To see the Devil's Slide area from a satellite, click here.
Devil's Slide was closed today so that the California Department of Transportation could remove boulders from above the road before they come crashing down. With the closure our little world became one big cul-de-sac... one big dead-end with nowhere to go. We rather like it that way, actually. Inconvenient, but peaceful and nearly traffic-free. When Devil's Slide is out we can stroll across the highway to visit our favorite tacqueria without fear of death by vehicular misadventure, for one thing.
So, what's the story of Devil's Slide? In the early 1900s the Ocean Shore Railroad blasted a roadbed through the Devil's Slide ridge and laid down railroad tracks. For a few years steam engines chuffed along the precarious stretch, carrying passengers from San Francisco south -- "Reaches the Beaches" was the Ocean Shore Railroad tag line. The railroad never fully succeeded. For one thing, soaking rains repeatedly caused the shale and sandstone above the roadbed to slide down onto the tracks. The Ocean Shore Railroad ceased operation in the 1920s, never having achieved its goal of a rail line all the way down the coast to Santa Cruz.
Barbara VanderWerf tells us, in her wonderful book Montara Mountain:
Originally Devil's Slide meant only the promontory and its inland ridge. In the 1880s, travellers in horse-drawn wagons on the Half Moon Bay-Colma Road, which ran along the top of the ocean bluffs, paused to note the chute-like ridge ending in the massive rock dome. They thought it looked fit for a Devil's Slide and named it so.In the 1930s, the State of California acquired the railroad right of way and built Highway One on it. The mountain continued to slip and slide toward the ocean, hammering the road with boulders and causing parts of the road to drop away, resulting in periodic closures. In 1995, Highway One at Devil's Slide was closed for over five months. In 2006, it was closed for four months.
Here's what the highway sign near Pillar Point harbor looked like during the 2006 closure:
Driving to San Francisco usually takes about 30 minutes over Devil's Slide from Moss Beach and Montara. When the road's closed it can take up to three hours. Everyone north of Half Moon Bay must travel south along two-lane Highway One and join the southerly coastsiders to squeeze onto two-lane Highway 92 for the trip over the hill to where big freeways zip north and south on the bay side of the peninsula, and east and west across bay bridges.Our little world will soon become more reliably accessible, though. The tunnel is coming. In the mid-1990s a bunch of us coastsiders branded ourselves tunnelistas and banded together to mount a campaign for a tunnel through Montara Mountain, to provide a safe and reliable way around Devil's Slide. We sported bright yellow Think Tunnel bumper stickers and buttons and t-shirts, and rallied the entire county to put a tunnel initiative on the ballot. It passed overwhelmingly.
The impetus for the tunnel effort wasn't so much to avoid road closures, but to stop a huge freeway bypass over the mountain. Here are some photos, including an artist's rendition of what the freeway would have looked like: Saving Montara Mountain.
The cuts and fills to create that proposed freeway would have devastated a beautiful, pristine area, and resulted in a very steep road over an extremely foggy mountain. When you drive Devil's Slide on a foggy day you drive through a kind of fog tunnel, with the fog rolling up the bluffs and on up the mountain, leaving the roadway clear. At the elevation of the proposed freeway, visibility can be near zero on foggy days. Hike up Montara Mountain on one of those foggy days and you'll know what I mean! Can't see a thing.
There's a lot of story to Devil's Slide...
