Vintage AAA Materials?

[Candace66]

The old USGS maps were the first place I looked, and they didn't include a number of the routes I know to have been in use so I turned my gaze elsewhere...

Then these routes you know of must be very obscure!

I'm looking at the 1908 Ballarat 1:250K map.  The western half of this map is blank and labelled "unsurveyed." 

On Mesquite Flat, the map shows the old route running from Surveyor's Well southwest to the mouth of Marble/Cottonwood Canyon.   I was out at Surveyor's Well in 2014, and at that time you could see it used to be a crossroads.

The map also shows the old road junction at Stovepipe Wells (not the later settlement, but the well itself).  From there, it shows a road leading west-southwest along the north edge of Mesquite Dunes.  I've hiked out there and found traces of that road.  From the same road junction, the original road alignment leads up the valley; it was sited lower than the current road.  The old road went right past Triangle Well and Surveyors Well, continuing up to "Lost Wagons" BM and on to Mesquite Spring.

The 1951 Panamint Butte 1:62500K map shows the route you mentioned going up north Lemoigne Canyon.  But it's a dashed line, suggesting a trail and not a road.  Not that any "road" going up there would have been much more than a trail!  

If you dig deeper into the USGS map finder, perhaps you will find some of what you're looking for?  If it's not there, I hope you find it somewhere and share it with us!!

[DeathValleyDazed]

This vintage map stuff is really cool. I hope to find time this winter to delve more into it. Thanks to you DEVA veterans for leading the way on this map quest.

If the Earth was flat would this make our map puzzling easier? (Dumb questions deserve dumb answers.)

[Kauri]

If the Earth was flat would this make our map puzzling easier? (Dumb questions deserve dumb answers.)

Off-topic:

Questions that seem dumb may actually be deeper than the asker anticipated. Feel free to ignore the below answer if you're not mathematically inclined, or if you already know all this...

A flat Earth, or a round Earth, or really any shaped Earth that is a 2-dimensional manifold (possibly with boundary) in the sense of geometry/topology, such as a torus or a "dog saddle" shape, locally "looks like" Euclidean 2-space. I.e., for any sufficiently small subset of a surface that's a manifold, there's a continuous map, whose inverse is also continuous, between a subset of a flat surface and this subset of the original surface. (This map is called a homeomorphism, if you're curious.)

However, the sphere and the plane are not isometric (isometric means that this homeomorphism map also preserves angles and distances). The standard Mercator projection (sometimes called stereographic projection) between the sphere and the plane is conformal, so it preserves angles and directions, but it does not preserve distances, which is where one major difficulty in mapping the globe comes from.

(Yes I've been answering too many mathematics homework questions recently. But I thought your question was actually quite interesting and definitely worth answering from a mathematical point of view. )

End of digression...

[DeathValleyDazed]

If the Earth was flat would this make our map puzzling easier? (Dumb questions deserve dumb answers.)

But I thought your question was actually quite interesting and definitely worth answering from a mathematical point of view. )

Wow, Kauri I'm impressed by your "off-topic" math-mapping tutorial for two reasons. First, that you took the time to share your expertise and second, that I was actually able to follow and understand it. This is mostly due to your clear and concise writing style, so thank you very much. 

Your tutorial helps explain to me why sometimes I struggle with topo maps not appearing to be exactly accurate when I'm on the ground employing them? 

I suppose the solution to three dimensional mapping as a hiking-exploring guide would be a holographic virtual reality device one could wear to maintain perfect three dimensional orientation at all times? Could be fun or just another pain in the ass?

Side note: One aspect of just getting out there and walking about it the unscripted and fuzzy edges of the experience. Some surprise are exquisitely delightful. 

[Candace66]

While I didn't find any old maps...I did find an old road.   I'm curious myself what this connected!

Go to N 36.550670, W 116.860818 (Google Earth has high-res in this area) and you can see the west end of this road.  It runs generally east for a ways, then disappears into a wash.  Along the way there is some creative bulldozer work!


I spotted this while on the high point of the Three Bare Hills (the most southerly of the hills is the highest).

[David_Bricker]

I'll have to check my topos. I have 7.5 minute paper USGS topos of all of Death and Panamint valleys that I bought in the early 70s. Most of them are dated from the 1950s.

David Bricker / SYR

[Desert Fog]

Candace go to the link below and download Part 3 of 4 of the Hawkins map book.  Then look at page 25.  It shows a trail up to a spring in the general area you were in...

Hawkins Death Valley Map Book

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I don't think the trail in the Hawkins book is what you saw to the east of you from the hill.  That trail looks to be north of where you were.  It matches up with the topo below...

1952 15 Minute Chloride Cliff

[Candace66]

This appears to be a rather old map! 

Unfortunately, it wasn't made available in good quality on the page where I found it: Link

Actually, if you search for the word "road" on the page at the following link, you'll find they have a few old maps...unfortunately, the examples are all low quality:  List of illustrations and maps

Capture by Candace66, on Flickr

[GowerGulch42]

This appears to be a rather old map! 

I didn't even think to look in the Historic Resource Study… good thought!

[Desert Fog]

These two 1930s Death Valley maps and guides were posted on eBay this morning...

Two 1930's Scotty's Castle Death Valley Ad Brochure Map Vintage 

Map page