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

Storm signs, wolf moon, flowers

The January storms got wilder and wilder. Rain sloshed down in torrents, wind tore trees loose, waves pummeled the coastline.

This sign on Mirada Road at Miramar took a beating:

Getting to the post office in Granada was a drenching experience:

29 January brought us the wolf moon -- the first full moon of the new year. It was spectacular. When a full moon occurs during the perigee (the closest the moon gets in its orbit to the Earth), the moon looks its biggest and brightest. It was a cloudy, blustery night, but the heavens opened to give us this glowing glimpse:

Then the rains paused and the sun shone on the oxalis that dances in neon yellow across coastal hillsides.

We called oxalis sour grass when we were kids... sucking on the stems gives you a definite pucker.

And of course you can play in the fields of oxalis when you want to, even when you grow up.

Surf rising

The little waves that ruffled to shore in my beach haiku are gone, replaced by good-sized waves that curl in with spray steaming back off their tops.

As the winter waves get bigger, the coastside buzzes with speculation about the big-surf contest held in our front yard.

"Have they called Mavericks?" asked a woman at the gym.

"I bet they'll call Mavericks on Wednesday" said the greengrocer at the farm stand.

"Surf's comin' up, swell's right," commented a laconic cop at the taqueria, "can't call Mavericks 'til the wind's right, though."

Mavericks, the big-wave spot off Pillar Point, was named for a white-haired German shepherd dog with an adventurous spirit. The spot didn't gain fame until the early '90s, and gained notoriety in 1994 when Mark Foo, a Hawai'ian big-surf legend, wiped out and disappeared on an 18-foot wave. The first surf competition was held out there in 1999. In the early days when Mavericks was called, hand-lettered cardboard signs saying Mavericks today! were tacked up on telephone poles, letting us know that we needed to skip work and stick around.

I grew up during the surfing craze of the '60s, woodies and Surfin' Safari and all, and I never got over it. I body-surfed Santa Cruz waters but never graduated to the longboard elite. Wasn't ever a gidget-type surfer girl either, good grief. Meanwhile, three hundred miles to the south, Wm was one of the longboard elite, surfing Zuma and Trestles and Malibu. We have salt water in our veins, we dream of breathing underwater, and the waves call.

You can learn all about Mavericks, check the contest status, and watch the competition live when it's on at http://www.maverickssurf.com/.

The silver lining for 2010

On the last day of 2009, Wm and I walked on the beach at sunset and we saw the silver lining for 2010! A flash of silver beneath the clouds, where the sky met the sea...


"...the little silver flash...follows the setting of the sun, making a brief crescent of light no thicker than the crescent of a fingernail along the horizon line" says the story of Umai, a girl of the Yurok tribe who yearned to know what the crescent of light was.

Umai took her canoe to the edge of the world:

"She sat at the world's edge, watching quietly. She saw that the sky does not rest solidly on the ocean, but that it lifts and dips and lifts and dips in an even rhythm...and she saw that it is this dipping sky that causes the waves...

 "The sun went down behind the edge of the world and was followed by the familiar silver flash. But from so much closer up, Umai saw that it was not at all a narrow crescent, but a waving, moving something with a center of living brightness..."*

May 2010 be filled with good health, and a center of living brightness for us all.

* This story is told in The Inland Whale: Nine Stories Retold from California Indian Legends by Theodora Kroeber, published in 1959.

Beach haiku

Today we walked on the beach on a very low tide and watched the sanderlings and willets scurry along as the small waves met the shore at Miramar. Out beyond Pillar Point is where the huge waves of the renowned Mavericks surf spot build, but the waves on this day were small and peaceful. I waxed poetic in the sand.

little waves ruffling to shore
on a low low tide
small shorebirds jitterbugging

Here is a small bird jitterbugging near the ruffling waves:

Rebecca goes camping

Today I borrow from Wm's web site, where he says:

We just got back from a camping trip, and we are pleased to report that Rebecca is back to being Rebecca. I have to admit that I never thought we would all be hiking and camping together after last month's prognosis; we were thinking in terms of days.

Rebecca has gained all of her weight back and was chasing the raccoons and critters away from our campsite like she always has. We still take it one day at a time but this last camping trip was really special with her; Ellen and I have had dogs all of our lives but we have never seen a dog with so much spirit and true grit. She made us totally forget about the situation and it was a well-needed emotional rest and a slip back into normalcy.

Somehow, it reminds me of getting a second chance like in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life...even if the outcome suddenly changes we will always remember this little miracle and be grateful for the extra quality time we are getting with Rebecca.

 A few photos, of course:


Our campsite over looking Sunset Beach between Santa Cruz and Monterey

Rebecca guarding the food


Yo!...let's go hiking!


Check out the surfer dudes (Rebecca always finds the action)




Rebecca loves the sunset...means dinner, critter chasing, and a campfire.


After the campfire wears down, it is time for the warm innards of Goldie, our home away from home. You can see the snow clouds forming behind...it snowed the following day in the Santa Cruz Mountains.


Goldie is our all-original 1971 Dodge factory-conversion van which sleeps two adults and two small children (or two adults and one large dog), dining area, wet bar, kitchen sink, fridge, and stove, along with lots of drawers and closet space. We just hit 70K original miles on this last trip.



"Hey Dad...stop your yapping...my burger is ready..."