Excerpt:
The highway embodies the California promise of freedom. But it keeps breaking. A recent trip along the roadway revealed the frustrations of many residents.
The road has inspired rock bands and novelists. It’s sold Oldsmobiles, Chryslers and Mustangs. It’s promised freedom, opportunity for introspection, or the perfect selfie. And in a feat of engineering, it clings for hundreds of miles to the edge of the continent.
The Pacific Coast Highway is among the most famous drives in the world.
But it keeps breaking.
Since building began on the first parts of the highway more than a century ago, sections of the route, which runs more than 650 miles from south of Los Angeles to Northern California, have been closed, over and over again.
In some places, chunks of the road have slipped into the ocean. In others, more than a million tons of earth have barreled onto the highway, slicing it to pieces. Bridges have failed. Rainstorms have flooded the road with mud. Residents have been left marooned. Tourists have been shut out.
Recently, consecutive landslides in Big Sur, a 90-mile region along the Central Coast, have closed parts of the road for two years, four months and counting. And in January, the Palisades fire, which burned thousands of homes, shuttered an 11-mile stretch of the highway connecting the Los Angeles area with the beachside city of Malibu, Calif.
That stretch reopened on Friday, but there is no timeline for reopening the road in Big Sur.
The California Department of Transportation, known as Caltrans, said that the state had spent more than $370 million on fixing the highway after extreme weather events in the past seven years. Prolonged closures in 2017 cost businesses along the route more than half a billion dollars, according to the state’s tourism agency, Visit California.
New York has skyscrapers. Arizona has a canyon. Mississippi has a river. California has a coast — and one major highway to see it from. Building the road on unstable terrain took ingenuity. Fixing it in a world being rocked by climate change may take even more.
In early May, a four-day trip of about 600 miles along much of the highway from Los Angeles to San Francisco (passing through a burn zone and circumventing a landslide) revealed residents struggling with the closures and contemplating the future of the route.
It is officially called California State Route 1, but is commonly referred to as the Pacific Coast Highway, or Highway 1, and was built bit by bit, beginning in the early 1900s. In 1964, it was merged into a single highway.
The road winds through steep granite bluffs and yawns open in salt-worn beach towns where trailers with American flags stake their place in the sand. Workers poke sticks into the earth to measure the rate at which it is moving. Tractor-trailers haul car-size boulders up the narrow pass.
One of the drivers, Juan Ramirez, each day carries two or three very large rocks from near Fresno, more than 150 miles inland, to the coast.
“It’s a long way,” he said. “Four hours this way, and then, four hours out.”
The boulders are used to build a retaining wall intended to hold back the force of the Pacific Ocean — one small part of the effort to keep the highway open. It’s a herculean task. Increasingly, it is becoming Sisyphean…
