Hello Paul P, The fact is if the USFS parking lot at the beginning of trail 3W02 ( Bowen Ranch trail ) was more accessable then people would drive to it and use the parking lot there more. Since the Willow Fire, the open routes changed and the access to the USFS parking lot became much harder. No public access to it through the Bowen Ranch anymore. The only ways, as they exist today are lengthy, and you need a high clearance four wheel drive to get there. Before the Willow Fire you could get there with a two wheel drive, by both passing through the Bowen Ranch and by driving old Routes 1 to 2. Now the USFS parking lot is hardly used by the general public. Now, in driving around the Bowen Ranch on route 4 to 3 you eventually come to a steep hill on Route 3 where beyond which you need four wheel drive to continue. Naturally people without four wheel drive would park there. In the canyon south of this spot is a path I call the Route 3 trail that has been hiked for many years to where it crosses over a pass and hits the Bowen Trail. Of course Mike Castro tells people that I built this trail, just like I built all the hiking trails leading to DCHS, including the PCT, being a Wizard helps :-) Mike Castro in the last couple of years has acted like there is some kind of huge flood of " Bad " people that use this path, its utter nonsense but time has shown that the USFS seem to hold this view also. I frequent the area and see how few cars park there, especially since the unexplained shot out car windows at that location last summer. Brad Burns had told me in the past that the trail was not legal and he wanted to erase it. It appears like the USFS have acted and that thier idea of erasing a trail is to cut down a whole bunch of natural vegation and then pile it on the trail. From what Joe says in his recent post, some folks have thrown the cut branches off the trail and that explains why I saw them scattered haphazardly all around the trail when I hiked it last Friday. Now what will be the USFS next move, to close this canyon to hiking because people have tampered with thier environmentally sensitive, wholesale cutting, pile up the branches, and hide the trail scheme. I see the USFS parking lot not being used because the general public for the most part, can't get there. Personally, I don't think the agencies really want to see it being used. It seems to me that if they made it more accessable, this would solve most of the problems of people seeking other canyons to access the springs because Trail 3WO2 ( The Bowen Trail ) is the best one to the springs. Back when old Route 2 was open and had been graded, the USFS parking lot was used regularly by the general public who were seeking to access the springs by other ways than through a piece of private land and paying the owner of that land a toll. Mike Castro was quite upset, to say the least, when the USFS graded the tuff portion of Route 2 and made it easier for folks to get there. Then came the Willow Fire which changed all of this. After the new routes opened and the USFS parking lot saw very little use I'm sure Mike Castro was jumping up and down in glee! Then Mike Castro began to percieve the Route 3 trail as a new possible threat to his supremacy on the hotsprings hill. Some consider his " concerned " efforts patrolling the open routes and Bowen Ranch surrounding areas to be about guarding the springs from the danger of the " open route bad people ". To me his actions have been so way over the top, in regards to whats really going on out there, that its come to be my opinion that he is obsessed with controlling, by his activities, all the Northern ( most convenient ) routes to the springs. If the general public wants to access around the Bowen Ranch on the north side of the Deep Creek canyon then all we reasonably have left is Route 4 to Route 3. The Route 3 trail was a beautiful, peaceful, clean walking path, and I will miss how it was before the recent butchering of the plants there last week.
