Keeping the Pacific Coast Highway open has become a Sisyphean endeavor.
For hundreds of miles, the famed road clings to the edge of the continent.
But landslides, erosion and fires have closed it time and again.
The constant closures make life difficult for residents. They deter tourists and choke off local businesses.
Building the highway was a feat of engineering. Continuing to fix it in an increasingly unstable world may be an even greater one.
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The Pacific Coast Highway, a Mythic Route Always in Need of Repair
The road has inspired rock bands and novelists. It’s sold Oldsmobiles, Chryslers and Mustangs. It’s promised freedom, opportunity for introspection, or the perfect selfie. And in a feat of engineering, it clings for hundreds of miles to the edge of the continent.
The Pacific Coast Highway is among the most famous drives in the world.
But it keeps breaking.
Since building began on the first parts of the highway more than a century ago, sections of the route, which runs more than 650 miles from south of Los Angeles to Northern California, have been closed, over and over again.
In some places, chunks of the road have slipped into the ocean. In others, more than a million tons of earth have barreled onto the highway, slicing it to pieces. Bridges have failed. Rainstorms have flooded the road with mud. Residents have been left marooned. Tourists have been shut out.
Recently, consecutive landslides in Big Sur, a 90-mile region along the Central Coast, have closed parts of the road for two years, four months and counting. And in January, the Palisades fire, which burned thousands of homes, shuttered an 11-mile stretch of the highway connecting the Los Angeles area with the beachside city of Malibu, Calif.
That stretch is reopening on Friday, according to the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, but there is no timeline for reopening the road in Big Sur.