Uncovering the Miner's Ditch Trail

    The northern portion of Excelsior drops precipitously to the narrows of the Yuba River. It was the summer of 2007 when I tried to find a deer trail that could take me down those steep slopes to the confluence of the Yuba River with Deer Creek. After several dead ends, I finally found an old trail that led me through breaks in the tall basaltic walls to the rushing water of the Yuba River narrows west of Deer Creek. But during my attempts I found something even more intriguing – a major ditch which followed the terrain, at about 700 foot in elevation, around the north-facing slopes of Excelsior above the Yuba River. And this was not just any ditch –this was a major ditch, the size of the old China and Tarr ditches which entered Excelsior to the south and drove the vast hydraulic diggings at Blue Point. But this ditch was not on any historic map of the ditch system I’d seen, and seemed to be too low on the mountain to have driven hydraulic cannons in the Blue Point bowl, so why had it been dug, at such obvious great expense and effort?

    After months of inquiry, I had my answer. In the map archives of the Nevada Irrigation District, one old map showed a ditch, called only “Miner’s Ditch”, around the north of Excelsior, commencing at the confluence of Deer and Squirrel Creeks and ending several hundred feet above the site of the original settlement at Rose Bar, which now lies buried at the edge of the Yuba River under forty feet of gravel and cobble. And then I understood – this must have been one of the first ditches carved through these mountains, dug to carry water to power the water cannons of the region’s first hydraulic diggings, at the short-lived township of Rose Bar. That small town was ill-fated – not only was it built too close to the river, and fared badly in the floods of the 1850’s which drove the miners inland to Timbucktoo, Sucker Flat and Smartsville, but it turned out there was not as much gold there in the river, there at the mouth of the narrows, as the miners had hoped. In fact, the real gold lay in the cobble gravel cliffs behind the town and so the first hydraulic cannons, driven by water carried in this Miner’s Ditch, were turned on those cliffs and within a few years, what of the town had not been carried away by floodwaters or taken down to be rebuilt in Smartsville was buried in the gravel washed from the surrounding hillsides.


    We spent a couple of months during the spring of 2008 with chainsaws and machetes, hacking away at the fallen trees and poison oak which blocked the trail. We were thrilled at the condition of the ditch, with very little of it eroded away or broken by long-vanished flumes. And at the end of our work we had not only uncovered a great and hitherto forgotten mining ditch – we had also created one of the finest hiking trails along the Yuba River I had ever seen, extending for miles, with an almost perfectly level gradient, around the north of Excelsior from Mooney Flat Road to the historic Blue Point diggings. It was a trail which likely had not been explored for over a century, since those miners stopped hydraulicking Rose Bar and moved inland to richer gravels. And it was a trail with continually spectacular views, of Englebright Reservoir to the east, Timbucktoo Bend to the west and the hidden recesses of the Yuba River below.

    The trail has only been hiked a few times since then, with representatives from the Trust for Public Lands and the Nevada County Land Trust, among others. We anticipate that the Miner’s Ditch Trail will be opened to the public after the Trust for Public Lands acquires the property, and that it will become one of the premier scenic and historic hiking trails along the Yuba River. Until then, the trail is on private property and not open to the public, except for a limited number of accompanied day hikes which we will be conducting during the upcoming season. If you’re interested in joining us on one of these hikes, drop me an email at bbisnett@excelsiorproject.com.