The Easiest Stream of Travel

 There aren't many flat places to camp in the mountains, even when you only need a small area.  Of course there are mathematical points of flatness, between the uphill and the downhill of a mountain.  A topo map shows isocline lines that are flat, but they too are too immaterial for camping or mountain biking.  That is why I was so delighted by a special type of isocline that we mountain biked on, today.

By chance I found a water diversion ditch nearby.  It had a smooth dirt service road alongside it, so I followed it upstream.  The creek through the ditch was small, but it was energetic enough to make a pleasant gurgling sound.  The bottom of the stream seemed gravelly more often than muddy.  If the Little Cute One were a labrador retriever she would have been in heaven, splashing along through the water, only 15 feet from her man on a bike.

We went uphill at a uniform 1 or 2% slope.  When was the last time I biked such a smooth and flat road?!  At times the mountainside was very steep both above and below ditch (perpendicularly).  Woudn't it have been interesting to watch the construction crew carve a V-shaped notch along the side of these mountains?  Imagine if the surveyor was drunk that day, and at the end of a long hard day of digging and blasting they discovered that they dug the ditch 1% uphill instead of downhill!

No information was available on the maps I was using, so it was fun to try to guess how far the ditch would go.  A small gap in the forest let me glimpse the road (we started on) several hundred feet below us!  We kept going upstream until this happened. 

Here our ditch was split off from the main creek.  Just a while ago, the main creek was hundreds of feet below our ditch!  

A concrete dam diverted 98% of the water to our ditch:

That hardly seemed fair!   Actually though, a bit downstream there was a controllable weir that put some of the flow back into the main creek.  I wondered what the story was: why was this ditch even here?  Why aren't there a lot more of them?

What a miraculously easy transportation route our ditch road had been.  You can easily see why people went crazy building canals back in the 1830s.  Or go back even further to ancient Rome, when aqueducts carried water to the cities and narrow coastal plains that needed it.

I enjoyed this route so much that I would like to find other water diversion ditches.  Google Maps and most other apps do not make this easy.  Perhaps I should be happy with that: I liked the experience as a surprise.  I wouldn't want it to become one more thing you can look up on the internet.