The Big Sur slide you have not heard of
There’s a second smaller landslide in Big Sur that’s been eclipsed by the drama of the epic Mud Creek slide.
But it’s an equally big headache if you’re trying to reach the coast from Highway 101.
Here’s more bad news: This sibling slide — named “Paul’s Slide” — won’t be cleared until mid-July, says Caltrans.
Until Paul’s Slide dumped tons of rubble and closed Highway 1 near the settlement of Lucia on May 25, it was possible to reach Big Sur retreats like Esalen, Post Ranch Inn and Ventana and the restaurant Nepenthe.
How? You’d enter from the east. You’d exit Highway 101 at King City, drive to Fort Hunter Liggett and then climb over the Santa Lucia Mountains on remote, narrow and windy Nacimiento-Fergusson Road (no cell service, gas stations or other amenities) to make your way to the coast.
Now Paul’s Slide stands between you and those resorts. Only locals have been given limited access. The slide is 2 miles north of where Nacimiento-Fergusson Road ends at Highway 1. And it’s 10 to 15 miles south of these resorts.
(It’s still possible to reach Limekiln State Park, Plaskett Creek Campground and Kirk Creek Campground from Nacimiento-Fergusson Road.)
Officials hope the trail connecting the two segments of Big Sur severed by the downed Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge will open to the general public July 1, with a shuttle service bringing visitors to the footpath on one end and picking them up on the other. Meanwhile, access from the south is blocked by the giant Mud Creek slide for at least a year.
Paul’s Slide slumped in May, although that stretch of Highway 1 has been touch-and-go all winter. This Facebook link shows how restless it is.
It is being monitored around-the-clock by the Colorado company IDS GeoRadar. The tool, called IBIS (Image By Interferometric Survey), relies on radar interferometer. A signal is emitted, travels over a distance, contacts a surface, then is received and noted. Software analyzes the results, so small displacements of soil are monitored. The systems send text or email alerts. Some sites have beacons or sound alarms.
The system is used not only to remotely monitor landslides and other naturally-moving objects like glaciers, but also manmade slopes, like open pit mines, according to John S. Metzger, business development technologist at IDS.
Paul’s Slide has a long and notorious history. It was named decades ago — for Caltrans employee Paul Collins, who worked at Willow Springs Maintenance Station — by the late Don Harlan, a Caltrans supervisor whose family came to Big Sur in the 1800s, according to Kate Novoa, whose blog BigSurKate is an indispensable news source for locals.
“I have been sworn to secrecy as to WHY Don Harlan named this one Paul’s Slide,” Novoa wrote.
Before his death, Harlan — “an original road warrior,” said Novoa — typed up the names of all the Big Sur slides in an 11-page document and described how the names came to be, along with a hand drawn map of the area indicating where they were located, she said. Caltrans and Novoa keep copies of Harlan’s historic document.
But the cliffs of Paul’s Slide have been slipping long before a road was built there. This region of the southern Santa Lucia Range, straddling the San Andreas Fault, is marked with repeated scars, old and new, where the mountains have plunged into the sea. It’s at high risk of sliding for three reasons, said landslide expert Kevin Schmidt of U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park. It is a mélange of loose rocks. The topography is steep. And it’s exposed to fierce Pacific storms.
The route is now being excavated and rebuilt by John Madonna Construction of San Luis Obispo.