Professor Gary Griggs goes back to 1962. It has rained a lot since then, a factor of great relevance in his account of the first time he drove through Big Sur, the iconic section of California’s Route 1 with priceless views of the Pacific as one drives alongside the precipice.
“It was a kind of adventure. You were on that wild road that runs along the coast and you might see another car every half hour”, recalls this professor of oceanography at the University of California at Santa Cruz and an expert in coastal erosion with 13 books on the subject in which he is listed as an author or co-author
During the Zoom interview, a smile escapes him, perhaps out of nostalgia, remembering that he was a university student when he made his debut on that route, driving his old Volkswagen van.
Every time there was a coast, it went slower and slower. “You greeted those coming from the other side. It looked like you were driving in Alaska,” he says. “Today is very different, there are tourist buses, motorhomes but they are still at the mercy of the climate and geology,” he says.
However, traveling along this road has become much more complicated due to the impact of climate change and the so-called atmospheric rivers, which cause torrential downpours of more than two cubic meters of water each year that make the journey more vulnerable. Constant fires also destroy vegetation and make the ground more exposed to rain, which means more debris and mudflows.
Meteorological studies show that precipitation is about 10% more intense than it has been historically.
One day yes and another also sections are cut off or the passage is only allowed alternatively once or twice per day due to the frequent landslides when the storms grow repetitively.
A recent downpour caused pieces of this road to collapse into the ocean. This forced evacuations and blocked traffic in the area near the Rocky bridge. It’s just another example of the constant pace of roadblocks and disruptions the road suffers from.
Repairs for the Rocky Creek landslide continued this week and traffic was regulated.
Traffic through Big Sur, which from an impossible-to-build road became a pop-era myth, is increasingly difficult to comply with. “I call it a perverse problem impossible to solve,” says Griggs.
“We will permanently fix this and all the California Department of Transportation is doing is putting band-aids on it,” he clarifies.
The print Professor Griggs treasures from 1962 is the same one that attracted so many artists seeking beauty and isolation. “This place is so overwhelmingly large that it engenders a humility and reverence not often found in Americans,” wrote Henry Miller, a good connoisseur of this territory. “Big Sur has its own climate and its own character”, he insisted on the route that connects Los Angeles and San Francisco.
This is another era. Instagramming and selfie culture have helped drive an overwhelming surge of tourists along the 33 bridges and postcard views of whales and lions and elephant seals, not to mention the surroundings.
“The massive popularity of the Big South is spoiling its scenic qualities and natural beauty,” according to a 2020 state government report on the highway.
“Everything goes against Route 1”, points out Griggs.
Nothing suggested that the route should go where it does, where tectonic plates join, on the edge of the continent, very steep slopes and very unstable stone with a mixture of granite, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks. Despite everything, he pushed forward that decade of the thirties of the last century. In the midst of the Depression, the Roosevelt administration offered something to be proud of.
So, from its origins it posed obstacles, but geology is still evolving.
Is it worth spending to plug holes? “Of course we have to keep it alive,” states state senator John Laird. No one is willing to close it, Griggs confesses. Although it is not a place where many people live, nor that there are many businesses, Big Sur is a sign of identity.
Although there are projects to build another road through the interior, the professor says that on that route you can see “lettuce, asparagus and tomatoes, but not Big Sur”. Faced with the money to repair, he proposes that tolls be paid.
More than geology and investment, what surprises Griggs is humanity, trying to make the road at full speed. He imagines driving around in a convertible, without the hood, enjoying the horizon. “If someone asks me if I [prefer] time or money, I choose time. You can get money, but time doesn’t come back.”
