‘Granddaddy of all roads’
Celebration planned for 100-year anniversary of original Ridge Route
As 19th-century California faced the 20th century, it also faced a crossroads. The infancy of the nation’s automobile boom had opened up new opportunities for personal travel, new places for exploration. But the state’s daunting geography of barrier mountain ranges stood in the way of the freedom offered by its nascent car culture.
Between Southern and Central California, that barrier was the rugged Tehachapi and San Gabriel mountains that forced travelers far out of their way in their path between the Los Angeles Basin and the San Joaquin Valley.
All that changed with the 1915 opening of the Ridge Route, a road hailed in its time as an
engineering marvel that provided the most direct access yet between Los Angeles and central and northern reaches of the state.
The Ridge Route is more than just an old stretch of pavement; it’s a road that united California, says Harrison Scott, a Torrance resident and executive director of the Ridge Route Preservation Organization.
“Had the road not gone in, California would have been split into two states,” he said in a recent phone interview. “There were no less than 30 organizations vying to split California up because there was no direct commercial path between the San Joaquin Valley and Los Angeles.”
A centennial celebration of the opening of the Ridge Route is scheduled this Saturday.
Winding road
Winding from Castaic Junction to the San Joaquin Valley, the serpentine Ridge Route opened in October 1915 — and, in doing so, opened up new opportunities for residents and businesses alike.
“It increased tourism between Northern and
Southern California,” said Alan Pollack, president of the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society. “It increased commerce. It was the connection between Los Angeles and the rest of California.”
When it was opened, the 48-mile road over the Tejon Pass, an area often referred to as “the Grapevine,” hugged the ridgelines as it wound over mountains so steep they were unconquerable by rail.
“Instead of going through a lot of mountains, they went around every peak and pinnacle they could,” Scott said.
“They had to build it along the ridge of the mountains, and that meant curving around whatever ridgelines they had to follow,” Pollack said.
That added up to numerous stomach-churning turns for drivers to negotiate.
Scott said there were 697 twists in the original route. It’s been calculated that the road forced drivers who made the trek to complete the equivalent of 110 circles during the journey.
“So people came off of the Ridge Route quite dizzy,” Scott said with a chuckle.
Others came off the road entirely. Its many twists and turns led to a number of crashes and plunges.
“The speed limit was like 15 mph, and a lot of people,
as they do today, didn’t follow those speed limits,” Pollack said. “They would get in accidents and fall off the mountain.”
Though the Ridge Route wasn’t the smoothest or necessarily safest ride, Scott said it was hailed as an engineering marvel in its day.
“It was California’s very, very first mountain road,” Scott said. “It was the
granddaddy of all roads.”
The Ridge Route’s historical importance was recognized in 1997, when a stretch of the road was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Alternate
Though the Ridge Route saw heavy use after it was opened, it largely gave way to another route called the
Ridge Route Alternate in 1933.
That road provided drivers the option of a quicker and less meandering ride than the original.
The alternate, however, carried its own set of challenges.
It originally opened as a three-lane road with a middle so-called suicide lane provided for drivers heading in either direction to pass at their own peril.
The 1933 alternate road was eventually widened to four lanes. It was replaced when Interstate 5 was snaked through the area in the 1960s.
Drivable
Though it had long since been replaced by newer, less harrowing roads, the Ridge Route was drivable as late as 2005, Scott said.
He and other members of his group used to “go up there on a monthly basis and clear the drains, because if the drains are not kept open the road will wash out.”
Even that work wasn’t enough to save the road from a powerful storm in 2005.
“We had the 100-year rainstorm,” he said. “There were three major areas where the road was completely annihilated — it went down the hill.”
Much of the original Ridge Route in the Angeles National Forest remains closed, Scott said, but a few miles of the road are still drivable off Highway 138 near Quail Lake.
The journey can be a jarring one, Scott said, but what’s a few bumps when you have a chance to trek down a piece of California history?
“This is a unique and one-and-only road you can drive today that shows early highway engineering,” he said. “And it’s pretty much not changed a whole lot from when it went in.”