http://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=34.2832, ... 7&z=15&b=t
I parked at the East Fork trailhead and booked it to the bridge. Just short of the bridge, in the usual spot were 5 bighorn sheep. This group was especially interesting: two of the rams had some sort of disagreement, and there was shoving and head-butting. Neat!
I crossed the river and started walking uphill. The old USGS topos show some trails here, but I've only ever looked-for (and found) and single switchback. This time, I noticed a clear trail cut to the West:
I climbed up to the start of the cut and saw that it was still a real trail
Here the trailbed was cut out of solid rock, so it was still there. I walked further to the South, and found a fantastic old sign:
What is "PL and P"? The sign is in shockingly good shape, given that this trail has been abandoned for decades and decades now. At the sign is a junction. One can walk down towards the river on some poorly-defined trails. You end up at the trail along the river, at some old cabin ruins:
These ruins lie exactly the the BM 2612 marker on the USGS topos. Or you can traverse further South. Very quickly the trail rounds a corner and dies out, leaving you with a nice overhead view of Devil's Gulch falls:
That's pretty nice! I then turned around, and tried to follow the trail in the other direction. It's in poor shape to put it mildly. Most of this area is loose scree or loose dirt. Everything moves around over time, covering the trail. Or if it doesn't move, then stuff starts to grow on the trail. And if THAT doesn't happen, then bighorn come out, and make a myriad of their own trails, that all look similar at this point. It's well-defined in some places, though:
Moving towards Airplane Flat, the trail has some switchbacks (that sorta still exist), then it meets another old trail further up (that also sorta still exists). To get to Airplane Flat, one traverses this upper trail Eastward. This section crosses several sketchy gullies, and since there was no obvious trail here, it took a long time to safely climb around everything.
Airplane Flat is just on the other side of a ridge. The toe of this ridge cliffs out above the bridge, and at the tip is this benchmark:
It's not on the map! I watched the bungee jumpers from above
and then rounded the corner to hit Airplane Flat. Airplane Flat looks to be the top of a small hill that is surrounded by an impregnable wall of brush. The trail exists here, but travel is pretty much impossible
On the way back I found the old trail, and that made the gully crossings trivial. The trailbuilders made cuts in the rock for the trail to pass through, and if you find those cuts, then crossing is very easy. Example:
I then kept exploring by backtracking on the upper trail further West, towards Devil's Gulch. I was thinking of getting into the drainage, and then taking it to Rattlesnake Peak or something. Turns out this is very difficult. The area approaching Devil's Gulch is especially loose, and there's not trail there at all anymore. Which is annoying, because the whole time you're looking at the area PAST Devil's Gulch and it has a very well-defined trail cut:
It's probably way overgrown there, but it's SO clearly visible. In any case, there was no reason to push through this, so I turned around to go back the way I came. On the traverse I almost stepped on a bird. It responded by flying maybe 10ft away, landing on the ground, and pretending to be a rock.
If you got too close it would swallow as much air as possible to look big. ID?
In any case, I walked down, and found 12 more bighorn. Complete with a lamb
Neat! On the way back, I went into Devil's Gulch since I've never seen those falls the "normal" way. There's a pretty fantastic ruined cabin in there. Somebody built a concrete shelf on the side of the canyon for the house; they cemented the stove and chimney into the vertical rock wall of the canyon. And when some flood washed away the floor and the house, the stove/chimney remained suspended in the air, still attached to the wall.
And then I got to the falls, which are really nice too
That would mostly do it for the day. I swung by the Queenie mine on the way back, since I haven't been in there before, either. There's some mineralized water dripping down, and some baby stalactites growing.
Not bad for a trip where I didn't actually end up anywhere!
First off, AW and Taco did a very similar trip earlier:
