Skip to main content

Yokohl Valley Drive/Mountain Route 296 and Signed County Route J37 sign find

Back in March the Sierras were clearing up finally after a rough winter and I decided to hit a road I wanted to always try; Yokohl Valley Drive.






Yokohl Valley Road/Mountain Route 296 is a 23 mile road in the Sierra Nevada Range in Tulare County.  Yokohl Valley Road has a north terminus at CA 198 and gradually winds through the foothills and lower mountains in a southeasterly direction to reach County Route J37.  Yokohl Valley Road is extremely narrow but manages to maintain a center stripe for the duration of the route.  There is a couple large hairpins in addition to a large grade that ascends to approximately 2,700 feet above sea level a couple miles north of the J37 junction.  I'm unsure on how old Yokohl Valley Road is but it does appear as a county maintained roadway in 1935 on a Tulare County Highway Map.

I started out on Yokohl Valley Drive from CA 198 in the village of Yokohl and headed southward towards J37.  Most rural mountain roads in Tulare County have a Mountain Route number and Yokohl Valley Drive is not exception being assigned with MTN 296.





The asphalt quality on Yokohl Valley Drive quickly drops off south of CA 198.





About the only semi-significant junction on Yokohl Valley Drive is Road 228 which traverses towards Lindsay.  Yokohl Valley Drive begins to follow Yokohl Creek from Road 228 east towards the Sierras.





The views of the Sierras is fantastic after a winter storm.





Pretty soon Yokohl Valley Drive begins to ascend into the Sierras.  The roadway is somewhat straight but it doesn't last too long.















There is a stern warning to trucks buses to not continue as Yokohl Valley Road rises above 1,000 feet.





The grade Yokohl Valley road travels is pretty big and tops out at a summit of about 3,000 feet above sea level.  There is one hard hairpin curve and several other smaller ones.  The view looking back at the road you just climbed near the top puts the height of the climb in stark relief.










Yokohl Valley Drive descends down to J37 on much softer grades.  The roadway is pretty rough but something I didn't consider to be too difficult.









At the end of Yokohl Valley Drive the road meets J37.  I actually found a surprise I wasn't expecting, Signed County Route J37 was actually signed!






I've never found any of the Signed County Routes in Tulare County aside from J37 to actually be signed, I was actually shocked to see shields.  J37 begins at Springdale and traverses 25.17 miles northeast to Mount Home State Forest which is a large grove of Sequoia Redwoods.  Balch Park Road appears to be very old in design and appears on County Highway Maps in 1937.  There is at least one bridge from 1927 over Sycamore Creek which may suggest that was when the route was built.  The J37 designation was assigned in 1975 and was one of the later Signed County Routes to be designated.













Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

  Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third

Old River Lock & Control Structure (Lettsworth, LA)

  The Old River Control Structure (ORCS) and its connecting satellite facilities combine to form one of the most impressive flood control complexes in North America. Located along the west bank of the Mississippi River near the confluence with the Red River and Atchafalaya River nearby, this structure system was fundamentally made possible by the Flood Control Act of 1928 that was passed by the United States Congress in the aftermath of the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 however a second, less obvious motivation influenced the construction here. The Mississippi River’s channel has gradually elongated and meandered in the area over the centuries, creating new oxbows and sandbars that made navigation of the river challenging and time-consuming through the steamboat era of the 1800s. This treacherous area of the river known as “Turnbull’s Bend” was where the mouth of the Red River was located that the upriver end of the bend and the Atchafalaya River, then effectively an outflow

Hernando de Soto Bridge (Memphis, TN)

The newest of the bridges that span the lower Mississippi River at Memphis, the Hernando de Soto Bridge was completed in 1973 and carries Interstate 40 between downtown Memphis and West Memphis, AR. The bridge’s signature M-shaped superstructure makes it an instantly recognizable landmark in the city and one of the most visually unique bridges on the Mississippi River. As early as 1953, Memphis city planners recommended the construction of a second highway bridge across the Mississippi River to connect the city with West Memphis, AR. The Memphis & Arkansas Bridge had been completed only four years earlier a couple miles downriver from downtown, however it was expected that long-term growth in the metro area would warrant the construction of an additional bridge, the fourth crossing of the Mississippi River to be built at Memphis, in the not-too-distant future. Unlike the previous three Mississippi River bridges to be built the city, the location chosen for this bridge was about two