Devil's Slide and the really big cul-de-sac

Devil's Slide is a rocky promontory high above the Pacific Ocean between Pacifica and Half Moon Bay. When you drive over Devil's Slide you're driving through a slice cut into Montara Mountain. Montara and San Pedro Mountains are the northern part of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the range that divides the San Francisco Peninsula -- the bayside region along San Francisco Bay, and the coastside region along the Pacific Ocean. Moss Beach and Montara are the last little coastside towns you visit before starting north over Devil's Slide toward Pacifica.

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...

Mavericks! Everybody's gone surfin'

The Mavericks surf contest was called for 13 February, and big-wave surfers from around the world converged on the coastside. For weeks, locals have been second-guessing the contest organizers about when the contest would take place... the surf rising topic mentions the buzz, and gives a little history of the spot.

Early on the morning of the 13th, Wm and I made our way out to the Moss Beach bluffs, which are just north of the Mavericks surf spot. The waves were rolling in at a good 35 feet and destined to get up to around 50 feet by contest's end.

What makes this surf break so huge? The entire Pacific Ocean is roaring in to shore, then whoop! suddenly trips over the underwater reef and over it goes, tumbling over itself in a spectacular way.

An early-morning wave, about a half-mile southwest from our bluff-top perch:

A  few of our fellow spectators in the early morning; the crowd doubled by mid-day:

 

Pelicans cruising overhead, looking prehistoric.



Here's what it's all about--surfer Zach Wormhoudt (photo by Don Montgomery):

 Amazing.










You can see the whole photo gallery at the Mavericks site: http://www.maverickssurf.com/buzz/photos28.php

Pumpkin madness

It's October on the central California coast, and pumpkins are everywhere. I mean, everywhere. These are in a hilly field near our home in Moss Beach... the view is looking east, with the Santa Cruz mountain range in the distance. When Wm. took this photo, we could hear the Pacific Ocean pounding heavily behind us to the west. A storm was out at sea, moving in.
















October on the Coastside means the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival. Thousands and thousands of people come for the parade, which features the giant pumpkin. The monster in this photo topped 1600 pounds. Really, shouldn't the winning pumpkin be orange? I think that should be one of the rules......

I'm thinking about pumpkin pasta, with all this pumpkin-ness. Not pasta stuffed with pumpkin, but with pumpkin right in the dough, along with the flour and eggs. I use 2 eggs, a half-cup of pureed pumpkin (sugar pie variety) or squash (try kabocha) and enough flour for a 3-egg pasta... 3 cups or so, depending. Maybe a grinding or two of pepper in the dough.

And how about a nice walnut sauce to top that beautiful golden pasta?

Nice Walnut Sauce for Pasta

2 cups walnuts
boiling water
pinch salt
a clove of garlic
a few leaves marjoram
1 cup Parmigiano-Reggiano, grated

1. Soak the walnuts in the boiling water for half an hour or so.
2. Drain the walnuts and zing them in a food processor with a little salt, the clove of garlic, and the marjoram; make a smooth paste.
3. Add the grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and zing some more. Right! It's pesto we're doing here. (Pestare means to pound, and the right way is to pound it all in a mortar; zinging in the processor is easier, though, no?)
4. Thin with hot pasta-cooking water before serving, to make the sauce creamy and smooth.