DEL NORTE COUNTY, Calif. — In March 1972, Kurt Stremberg’s parents gave him a predawn ride from their house in northwest California to his friend’s home in the tiny town of Klamath, about 20 miles south of Crescent City on Highway 101.
Stremberg, then 24, and his buddy were going to hitch a ride on a log truck bound for San Francisco, catch a flight to Europe, and see the world.
His parents, Edwin and Aili Stremberg, said a quick goodbye, then started driving home. It was still dark. And raining hard.
In the few minutes it had taken to drop their son off, a landslide-plagued portion of the highway — ominously named Last Chance Grade — had crumbled. The Strembergs’ Ford sedan went over the cliff, killing them both.
For decades, residents of California’s remote northwest corner have been pleading with government officials to do something about Last Chance Grade, an eroding, three-mile stretch of highway hugging the fog-shrouded cliffs between the redwood forest and the Pacific Ocean.
It is a critical thoroughfare — the only viable route linking Crescent City, a tsunami-prone town of 6,200 people, with neighboring Humboldt County and the rest of the state.
But 53 years after the Strembergs’ death, the two-lane road is still perilous. Perched atop four active landslides, its pavement warped and cracked by constant land movement, Last Chance Grade is so unstable that it was reduced to one-way traffic for nine years straight, reopening in October 2023. Last week, it was down to one lane again.
“You look at the kind of problems we’ve had over the years, you’d think there would be some kind of movement,” said Stremberg, now a 77-year-old real estate agent living in Crescent City. “It was ignored, as long as a lane of the highway could stay open. We need a solution to something that’s been a problem forever.”
Now, after decades of patching holes and building retaining walls — temporary repairs that have cost more than $125 million since 1997 — the California Dept. of Transportation has settled on a long-term solution: a 6,000-foot tunnel through the redwoods that would bypass Last Chance Grade’s fast-eroding cliffs.
It would become the longest highway tunnel in California, far surpassing the 4,233-foot Wawona Tunnel in Yosemite National Park that was built in 1933. Running between 100 and 400 feet below ground, it would be engineered to absorb and dissipate land movement at the southern entrance.
The Last Chance Grade Tunnel would cost $2.1 billion — an eye-popping amount that Caltrans and elected officials say they are still trying to figure out how to fund.
After years of debating numerous alternatives — including maintaining Last Chance Grade as-is, rerouting it farther inland, and using dewatering wells to slow the landslide — Caltrans settled on the costly tunnel plan last year.
If funding can be cobbled together, construction is expected to begin as early as 2030, with the tunnel potentially opening by 2038.
This summer, the California Transportation Commission allocated $40 million to formally kick off the project’s design phase. California State Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, a Democrat who represents the North Coast, has called the funding a “major milestone,” noting that $50 million had already been invested in environmental reviews.
But the process, McGuire has said, has taken too long.
“Let’s be honest, if the biggest highway in the Bay Area or L.A. kept falling into the Pacific, the problem would have been fixed long ago,” McGuire said in a statement to The Times. “Last Chance Grade and Highway 101 isn’t just a road — it’s a lifeline. And every truckload of goods, every visitor to the redwoods, and every emergency response depends on reliable access through this critical corridor.”
Residents and elected officials say it has been an ongoing struggle to draw outside attention to Last Chance Grade, despite its long-known dangers, because the region is so remote and economically depressed.
Del Norte County is home to just 27,000 people. The median household income of $66,780 is just 70% of the state median of $96,334.
The industries that once defined the place, logging and fishing, have either collapsed or are struggling. And there is not much room to grow, since more than 80% of the county’s land is under state or federal control, mostly as parks, national forests or wildlife preserves.
A 2018 Caltrans study concluded that an emergency one-year full closure of Last Chance Grade would devastate the region, resulting in the loss of up to 3,800 jobs and $456 million from the local economy.
Here, residents and elected officials say it is difficult to compete with critical infrastructure projects in wealthier, more populated places such as the Palos Verdes Peninsula, where ground movement has turned Palos Verdes Drive South into an asphalt roller coaster near President Trump’s golf course, and coastal Monterey County, where landslides have kept portions of the tourist-heavy Highway 1 near Big Sur closed for more than two years.
“We’re so rural up here, and we tend to be forgotten,” said Del Norte County Supervisor Valerie Starkey, who added that every time Last Chance Grade is closed then reopened, “we’re all just waiting for it to fail again.”
Highway 101 is the only viable route between Crescent City and Klamath, population 800 or so. When Last Chance Grade is closed, the only alternative — aside from steep, unpaved logging roads — is a 449-mile, eight-hour detour circling through Redding and southern Oregon.
Many children in Klamath attend school in Crescent City and rely upon the campus’s free meals. So when rocks and mud buried Last Chance Grade in February 2021, Starkey said, school employees hauled lunches to the base of the landslide and handed them to Caltrans crews to take across to kids on the other side.
She added that Klamath residents must traverse the road to reach the small hospital in Crescent City — and that residents there use it to access specialized medical care, including chemotherapy and opioid addiction treatment, more than 80 miles south in Humboldt County.
Starkey said the $2.1 billion price tag for the tunnel is daunting, but “we’re just hoping this is a better option fiscally” in the long run.
A spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) — who put together a Last Chance Grade stakeholder group comprising local agencies, Indigenous tribes, businesses and environmental groups a decade ago — said he hopes to get some federal funding through the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Mega Grant Program for major, complex projects.
Yet the prospects of the Trump administration supporting the project are uncertain at best. The president and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom are locked in seemingly unending political battles, and Trump has already tried to claw back funding for more high-profile California transportation initiatives, including its high-speed rail project.
Last Chance Grade — first built as a wagon trail through the dense redwood forest in 1894 — was built in its current alignment between 1933 and 1937. Before the work began, an engineer noted that the road would be expensive to maintain because of the constant land movement, and while it was being built, “many slipouts and slides occurred, delaying construction,” according to a 2015 project feasibility study commissioned by Caltrans. An alternate route to the east was considered, but then dropped because of costs and state park resources.
Since the 1930s, portions of Last Chance Grade have shifted 40 feet horizontally and 30 feet vertically, said Jaime Matteoli, the Last Chance Grade project manager for Caltrans. The movement, he said, has accelerated over the last decade, with some sections of the road now moving several feet a year toward the sea.
“We’re running out of real estate,” Matteoli said. “Whether you believe in climate change or not, this situation is getting worse and worse, the coastal erosion and the landslide.”
Crews have built more than two dozen retaining walls to prop up the roadway over the last three decades, he said. But those have shifted, cracked and broken, too, and need their own constant repairs.
As Matteoli drove the curves of Last Chance Grade last week, construction workers appeared out of the thick morning fog like neon-vested ghosts. Their work can be dangerous, he said. During the 2021 landslide, three workers were seriously injured when a tree crashed down the hillside, including a Caltrans engineer who lost part of her foot.
The highway runs through Redwood National and State Parks, a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site. Tunnel construction would result in the loss of 16 old-growth redwood trees wider than 4 feet, in addition to other trees, Matteoli said.
Steve Mietz, president and chief executive of Save the Redwoods League, a century-old conservation group, said the cutting of any such trees is a loss. But in an email, he said that the tunnel “was among some of the least environmentally harmful options” for Last Chance Grade.
Harlan Watkins, who helps manage Crescent City’s Battery Point Lighthouse, a beloved tourist stop, said he believes the tunnel project could be a boon for the region, especially if the state hires locals to help build it, providing much-needed jobs.
As a former volunteer with the Del Norte County sheriff’s search and rescue team, Watkins, 69, has pulled numerous people off the slopes of Last Chance Grade.
His first rescue was in the early 1990s — an older man who was driving drunk, pulled over to urinate, stepped out of his vehicle and tumbled down the cliff. Watkins descended the slope with a rope and harness to find the man, who had cut his nose — and forgot to zip his pants back up — but was otherwise fine.
“It’s a treacherous road,” Watkins said. “But if that road goes out, this town will dry up pretty quick.”
Stremberg eventually did make his trip to Europe. It included a stop in Finland — the country from which his late parents emigrated when he was a toddler. After he returned, he wanted nothing more than to avoid Last Chance Grade. But “it’s difficult to ignore it when you have to drive over it all the time,” he said.
For several years, he said, his own adult son was the principal of an elementary school in Klamath, driving to and from home in Crescent City.
“I always felt bad with him driving it on a daily basis,” Stremberg said, “but there wasn’t a choice.”
Stremberg, who supports the tunnel, said most people in town feel relieved there is momentum for a long-term fix, though they are frustrated that construction is still years away. Disaster has forced quicker construction even in this remote place, he said.
In December 1964, when Stremberg was in high school, a major flood wiped out a Highway 101 bridge over the Klamath River, as well as much of the eponymous town.
Stremberg was on the basketball team in Crescent City at the time. With the bridge out, the boys rode a bus to the river, boarded jet boats, and met another bus on the other side of the water to reach their rivals’ gyms south of Klamath.
“They rebuilt the bridge in a year’s time,” Stremberg said. With Last Chance Grade, “it’s very frustrating because you look at it and go, ‘OK, if this were [considered] a real issue, it could be done more rapidly.’ ”
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