Mystery spot Monroe Truck trail

[JeffH]

I was looking at Google maps - as many of us are wont to do - and saw this little spur off the trail as it heads toward Glendora Mountain Road. It looks odd on the picture as looks like a line of trees is nearby.

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This got me curious as I had never seen any other road/trail there so I zoomed in a bit and found this large bare spot, looking like it was cleared intentionally.

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So I figured I'd check it out, arriving at Big Dalton Road just as the gate was opened. I walked up through Mystic Canyon and took the entire Punkout route, continuing on to the junction with the "trail" to 3397. I had a Caltopo guide on the phone where I had dropped a pin showing the spur in the screenshot, but as I suspected that came out to be a wrong location. I walked in there for less than a minute to decide it wasn't a trail.

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About 50 yards further along the real trail I found some footprints and while not a clear entrance there is an obvious pathway. This is actually an old road cut as it's graded about 20-30 feet wide and even still has some of the corrugated steel drainage gulleys.

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I brought cutting tools so I hacked my way through a couple spots until I came to where I had another pin for a drop down into that clear space. Turned out I was wrong by about 50 feet, finding more footprints further along this track. I got down into a little clearing which didn't look as big as the one in the picture, and I cleared some branches that were about chest-high for me so I could walk through some trees into another little open space. Then I ran into some thicker tree cover where I would have to crawl so I looked at the time and amount of water I had remaining and decided to head back home.

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I think I'll go back to see if I can find that bigger space, only drive all the way to the GMR/GRR junction and walk the shorter path to get here. Anyway, this was a nice walk on a great SoCal day, it's about 8 miles round trip via the way I took.

While on the way out I noticed this little bump which was a couple hundred yards past where I stopped - hard to see in the digital zoom photo but it looks there are some posts out on the point which made me think of a honey factory (like the one that used to be below 3397)? Anyway, just another reason to go back and winter is the right time for this stuff.

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