Big Sur coastal road to reopen
Scenic Highway 1 stretch closed by landslide in ’17
GORDA, Monterey County — The forces of nature that have shaped the Big Sur coast have also been relentless in tearing it down. On Wednesday, California’s latest attempt to reconcile cars and shifting ocean cliffs will be put to the test.
Fourteen months after a winter of fierce storms unleashed rocks and dirt that buried Highway 1, Caltrans will reopen the road by midmorning. Visitors once again will be able to complete the fabled Big Sur drive, locals will be able to get to work or school hassle-free and the area’s tourist-driven economy will see a burden lifted.
“This has sort of been the history of this coast from the beginning,” said John Duffy, an engineering geologist in Pismo Beach (San Luis Obispo County) who consulted on the $54 million highway project. “It’s an emerging coastline geologically speaking, and it’s in a constant state of trying to come to some stability. All of the factors that have made it such a beautiful place also make it a challenging place to maintain a road.”
The rebuilt highway is as much as 250 feet west of where it used to run, owing to the new land that was created with the slide that obliterated the road in May 2017.
Highway 1’s reopening couldn’t come soon enough for folks like Semjon Mueller, 20. He and his buddy Simon Wendt, both from Germany, are trying to bicycle down the West Coast this summer. After pedaling 2,000 miles from Canada, they hit the “road closed” sign that has been in place near the tiny community of Gorda, about 30 miles south of the town of Big Sur, for more than a year.
“We heard about the problems, but everyone was telling us a different story,” said Mueller, who was pacing in front of the general store and gas station where traffic has been forced to turn around. “We had thought, ‘OK, let’s just go down the coast. Somehow we’ll figure out how to get through.’ ”
The alternate routes are not as appealing, especially to a bicyclist. The options were to backtrack to Monterey and link up to Highway 101 in the Salinas Valley, a roughly 200-mile detour, or brave the twisting Nacimiento-Fergusson Road, which narrows to one lane in spots and adds 100 miles to a trip down the coast.
But Mueller and Wendt appeared to be in luck. The new section of highway won’t open to cars and trucks until roadstriping is finished, but bicyclists have been slipping in without much resistance in recent days to head toward San Simeon to the south.
Chris Martin, a security guard who has been enforcing the closure since the highway gave out last year, is looking forward to dropping his defenses. He said he’s seen a lot of desperate people trying to get through.
Some have pleaded that they have emergencies. Others tried to bribe him. A few have offered to lift up their shirts.
“I had one guy sit right there and say he’d whoop my ass,” Martin recalled, standing at his post in the middle of the closed road. “A lot of people have been really upset.”
Swedish traveler Per Ricktun, 55, who was heading south on Highway 1 en route to Pasadena, got over his annoyance quickly. He’d be a little late to his hotel because of the closure, he said, but he wasn’t in any real hurry.
“I saw the warning signs (for the closure), but I thought there would be a detour close by,” he said. “It appears that’s not the case.”
Locals could tell that trouble was coming to Highway 1 during the winter of 2016-17, when near-record rainfall pelted the Central Coast. There were more problems on the road than usual, particularly at a spot called Mud Creek.
Ringo Jukes, 55, who works in the cafe at Gorda, remembers his 3-mile commute from the south becoming increasingly treacherous.
He’d have to stop his car suddenly for rocks in the road, and on some days Caltrans crews would close the highway. Eventually, Jukes gave up driving and began walking through what had become a narrow, muddy ridge high above the ocean. Soon, he started calling in sick.
“I wasn’t going to risk my life to work a cash register,” he said.
On May 20, 2017, the whole mountainside came crashing down. Fortunately, it was during one of the times Caltrans had shut the road.
More than 5 million cubic yards of dirt and rock was dumped into the sea, enough to fill about 1,600 Olympic-size swimming pools. A new 15-acre peninsula formed in the water below. About a quarter-mile of Highway 1 was gone.
It was nothing anyone in Big Sur had seen before.
Jukes moved into a trailer behind the cafe to avoid a 3½hour drive to work from his home on the opposite side of the slide. And Caltrans started trying to figure out how it would rebuild the highway.
“I had a message waiting from my boss to jump on this,” said Joe Erwin, Caltrans’ project manager for the repair. “It was breathtaking to see how big this landslide was.”
Erwin and others quickly concluded that a new road over the slide was preferable to building a tunnel or viaduct, which would take longer and cost more. By summer, 35 workers with 25 pieces of heavy machinery were on the job sunrise to sunset, seven days a week.
Complicating matters along the Big Sur coast, storms had also washed out Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge to the north, leaving about 35 miles of Highway 1 accessible only by the littletraveled Nacimiento-Fergusson Road.
“It was bad,” said Kirk Gafill, president of the Big Sur Chamber of Commerce and owner of Nepenthe Restaurant.
Before a new bridge was opened in October, business along Highway 1 was less than a quarter of what it typically is, Gafill said. Traffic has since increased, but the closure at Mud Creek has kept it below normal.
“It just adds to the complication of traveling,” Gafill said. “Traveling is already complicated enough.”
Caltrans says the new road at Mud Creek is built to last. It consists of two 12-foot lanes with shoulders that are 4 to 6 feet wide. The soil is fortified with heavy-duty fabric to maximize its strength. Crews built a 2,000-foot revetment out of 8-ton boulders in the water to keep the coastline from being undercut. And they’ve flanked the inland side of the highway with ditches and defensible space so no new debris falls on the road.
“There is still some (slide) movement,” said Caltrans’ Erwin. “We don’t want to give the impression that this is a stable and static area. We’ll have the highway open, but we’ll still see movement.”
Duffy, the geology consultant, marveled at the speed of the work. He said better science, technology and construction equipment have enabled engineers to quickly confront the slides that are a fixture of the coastline.
The second-largest slide to strike Big Sur, near the entrance to Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park in 1983, brought down less than half the amount of material as the Mud Creek slide, yet it took almost as long to clear.
“It’s very challenging to maintain a year-round corridor,” Duffy said. “We have to learn to live with landslides. The road moves a little, and we have to fix it.”