That's the bottom end of the Old Wawona Road, one of the early stage coach roads into the Valley. It intersects (actually, cuts across) the current road just a couple hundred yards south of the turnoff to the BVF parking area. It's mostly clear and a really lovely walk. Besides going down that way, you can actually follow it pretty easily (albeit with quite a bit of tree-hopping and bushwhacking) in the other direction to a spot near Grouse Creek. From there to Wawona, it's in several incomplete segments. One (starting near Henness Ridge Rd) is maintained as a fire road and is another easy walk but most of the segments from there south take a bit of investigation to find.
You'll find a lot of other posts that discuss this (and the other old roads) in some detail in these forums and chick-on has made various overlay maps showing where the old road was in respect to the current alignment, several of which you can also find here.
I LOVE these old roads...they are as close to a time machine as you can get...especially when you stumble across one of those sections that's still well-preserved.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/03/2014 07:22PM by DavidK42.
