thoroughly (in modern and historical books and maps, by talking to people familiar with the history of the Park and by getting the dirt of those roads on my hiking boots) and I'll do my best to help.

Like anything one loves, I want to tell everybody about the roads and, at the same time I want to protect them from public onslaught.  If you do attempt to traverse these old roads, please be careful, be respectful and come back and share your experiences here.

David