I agree wholeheartedly. Just this morning, Dopers taught me about the deep nature of pi, and about airport runway construction, and about how John Bonham was drafted into the New Yardbirds… what a great way to enjoy breakfast!
Mystery solved!
Hannah and I went back out to the area to where the mystery path diverges from Walrus Lower:
There is a slight path-looking thing that goes straight (like the map does) but there is a cliff right there instead of a path:
However we backtracked into the woods a bit and found another, narrow path down:
We zigzagged bath and forth till we made it all the way down to the river:
Till we got to some rickety, old stairs that I didn’t want to trust:
But what did we also find??? An old bridge!!! On the main paths, there are little foot bridges that are essentially logs with chopped wood nailed along to make a small 1 or 2 foot wide bridges. In the past, someone has obviously made a huge one that went across the river and now it’s broken and washed out:
Then we had to make the very steep climb back up:
Bonus - old water tower:
So I think that there used to be a path that climbed down in the spot on the map but over the years the cliff has given way so the path moved down a bit.
Looks like you solved it! Bit of a hijack, but I have a map of BC in 4 sheets each about 3 feet square from 1912, and it has “Indian trails” marked on it; I wondered if some of those had survived later iterations of maps.
Wow! That sounds super interesting. I’d love to check out old trail maps - off to Google!
Awesome pix. Glad we could ride along as you solved the mystery. You get extra Scoobysnax tonight.
Mystery solved. But I wonder if map software ever generates display bugs that insert a line or curve where no geographical feature exists? Display bugs (defects) can happen often enough.
Hello I am the creator and one of the developers of Trailforks.com.
The none interactive light brown lines are part of the background basemap as others have suggested. This is a custom basemap we have created, using OpenStreetMap data among other things.
https://www.trailforks.com/blog/view/trailforks-custom-basemap/
We try and filter the OSM data to show stuff that might be useful to mountain biking. So we leave forest roads and hiking trails on the basemap. So the trail in question is from OSM, not Trailforks.
You can find it on OSM here
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/362487291/history
Odd thing is it was only edited 1 year ago, but from the photos above it seems this trail is probably decades old. But the river crossing has not been viable for a long time.
Our ride data shows people are using majority of the trail/road on the eastern side, but no one is crossing.
https://i.imgur.com/9UAvl9n.jpg
I will edit the way on OSM to remove the river crossing.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/46917046#map=15/49.2429/-124.3471&layers=C
Canadaka, thank you for your informative post! I will mention your example when I teach my students a little bit about OSM, custom base maps, and activity-specific interactive GIS web portals like yours.
Thank you so much for posting and glad I could be of help! Your maps are awesome and I go on your site daily to chart out my hike for the day.
Ah ha! I now see where I can meet up with that trail by following a mostly hidden, rarely used trail that I have gone on before by going across the main bridge in the park and then heading south into the forest.