The Path

The road appears twice in this photograph. Once at the top right, crossing above the single ponderosa. And once at the bottom left, a pale slash through the mist. That is the same road. It drops that far in less than a mile.

This is NF-382, the South Fork Road, between Garden Valley and Centerville. It began in the 1860s as a pack trail. Miners hauled supplies and equipment up this slope by mule to Centerville, Placerville, and the diggings around Grimes Pass. For seventy years it stayed a trail. Then the CCC came through in the 1930s and made it a road. Heavy iron and men with shovels, pick axes, and crosscut saws. They stood somewhere near where I stood and decided where the grade would go, then cut it out of the ancient hillside by hand.

There is another path in the frame. It leaves the road and runs down and across the slope, thin as a pencil line. No crew cut it. The deer and elk of this drainage made it, and maybe a bear or two, walking the same line their mothers walked until the ground gave in and held the shape. Nobody widened it. Nobody named it. It goes where they need it to go.

I waited a while there. Watching the low clouds erase and reveal the horizon. Hoping to see a local resident use their homemade trail. None did.