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GORDA — Finally, the iconic Highway 1 — the “longest dead end” in California — will reopen at this scenic outpost south of Big Sur on Friday, relieving 18 months of epic inconvenience along the coastal journey between the Bay Area and LA. It also will end a baffling phenomenon that has left thousands of tourists making the most-frustrating U-turns of their lives.
Despite numerous flashing road signs for 65 miles announcing “Road Closed at Gorda, No Detour” thousands of tourists blew right past the warnings, screeching to a halt at the roadblock spanning the two-lane highway and providing nightly entertainment for the locals on the porch of the Gorda General Store. Motorists have rammed the gate more than once. Fuming couples often wildly gesticulate in the front seats. But most just brake and sit in the middle of the highway, stopped, for minutes.
“We call it the ‘pause of disbelief,’” said Shena Ellis, the store manager who bears the news that yes, they really do need to turn around and drive two hours north, back through Big Sur to Monterey, and that their trip to Hearst Castle will take more than four hours instead of 40 minutes. She tries to be chipper: “‘Big Sur, so nice you get it twice!’ I’ve said it so many times and they never laugh, not once.”
Well, all that excitement will be behind the good folks of Gorda and their wayward travelers come Friday when the longest closure in the highway’s history comes to an end. They are three months ahead of schedule to finish the $54 million project to rebuild the road after Big Sur’s largest recorded landslide buried a quarter-mile stretch of the highway at Mud Creek.
The stories from Gorda are endless and comedic, involving bubbles and hula hoops and a bumper-to-bumper Christmas Day meltdown.
But as anyone who lives and works in the other hippie hamlets along Highway 1 can attest, the closure has tested the resolve of even the most enlightened locals who have endured countless, cascading and overlapping natural disasters here. The opening comes none too soon — at the peak of the Summer Road Trip season.
When the road closures from the 2016 Soberanes Fire are factored in, along with the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge failure last year and the construction of the Paul’s Slide tunnel, Friday’s ribbon cutting will mark the first time in two years travelers will be able to drive straight through from Monterey to Hearst Castle and beyond. During an excruciating eight months of that time, the town of Big Sur — 25 miles south of Carmel — was cut in half, making the southern side an island, cut off on both sides.
“We’ve been through this in 1983 and ‘84 and ‘98, with mudslides and landslides causing closures. But those were only 10 weeks long, and 10 weeks was like 10 lifetimes,” said Kirk Gafill, a third generation owner of Nepenthe, one of Big Sur’s destination restaurants. “So this experience was all of that, but four times longer. It went on and on and on and on.”
During that stretch, the luxury Post Ranch made headlines when it started flying in guests by helicopter. But for the locals, the only link between the two halves of Big Sur was a mile-long footpath, including a 500-vertical foot hike up the canyon. Families were separated — Gafill’s wife and teenage son moved to Carmel for the duration.
During the winter months, elementary school children hiked home in the rain after dark. Kurt Mayer, owner of the Taphouse restaurant and store, designed a backpack frame to carry three giant plastic tubs of supplies, including bread, ice cream and newspapers, to keep the store open as a hub for stranded locals.
“They weighed 80 and 90 pounds,” said Mayer’s 27-year-old son, Steve. “It took a half hour.”
Businesses lost numerous employees and getting them back has been a challenge. Fires in Big Sur in recent years wiped out more than 100 homes, including rentals, and getting workers to commute down the coast when jobs are plentiful elsewhere is a chronic challenge. Motels and restaurants on the south side of Mud Creek slide — including Cambria and San Simeon, home to Hearst Castle — have had to lay off so many workers that owners have been doing most of the cooking, serving and cleaning.
Business is down roughly 20 to 40 percent in Big Sur — most travelers have been making day trips instead of overnighting — and upwards of 60 percent in San Simeon.
But as those who end up at the “CLOSED” sign at Gorda will tell you, it’s not for lack of trying to get there.
“We’ve driven over two hours on this road hoping to get to Morro Bay,” said Megan Ryder, 18, of San Jose who ended up in Gorda last week with her boyfriend, Kevin Yee.
“Have there been signs?” asked Yee. “I guess we were just admiring the coast.”
“We saw the signs, but we also saw all the cars — we thought, where do they go? Let’s follow!” said Alice Hörnestig, 24, who traveled from Sweden with her boyfriend who was a bit annoyed at their predicament.
But that little frustration was nothing compared with what Shena Ellis has witnessed in the front seats of full-size RVs, loaded minivans and sporty convertibles on a nightly basis, in many languages.
“I’ve seen fights — fight fights,” between furious spouses, she said.
Ellis and her friends, including Brooke Russell who works at the nearby school (enrollment: 9), locals who tend the yurts at Treebones resort and a few of the U.S. Forest Service rangers, gather about four nights a week to eat sandwiches, sit at the porch counter overlooking the ocean and bet on who will be the “flyers” or the “screamers” or end up in a dead stop in the “pause of disbelief.”
About 75 percent of everyone who has ended up here these past 18 months — upwards of 200 people a day, she says, “aren’t here on purpose.”
To lighten the mood, Russell often takes to her hula hoop and Ellis blows a jar of bubbles in the parking lot.
Ellis has seen full-size diesels trying to get through and “two guys in a tow truck trying to get to San Luis Obispo.” One fellow rammed through, she said, and blew two tires on the way. He ended up hiking to a construction trailer and sleeping on the porch there, she said. “I’m pretty sure he went to jail the next morning.”
Christmas Day last year — traditionally the busiest of the year — was so bad, she said, that dozens of vehicles backed up while lines of people asking directions or waiting for the bathroom snaked down the front steps.
“Not a single person said Merry Christmas,” Ellis said.
For the first few months of the closure, Ellis sent them straight back to Monterey. “No detour means no detour,” she would tell them, referring to the Caltrans signs.
In fact, there is a route that connects the coast to Highway 101 some eight miles north of Gorda — on Nacimiento-Fergusson Road — but it is so narrow, winding and treacherous, Caltrans doesn’t mark it as a last turnoff, and most locals don’t mention it when asked. More traffic means more collisions.
The nightly sport for the Gorda locals will come to an end when the highway opens on Friday with a ribbon cutting at Ragged Point to the south, where the project now extends the roadway an extra 250 feet toward the ocean.
Still, Ellis is looking forward to reconnecting with friends and other southern destinations. And to be honest, Ellis says she is tired of “being the grim reaper” at the deadest of ends.
“It will get busier,” when the road opens, she said. But she’s looking forward to the time when, for the first time in 18 months, “the people who will be here will be here on purpose.”
