Winter rains are a long gone memory, we’re in a heat wave, and the living is easy, right? Except for those pesky roads that were washed out and destroyed in January and February. Those of you who plied those roads regularly know which ones I’m talking about. But Spokers who live in more ‘isolated’ communities such as San Francisco may be blissfully unaware that some of the best roads for cycling are still unrepaired and have no firm timeline for repair.
This past winter was one of the rainest, wettest on record. In Orinda we received 53 inches of precipitation; an ‘average’ year would bring us about 35-36 inches. That rain damaged and led to the closure of the following, among many others:
- Redwood Road
- Stage Road
- West Old La Honda
- Wildcat Canyon Road
- Veeder/Redwood Road
- Norris Canyon
- Highway 84
- China Grade
- Schulties Road
- Glenwood Drive
- Old Santa Cruz Highway
- Highway One
- Crow Canyon
- Mines Road/San Antonio Road
- Patterson Pass
- Bolinas Road
Most of these roads are still closed with uncertain timelines for reopening. A few such as Mines Road and Bolinas Road have partially reopened to one-way traffic without the wash-out or road failure being repaired. Quite a few roads that had been shut down have been fully repaired such as Patterson Pass and Crow Canyon. Some of the closed roads are still being used by cyclists although it involves ignoring a closure sign and possibly walking the bike around the collapsed section of road such as Wildcat Canyon and Veeder/Redwood Road.
Roads such as Redwood Road and Stage Road are used heavily by cyclists and they have no easy alternate. This means either ignoring the signs and K barriers or consigning oneself to not being able to do a larger set of rides to which these roads lead. A secondary effect is that if a closed road has an alternate, it’s also being impacted by car traffic. An example is Old La Honda Road. With Highway 84 closed for an indefinite period of time, traffic from Woodside up to Skylonda or to the San Mateo Coast is forced onto Kings Mountain, East Old La Honda, and Page Mill Roads making these roads even more hazardous for cyclists. To make things even worse these roads are curvy and have sections with terrible sight lines and no shoulder.
A pleasant and unexpected benefit of a few road closures is the absence of car traffic once you get beyond the road closure. You may recall the Mud Slide which took out a huge section of Highway One below Big Sur in 2017. A hastily, ad hoc trail built through Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park allowed walkers and cyclists to access Highway One from the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge all the way down to Limekiln State Park, one of the most scenic sections of the Big Sur area, to enjoy with almost no car traffic. Wildcat Canyon Road is closed to cars but cyclists continue to use it from Inspiration Point to San Pablo Dam Road; it’s incredibly pleasant not having to share it with the rush of cars hurtling through the narrow curves!
If you look at the various county websites listing road closures you will see that none of these roads has a timeline for repair. Some list inspections and geotech surveys having been done but that is merely a prelude to engineering a repair and then lining up a contractor. These road repairs are not cheap and county road budgets are wellknown to be under stress for many years already. Highway One and 84 are state roads and are therefore under Caltrans’s purview and we can expect them to be dutifully restored to their prior condition if not better. But even today Highway One has not reopened even though the extent of the damage in no way compares to the Mud Slide in 2017, which took about a year and a half to be remediated enough to be reopened. Wildcat Canyon is not expected to be reopened until sometime in 2024 or 2025! Redwood Road, Stage Road, and West Old La Honda have no date for reopening whatsoever, not even an estimated date and that indicates that the eventual repair is no where near beginning.
In the meantime as we await reopening we can remind ourselves of notorious road closures in years past. Calaveras Road, which was also ruined this past winter (but has since reopened) was closed for about ten years (!) due to the earthquake retrofit of the Calaveras Dam; the repair of the Crystal Springs Dam in San Mateo similarly took more than ten years for Highway 35 to reopen. I doubt we’ll have to wait that long for these roads to be repaired!
The Chain Letter 