Old Ridge Route: Long, Long Trail A-Winding : Much of Today’s Interstate 5 North Out of L.A. Traces Tortuous Path Trod by Indians

Today, it’s Interstate 5, a generous, eight-lane freeway that sweeps you over the mountains from Los Angeles to Bakersfield in about two hours.

A few years back, it was Highway 99--originally two lanes, later three and eventually four--a relatively fast road, but steep and dangerous, best remembered for runaway trucks that maimed and killed on the infamous Grapevine and Five-Mile grades.

Before that, it was the Ridge Route, a nasty, narrow, serpentine road that claimed countless burst radiators, blown tires and broken crankshafts in an era when making it from Los Angeles to Bakersfield in a day was a major accomplishment.

Before that, for generations, it was a meandering, rutted lane known as El Camino Viejo a Los Angeles (the old road to Los Angeles). It took 19th Century travelers a week to get from the village the Spaniards called Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula to the vacant spot in the San Joaquin Valley where Bakersfield would eventually be located.

And before that, for centuries, it was a series of narrow footpaths used by the Yokut, Kitanemuk, Aliklik and Chumash Indians. If they had a name for their route through the San Gabriel Mountains, no one recorded it.

The earlier routes are easy to miss these days as you zoom in comfort--air-conditioned or heated, depending on the season--over the carefully groomed grades of I-5, the principal freeway route between Southern and Central California.

But if you’ve got a little time--and a touch of imagination--you can still find traces of the old routes. In some cases you can hike them, and in some you can still drive them.

The routes’ history is revealed in documents from the Automobile Club of Southern California, the California Highway Patrol, the State Parks and Recreation Commission, the Tejon Ranch and the Kern County Historical Society; clips from old newspaper and magazine files and interviews with historians, local residents, police and highway patrolmen.

The first route--the principal one used by the Indians in the centuries before the Conquistadores arrived from Spain--probably passed northwest from the Los Angeles River to the Newhall Pass area (where the I-5 and Antelope Valley freeways join), north through Newhall, Saugus and lower Bouquet Canyon and up through San Francisquito Canyon to Lake Elizabeth.

From there it apparently headed west along the San Andreas Fault to Gorman, and north again over the Tejon Summit, through Lebec, past Fort Tejon and down Grapevine Canyon to the southern edge of the San Joaquin Valley.

The Indian route is best traced by the Spanish road that followed it. That is because, as historian Mildred Wiebe puts it, “every time somebody made a road back then, they used a path made by the Indians.”

It wasn’t until 1772, when a Spanish army officer named Don Pedro Fages headed north on horseback in hot pursuit of some deserters, that anyone bothered to record the trip. Thirty-six years later, a Spanish army lieutenant passing through the rugged canyon at the base of the San Joaquin Valley noticed the abundance of Cimarron grapes growing wild there and named the place Canada de Las Uvas, or Grapevine Canyon.

Half-Mile Remains

Little of this original Indian-Spanish route remains, most of it having been cut, filled and paved over by succeeding generations of roadways. But there is one spot, up a little draw beside the old Sierra Highway in Newhall, where you can find about half a mile of it.

A visitor should park near the historical marker for the Newhall Tunnel and clamber down past the abandoned car bodies to the creek. What you’re looking for is the narrow dirt roadway that extends about a quarter-mile in each direction along the creek bed.

Entrepreneurs of the 19th Century widened this roadway a bit to get their stagecoaches and freight wagons through, but it’s probably still pretty much the way it was when the Indians and Don Pedro used it. The passage of California into Mexican hands in 1822 did little to spur travel over the mountains, but it’s believed that early mountain men, among them Jedediah Smith, Ewing Young and Kit Carson, passed through the area between 1827 and 1830.

Seven years later, someone stripped some bark from a massive oak at the future site of Fort Tejon and carved a simple message in the trunk:

“Peter le Beck Killed by a + Bear Oct. 17 1837”

Probably a Trapper

Nobody knows who carved the epitaph. Nobody knows who Peter le Beck was, although the best guess is that he was a French-Canadian fur trapper.

Years later, visitors found the carving and the mangled remains of a man buried near the tree. The remains were reburied at the fort--now a state park--at the foot of a marble headstone. A nearby town, Lebec, acquired a variant of his name.

In 1850, California became the 31st state. Four years after that, acting on the recommendation of Gen. Edward Fitzgerald Beale--a man with an eye to the future--the U.S. Army built Fort Tejon.

With the arrival of the fort, the old Spanish road between Los Angeles and the San Joaquin Valley was widened and improved enough to permit passage of the Butterfield Overland Stage. But Newhall Pass was still too steep for heavy freight wagons, and Beale, who had acquired a 48,000-acre ranch near the base of the Grapevine, realized that a better route was needed.

In 1859, Beale’s Chinese laborers hacked a 12-foot-wide notch through 60 feet of solid sandstone at Newhall Pass in a monumental example of mid-19th Century earth moving. Beale’s Cut, still virtually intact, can be viewed today from the historical marker for the Newhall Tunnel. You can walk through the cut by following the old dirt road up through the draw.

Fort Abandoned

With the outbreak of the Civil War, the U.S. government abandoned Fort Tejon.

Ranching, on the other hand, continued to expand and prosper, and by 1868, Beale had amassed what is now the Tejon Ranch--at 265,000 acres, the largest contiguous landholding in California.

In 1876, the Southern Pacific Railroad completed its rail line through the mountains, and for the next 30 years or so, traffic along the old Spanish road was largely limited to ranch wagons and the occasional intrepid traveler.

The advent of the automobile changed all that, and by 1909, legislation calling for better highways prompted California’s engineers to begin planning a shorter route over the San Gabriels--a direct route northwest from Newhall to Gorman that would lop off more than 40 miles.

The engineers chose to cut their road directly along a ridge top north of Gorman--hence the name, Ridge Route. The new route bypassed both Beale’s Cut and the Newhall Tunnel, which replaced the cut in 1910.

Massive Undertaking

The new road was a massive undertaking for the time, one that required hundreds of men using steam shovels, mule-drawn scrapers called Fresnos and the rickety chain-drive, solid-tire dump trucks of the era. Swede’s Cut, near the summit of the route, was blasted through with dynamite.

The earth moving, while remarkable for the day, was minuscule by today’s standards, so the route was pretty much dictated by the topography. The result was steep grades and a total of 642 curves in a 39-mile stretch at the southern end of the new route. The northern end, down Grapevine Canyon, was just as steep and curvy.

When the two-lane road opened in 1915, the Automobile Club of Southern California hailed it as “the last word in scientific highway building.” But four years later, about the time the 20-foot-wide concrete paving was completed, the club wrote that because of the “tortuous” curves, steep grades and sharp drop-offs on either side of the pavement, the road was “potentially one of the most dangerous in the world.”

Los Angeles County Sheriff John C. Cline announced in 1919 that because of the danger, two motorcycle officers would patrol the route, enforcing a speed limit of 15 m.p.h. Many ignored it, and the result was scores of accidents as cars skidded out of control, often plunging into the canyons below.

For most travelers, though, the dangers of the trip were less memorable than the slowness of the trip, the breakdowns and the discomfort.

A 3 1/2-hour Trip

“I just remember mile after mile, curve after curve,” said Harry Ralphs, 71, a Gorman resident since birth, who watched as a child while the Ridge Route road was completed past his house. “The trip up over the top took 3 1/2 hours. . . .

“I remember the car heating up, boiling over,” he said. “I remember those thin old tires blowing out and going flat. I remember everybody getting carsick. . . .

“Those old cars were breaking down all the time. The low gear would burn out on the Model Ts. Sometimes they could fix that, using the sole of an old shoe and a pair of pliers.”

“But a lot of people would just give up and shove the cars off the road,” Ralphs’ wife, Margery, added. “Those cars would end up in the bottom of the canyon, along with the wrecks. Antique car people would climb down there years later, looking for parts.”

There is a 30-mile stretch of the old Ridge Route that is still quite driveable. Although landslides have narrowed the roadway in some areas to six or eight feet, most of the old concrete pavement is still intact.

‘Old Ridge Route’

To reach it, motorists should turn off I-5 at Castaic on Lake Hughes Road and follow the signs indicating “Old Ridge Route.” Within a mile or two, you’ll be on the original pavement, and you can follow it north to Highway N2, the modern road tracing the old Spanish-Indian route along the San Andreas Fault.

Along the old route, only foundations are left from places like the Tumble Inn and Sandberg Inn, gas station-hostelries that thrived as speakeasies during Prohibition, according to the locals. Some of them continued to function on weekends after Highway 99 was built, in part “because they kept a few girls out back,” according to people in a position to know.

A steady increase in traffic prompted the decision to build Highway 99--a wider, faster, less curving route at the bottom of the canyon flanked by the Ridge Route--with construction beginning in the early 1930s. The new road chopped nine miles off the old Ridge Route.

The first, two-lane version of Highway 99 was completed in 1934, two years before Floyd Winchell, now 80, was assigned as the resident officer in Gorman for the CHP.

Winchell said that while his job called for him to catch speeders and watch for stolen cars, perhaps the most important part was helping stranded motorists--shoveling sand under the wheels of trucks stuck in the snow or dispensing water to people whose cars had boiled over in the summer heat.

Finds Stranded Family

Sometimes, it went beyond that.

One winter night, in the depths of the Great Depression, Winchell found an old Buick, out of gas beside the road.

“There was a family in the car, from Oklahoma--a man, his wife and their little boy--trying to get over the grade to find jobs picking cotton in the San Joaquin,” Winchell said. “They had no money, no gas, no spare tire. On one wheel, they were riding on the rim.

“I went down to Gorman, got them a can of hot soup and some bread. Came back and siphoned some gas out of my Packard to get them over the hill. It was downhill all the way from there to Bakersfield. I sometimes wonder whatever happened to them.”

There were people in even worse trouble--drivers of the heavily laden trucks that would break loose on Highway 99’s steepest grades, plummeting downhill at speeds of up to 100 m.p.h., often carving a deadly swath through the traffic below before slamming explosively into some hillside or canyon at the bottom of the slope.

Winchell said that when he and his fellow patrolmen could, they would maneuver their vehicles in front of the runway trucks, racing downhill with lights flashing and sirens wailing in an effort to warn those below to get out of the way.

It wasn’t always possible.

Survives Wild Ride

Newspaper accounts from the period tell the story:

- Truck driver Oliver Bliss, 29, survives a 100-m.p.h. ride down Five-Mile Grade, just north of Castaic, when his brakes fail. A tanker truck breaks free in the same spot when the drive shaft breaks, cutting the brake lines, but again, the driver survives.

- A runaway truck sends its load of wheel rims cascading down the Grapevine grade below Fort Tejon, demolishing 12 cars and injuring as many as 20 people. A few weeks later, another truck on the same grade breaks loose and wipes out a service station.

- In the first six months of 1956, a total of 16 trucks break loose on Five-Mile Grade, claiming a total of five lives.

One of the victims was Herbert Hayes, 29, of Huntington Park, who rode his brakeless truck to his death at 110 m.p.h. rather than endanger motorists below.

Highway patrolmen said that during his wild, careening ride down the hill, Hayes ignored two chances to leap to safety as the truck slowed momentarily.

Instead, they said, Hayes chose to stay with his truck, flashing his lights and blowing his horn as a warning to stay out of his path. At the bottom of the hill, they said, Hayes steered the rig over a 30-foot embankment and into a ditch below. He was crushed to death by the 20-ton load of cable behind him.

Prompts Safety Measures

Hayes was honored posthumously by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and newspapers took up the cry for escape ramps and other safety improvements for the road--which had been branded by a National Safety Council representative in 1948 as “one of the world’s most dangerous highways.”

State highway engineers had recognized some of the dangers long before that, and had tried various solutions.

One was the addition in the late 1930s of a passing lane on the steepest grades, which, one critic said, simply added head-on collisions to the rear-end collisions.

A later one was the conversion of the entire roadway to a four-lane, divided highway--a project begun in 1947 and completed in 1953.

Escape ramps and brake-check areas were added in 1956, after Hayes’ death, but engineers concluded that the only real solution would be a new highway--an eight-lane, 45-mile freeway through the mountains, part of a national route called Interstate 5.

Major Rerouting

The building of I-5, concurrent with the completion of the California Aqueduct, called for rerouting a major stretch of the road around Pyramid Lake, a new holding reservoir that would inundate a portion of Highway 99.

That meant moving part of the roadway several hundred feet up the mountainside. And that meant some of the largest cuts and fills ever made for a roadway--in all, the movement of 69 million cubic yards of earth, enough to fill a railroad train of gondola cars 13,500 miles long.

The massive project, begun in 1965, was completed in 1970. Highway 99--at least the portion over the San Gabriel Mountains--was largely forgotten. Forgotten, but not altogether lost.

Today, I-5 is split into two separate roadways on Five-Mile Grade. The newer, more gradual side is used for descending traffic. The other side, the one used by ascending traffic, is the same one that was used by traffic in both directions on Highway 99. As long as you’re headed uphill, engineers say, the old roadway is quite safe.

Disappears Under Dam

At Violin Summit, atop Five-Mile Grade, there is stretch of Highway 99 that parallels I-5 for several miles before disappearing under the dam that created Pyramid Lake. If you want to drive part of this stretch, take the Templin Highway exit off I-5 and head west about 100 yards.

Another stretch of Highway 99 can be seen emerging from the water on the north end of the lake and paralleling I-5 before the two merge in the Hungry Valley area. The rest of 99 is buried under I-5 until the two split north of the Grapevine, with 99 heading to Bakersfield and I-5 heading off to the northwest. If there is a frequent complaint about I-5 today, it’s that it’s boring. But Winchell, the old highway patrolman, doesn’t see it that way.

“To me, it’s interesting,” he said. “As I drive along, I can look across and see some pieces of the old roads. And when I do that, I relive some of the old times.”