What you see in the red circle, and then proceeding west as a dashed line alongside the Old Big Oak Flat Road, is identified in the legend as the Big Oak Flat Trail.
In the book, "The Big Oak Flat Road" (see link: book), the authors report out the following:
Beyond Crane Flat, and from 1856 to 1874, the rival communities of Tuolumne County and Mariposa County used a common terminus to their thoroughfares to Yosemite Valley. It followed more or less along the old Mono Trail and led through Gin and Tamarack Flats, Gentry’s (in later years) and down the cliff to the floor of Yosemite Valley. A peculiarity which did not interfere with practical usage was that one contingent called the entire length the “Big Oak Flat Trail,” while the other group spoke of it as the “Coulterville Free Trail.”
When the later road-building competition began, the Coulterville contingent rerouted their road to pass through Foresta, since the horse trail seemed too steep for wagons, and the great talus piles ahead made road building at a lesser grade too difficult. When they had money difficulties, a second company began building the Big Oak Flat Road through the talus piles anyway. But that's another story. A whole book, in fact. What caught my eye in Chick-On's overlay was a hint of where the old horse trail met the valley. The overlay sometimes has routes that are quite inaccurate, being drawn in with a coarse pen. But it usually accurate about junctions.
To quote further from the book:
The last station on the road was Gentry’s, down the mountain from Tamarack Flat at an elevation of 5627 feet. It was on the brink of the tremendous cliffs overhanging the canyon of the Merced just below Yosemite Valley but was so hemmed in by timber that the precipice was invisible.
Colonel E. S. Gentry settled there while the travelers over the high ridge where his stopping place was located were still riding a rough trail on horse and mule back. The wagon road with its appropriate concomitant of stages and freighters was so slow in arriving at his door that he was but little known to the dwellers on the lower [central valley] portions of the turnpike. Tamarack Flat was the last destination to be discussed with familiarity by the cattlemen and, until 1872 when the final miles of the road were under construction, only the determined sightseers headed for the wonders of fabled Yosemite or owners of supply trains plodded into Gentry’s on tired horses or mules.
There were two things called Gentry's. On the map, they are shown to the west of the circle. The less westerly one was not his main site, which was too small for Gentry's purpose but which later became a toll both and the entry station to the park. The original boundary of the Yosemite Grant runs through that spot. The other group of buildings to the west was Genty's Hotel and horse changing station, and later a sawmill. It was also the western junction of the trail that runs to El Capitan and beyond.
For almost twenty years, hardy tourists passed Gentry's on pack trains on their way to the valley. They were, of course, happy to relate how difficult the journey had been.
Well, we didn't have any hysterical women on side saddles, and we now knew where to look for the trail head. One other bit of historical interest. The pack trail was abandoned in 1874 when the road was finished. However, an engineering historian has reported the following: (see link: report)
The $56,000 turnpike had a maximum grade of 16 percent and averaged 13' in width. The road was open year round from Big Oak Flat as far as Crockers' Station, just outside the park's present northwest boundary, and for seven months from Crackers' to the Valley floor. The tollgate on the Yosemite end was located at the covered bridge over the South Fork of the Tuolumne River. In 1875, Harlow Stuart of Sonora ran a telegraph line along the road.
The trail is steeper than the road, but the relevant part for us was that the telegraph came through the year after they abandoned the trail, and it follows the old trail not the road. It turns out that the wire was almost pure iron (for low resistivity) instead of steel, so it doesn't rust. The wire is still just fine, and in many places is the best way to confirm which way to go when it is unclear which path is the horse trail and which an intersecting game trail.
Actually, the trail is quite clear in most places. There isn't a lot of stonework, though there is some where the trail crossed dips caused by rivulets. It is very modest and easy to overlook, unlike the heroic stonework on the old road. The main clues to following the trail are that the surface stones were moved to either side of the path, and twenty years of traffic has produced a slight groove in the ground.
Because of a lot of sewer work along the highway, we chose to park at the turnout called Valley View, east of the Pohono Bridge. That left us about a half mile to walk to the actual trail terminus, but we amused ourselves with various ruins and construction equipment tucked into the woods. Until, that is, we found a strip of poison oak that put us back on the highway.
The main thing to look for at the start is a huge scar on the face of the cliff below Rainbow View pipe rail, with a corresponding fresh talus pile underneath. Leave the highway and hike cross country to the base of the talus. Near the lower end of it is a cabin-sized boulder, and the trail can found where it crosses at the uphill side of it.
There is some fresh rockfall at this point, so you have to scramble over a couple of stone blocks right there. You will then find the trail going uphill to the west, and there are cairns.
That was a shock. We thought perhaps that someone else had read this forum and beat us to it. But most of the cairns look older than that. We finally concluded that they might belong to insulator thieves. The reason being that where the cairns stopped at the lip of the Fireplace Creek Cascade, the telegraph insulators began. Before that it was only scraps of wire on the ground. I had mentioned in an earlier post the insulator collectors' convention recently here in San Jose. One of the things that these guys do is collect them in the field and then swap among themselves.
Which raises an interesting question. The insulators are 136 years old. And they are now litter. It wouldn't surprise me if the park service wanted to both protect them as artifacts and to haul them away as refuse. Like the wooden pipes at the Glacier Point water works...
Anyway, the trail isn't too hard to follow in most places, and is certainly a better trail than the rough trail up to Ribbon Falls Amphitheater that we did the next day. Except for one thing: Wherever the trees thinned out there were bushes. Not too bad and not too often, but it would be good to have some trail usage to keep them down.
The trail first climbs to a prominent bench, where it becomes indistinct for a brief while, but when the slope picks up again it becomes easily visible once more. The next interesting place is where the trail reaches Fireplace Creek, which flows year-round. At this point you change from having a big cliff above you to having a big cliff below you. It's another one of those neat Yosemite places. but not one that would suit builders of a wagon road.
At this point we expected switchbacks going up. But there weren't any. After casting about for a bit, we found the trail continuing on the other side of the creek and up the bank. It continues as before, except more steeply at first. This is the only place where the old pack-train illustration above makes any sense. But it soon resumes its usual pitch.
This went on for a long time. We soon discovered that the telegraph wire in this area was not nailed to tree trunks or cross boards. It was passed through doughnut insulators that were hung in the trees with wire.
This is what a typical bit of the trail looks like. Impossible to photograph well with the lighting as it is.
Not a technique that you would use on the valley floor, but along an abandoned trail it was OK. As an engineer, I was also interested in the splices. Here is one where the two spools of wire were of different diameter, so it is easy to see how the splice was done.
This continued on and on. Finally, at about the 5250 foot level we got into an area with thinner soil and therefore more brush. Manzanita. When we hit an area of low angle slick rock, my buddy went nuts. He had realized that this thing was not going up to the road, but was going to continue in the same fashion all the way to Gentry's. The road was only a couple of hundred feet above us, so up the hill he went. We reached the road at 5500 feet and at noon. It had taken two hours from the Valley View parking lot.
Our original plan had been to go up the switchbacks to the road and then just continue along the creek past the waterfall and up to the El Cap Trail. Then down the trail and back along the old road. We had left a bicycle at its terminus. However, we were now too far to the west, under the Fireplace Bluffs. The idea of going around the loop the other way wasn't as attractive, since there was a lot of slickrock to cross that I hadn't seen yet. I prefer to do that going uphill. Finally, my buddy was starting to worry about how he would get a prime seat in the Lodge bar for the seventh game of the world series.
We ate a leisurely lunch, then walked the old road to where the switchbacks should have been. We went down the hill at that point, to the east of the creek, but within hearing distance of it. We were sure that we wouldn't overshoot the trail going down, because it follows the edge of the cliff above the cascade, and that is a pretty hard landmark to miss. It took an hour and a quarter to get from the old road back to the highway.
My guess as to why there are no switchbacks is that they only existed for one season. That would be while the masons were working on the great switchbacks of the road. The reason for having this optional route was that Fireplace Creek would be very scary and troublesome to cross at the head of the cascade when the creek was running full. The road crew would have put in their culvert over the creek by that time, and from that point a good horse could make it down blazed switchbacks on steep dirt to the old trail. Better than being swept over the cascade. And much faster if there was any traffic going the other way. But no stonework was done, so it's all gone now. Who knows what description the Hoods used to come up with that route on their overlay?
When I went to print a map of the gps track, I found that it wandered all over the place. That happens often enough among trees and cliffs, but this was worse than usual. I finally just drew in some waypoints that averaged the wandering, and threw the gps track away.
In this map, the long red track is from my descent after reaching the top of the waterfall last June. (See link: Fireplace Falls Hike) You can see where I backed away from the creek, then descended to the road, then followed it home. The short red track is the actual track from when we left the horse trail to where we hit the old road. The yellow dots were waypoints put in before the hike, a sort of expected route. The blue dots are my rendering of the average route of the wandering gps track obtained while on the horse trail.
Finally, here are a couple of Google Earth views with those waypoints thrown in. It doesn't handle the waypoint characters very well.
And a closeup rendering looking from the west. The red circle is the start point at the highway.
It's a nice bushwhack. Maybe some day I'll follow the trail all the way back to Gentry's.
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