On Thursday, August 24, Peggy and I hiked to visit the logging donkey yarder that George reported recently. It is an interesting logging relic and makes a good addition to the truck at Dirty Harry’s Museum, the fuel truck on FR 9021, the big logging arch trailer abandoned high on the South Bessemer Road and the big donkey engine near the mines on the way to Bear Lakes. There’s a lot of old equipment in the woods that was evidently either worn out or too expensive to try to haul out when the logging was over, or the mines were shut down.
Our route was a bit different than George’s as we used a mix of old roads and the volunteer built and unofficial trails that George described as shown on the map below.
The “trail” up between waypoints DY2 and DY3 was especially steep and it crossed old grades several times. Each time that it crossed an old grade, we had an especially steep “scramble” (see scramble definition below) to climb back onto the trail. We skipped the steep 0.3 miles of the trail between DY4 and DY5 as I wanted to check out the condition of the old Forest Road 9021-110. The measured GPS coordinates at the yarder were N 47o 25.105’ W 121o 37.798’. The yarder was reached 0.5 miles on FR110 beyond the top of the top trail (Waypoint DY5).
The yarder was easily seen from the road. This was interesting to me as Peggy and I visited the Mine Creek Ponds using FS 110, both as snowshoe trips and summer hikes, as early as 1995. I also led club hikes to the Mine Creek Ponds in the late 90s and early 2000s. We would have walked right by the site of the yarder and I don’t remember ever having seen it before.
On our return route, we walked down Forest Road 110 until leaving it at the waypoint DZ1 to follow the trails down to the old railroad grade. It was interesting to me is that these lower “trails” appeared to follow part of the route of an old “renegade” mountain bike trail. A number of years ago, at least 10-15 years ago, a group of “downhill bomber” mountain bikers built this route which contained some interesting jumps. It was apparently used mainly as a downhill trail. I was checking out the route up FR 110 one day and I saw the “mountain bike lift” in operation. A pickup with a low flat-bed trailer met the bikers, either at the intersection of FR 9020 and the railroad grade or at the lower end of the trail which ended on FR 9020. The bikers loaded onto the trailer with their bikes and then the pickup drove up to the near waypoint DZ1 where they began their downhill run. The pickup then drove down to meet them at the bottom and towed them up again for another downhill run. The use of this trail went on for several months until the Forest Service managers found out about it. They then ran the bikers out and shut the “unauthorized trail” down.
(DEFINITION: The scramble we used was the “Old Geezer Scramble”. When we were younger and took the Scramble class with the Seattle Mountaineers, a Scramble was on off-trail route that often required using both feet and hands to go uphill. We learned to keep three of the four hands and feet planted before moving the fourth. The “Old Geezer Scramble” often requires using both hands and knees to go uphill.)
Ralph Owen