Should California give up on Highway 1?

Drive along California's Pacific Coast Highway and you'll catch some of America's most iconic views. But you’re just as likely to catch yourself turning your car around and heading back the way you came.

The 71-mile section of highway between Carmel and San Simeon is a legendarily scenic drive, but the dramatic topography also makes it hard to keep the road intact: landslides and washouts have closed Highway 1 through Big Sur dozens of times the road first opened in 1937. A landslide in Februrary 2024 covered the road at an area called Regent's Slide; another stretch of road crumbled off a cliff at Rocky Creek a month later, temporarily stranding about a thousand people and their cars between the two landslides. Caltrans now estimates the highway won't fully reopen until sometime in 2025.

“The West Coast is still active geologically,” said Gary Griggs, professor of Earth sciences at UC Santa Cruz. “It's a place where tectonic plates have collided. We've got active faults” — most notably, the 800-mile-long San Andreas Fault, which forms the boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate.

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