Checking Out the West Road Near the GC75BP8 GeoCache

After studying the USGS Hill Shade map layers, I saw there was another road or trail off of the "former road" that I hiked down last fall. Since it was a very windy day, this side canyon seemed to be more sheltered, so I decided to see if I could find that old trail.

USGS National Map Viewer w/ Hill Shade layers:
https://apps.nationalmap.gov/viewer/

From the GeoCache description:
"I had trouble picking up the former road again from the home site, but eventually found it about 20 feet left of the grav3stones. It's a bit of a challenging route down to the Canyon Trail, but not overly so."

This whole area is part of a single 40 acre parcel of land that the Open Space district purchased around 2001, per the newspaper article. I haven't been able to find out about anything that was located here prior to district clearing the land shortly after acquisition. Here's a demolition project for an adjoining parcel of land, acquired from the same owner in 2013, that was cleared in 2014:
https://www.openspace.org/sites/default/files/CGI-B/agendas_minutes/2014.07.23_Lobner_AwardofContract_Demolition_r-14-97.pdf

It lists buildings dating from the 1890s, which is the date of the USGS topo map I have of the area. Likely similar structures were present on the 40 acre site to the west. This earlier demolition was done prior to the district posting such information on-line.

This cache has an incredible backstory with lots of interesting twists and turns:
- AlphaRoaming, an avid GeoCacher, stumbles on this area in 2013 while exploring an abandoned road
- Posts his adventures in his blog
- Contacts the MidPen Open Space District and the California Pioneers historical group
- After identifying historical head stones, a MidPen work party goes in and recovers those stones in 2016
- This prompts a newspaper article
- GeoCacher Werdave places a nearby cache with hints of an old road to the bottom of the canyon in 2016
- GeoCacher TickMag reads newspaper article, blog post and above GeoCache and heads out to the Gravestones site to place a cache
- Later, AlphaRoaming sees cache listing and comes back with friend to revisit the site.
- AR's friend posts log entry about coming up via and old road the AlphaRoaming knew about along with other log entries about other roads and trails in the area.

Sometimes, it really pays to read and reread the cache descriptions and log entries to figure out all this before setting out. And, like this time, revisit the location to figure out more details. Sure, I could have just hiked the normal trail down from the top, logged the cache and hiked back up to the parking area on top. But look at all the interesting things I would have missed. This section of the Canyon Trail used to be a boring ride up an old road, but now I know there's a whole network of old roads and trails off to the south.

Grav3stones cache:
https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC75BP8

A Secret Trailhead Redwood Pair (Premium cache):
https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC6F63Y

San Jose Mercury News article:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/04/04/herhold-unmarked-road-leads-to-historical-headstones/
https://web.archive.org/web/20170508023706/http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/04/04/herhold-unmarked-road-leads-to-historical-headstones/

AlphaRoaming blog posts:
https://alpharoaming.com/2014/09/29/headstones/
https://alpharoaming.com/2016/04/04/return-of-the-mysterious-headstones/

YouTube videos:
Initial cataloging (seems to be missing):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hID6_Cmgx28

Moving them out!:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V595-XMf8b0

Interesting tidbit on the YT algorithm: If the word "grav3stones" is spelled out correctly, then the video gets flagged and demonetized. "Head stones" seems to be OK, but not that "G" word!
Wonder what George Carlin would make of the situation today:
https://youtu.be/kyBH5oNQOS0

More to come...
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