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A couple of summers ago, I had friends visiting California, and I wanted to show them what many people who come to the state hope to see: the coast.
We were making our way from Los Angeles to Northern California, and had planned to take the Pacific Coast Highway, which clings to the edge of the continent for hundreds of miles. But I found myself on Google Maps, trying to reroute us around a closure. Whatever I tried, it seemed we would have to backtrack.
Instead, we took a largely inland route through vast plains and farmland.
The Pacific Coast Highway (which is technically called California State Route 1, but is often referred to as the PCH or Highway 1) has always been troubled. Parts of the road, built more than a century ago on steep and unstable terrain, are prone to landslides. Other parts are at risk of collapsing into the sea.
But over the past few years, frequent slides, erosion and fires have shut down sections of the route so many times that there has scarcely been a time when the whole stretch was open.
I kept wondering about the famed highway: Why were parts of it almost always closed? Was climate change making the problems worse? And would California keep fixing it? I began talking to experts. Several months later, the Palisades fire shut another section in Malibu.
In early May, the photographer Mark Abramson and I set off on a four-day road trip along one of the best-known stretches of the highway, between Los Angeles and San Francisco. We wanted to meet those who live, work and rely on the road that always keeps breaking, as well as those tasked with repairing it.
At the time, there were two major closures: an 11-mile stretch in Malibu, and a nearly seven-mile stretch in Big Sur, a loosely defined region on California’s Central Coast. The section in Malibu has since reopened to the public.
Before leaving Los Angeles, where we both live and where I am a general assignment reporter for The New York Times covering California and other news, I spoke with experts, local residents and business owners about the existential question of the highway. I studied its history. Again, I found myself trying to route around a closure. (A drive that should have taken 20 minutes would take about four hours.)
We planned to reach our first stop, a popular surf beach in Malibu, by sunrise, so I left home around 4:30 a.m. By the time we arrived, traffic was already choking the two-lane highway. We pulled over to climb a hill and survey the devastation from the fire. Without the homes that once lined the highway, it was the first time I’d seen so much of the ocean from Malibu.
From there, we headed north, past a woman jogging in flamingo-pink spandex; campers enjoying the afternoon sun in Ventura County; broccoli farms; and a late-night truck stop. Well after dark, we finally arrived at Ragged Point Inn, just south of the closure at Regent’s Slide in Big Sur.
Early the next morning, I awoke to see tractor-trailers hauling boulders along the highway. So we got in the car and followed them. We wanted to know where they were going and what the boulders were for. They led us to a traffic stop, where we learned the very large rocks were being used to build a retaining wall to stop erosion on a separate part of the highway.
A few hours later, the California Department of Transportation, known as Caltrans, drove us in buggies along a private back road to see the slide, which had buried the road with enough dirt and rock to fill hundreds of Olympic-size swimming pools. From the top, we clambered down a steep slope to reach an area leveled into a plateau.
Caltrans plans to continue pushing the dirt and rock down into the ocean until the highway is cleared. They have no idea when they will be done.
Throughout the trip, I marveled at the immense human effort needed to keep the road open. The more I learned, the more that endeavor seemed Sisyphean.
But what stuck with me the most was a conversation I had with two residents, both born in Big Sur, as they reflected on a trade-off: to live in such a sublime place meant accepting the ever-moving landscape and seemingly endless closures.
“We are the ones who are here, on it,” Surge Withrow, 52, said of the terrain.
“Before there was a highway here, it moved; after there’s a highway not here anymore, it will move,” he added. “After we’re not here anymore, it will move.”
Livia Albeck-Ripka is a Times reporter based in Los Angeles, covering breaking news, California and other subjects.
The post Driving a Famed Highway to Learn Why It’s Always Broken appeared first on New York Times.
