A Slow Road to Progress for a Narrow Pass in the Valleys

It’s been called the Fremont Pass, the San Fernando Pass, the Cuesta Vieja and the Old Newhall Grade.

But for hundreds of years, travelers have called it a pain in the neck.

The Newhall Pass--its modern name--is best known today as the junction of the Golden State and Antelope Valley freeways.

A steep and narrow route linking the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, the Newhall Pass has been a challenge to engineers and an irritant to commuters since the days of the Spanish conquest.

Such was the case on Wednesday, when a trailer overturned in the pass at the height of the evening commute, backing up traffic on the Golden State almost to the Simi Valley Freeway.

It may be no comfort to the motorists who sat in traffic that evening, but their distress and frustration were as old as the pass itself.

Located at the northwest end of the San Fernando Valley, the rocky pass separates the Santa Susana and San Gabriel mountains.

People have tried crossing it by foot, by horse, by car and even by camel.

Photographs from the late 1800s collected by the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society show a long line of flatbed wagons waiting to cross from one valley to the other.

The wagon masters look bored, grumpy and remarkably like the truckers and commuters stuck on the Golden State last Wednesday.

“We don’t seem to be progressing,” said Jerry Reynolds, a Santa Clarita Valley historian. “They had problems back then, too.”

The history of the Newhall Pass is filled with creative, enterprising and occasionally kooky attempts to find a better route between the two valleys.

Its story has been chronicled in books, magazines and government reports collected by the historians, Caltrans and the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society.

The first European expedition to cross the Newhall Pass was led by Spanish explorer Don Gaspar de Portola in 1769.

The explorers followed a rocky Indian trail located northeast of the present day freeway interchange.

The trail was improved over the years but remained so treacherous that stagecoaches were moved up and down the mountain by ropes and pulleys, Reynolds said.

In December, 1854, however, Phineas Banning, a brave and foolhardy Army major, tried to prove that a stagecoach could make the crossing without special help.

The stagecoach passengers sensibly said they would rather walk than ride, and the intrepid Banning set off alone.

The stagecoach and horses tumbled down the mountain, a jumble of splinters, chains and panicked animals.

Banning emerged from the wreckage and, according to accounts at the time, declared: “Far easier than I thought it would be.”

A rough path west of the Indian trail was opened in 1855, but storms washed it out six years later.

The strangest crossing during the brief history of the path was attempted by camels, part of a misguided U.S. Army experiment.

Lt. Edward Fitzgerald Beale had persuaded the Department of War that camels might make ideal beasts of burden in the harsh southwestern United States, Reynolds said.

Beale was mistaken. Camels, good for long treks over desert sands, had difficulty managing the steep, rocky grade.

Beale, undaunted, returned to the old Indian trail in 1862 and supervised the excavation of Beale’s Cut, a narrow, 90-foot-deep gash in the mountain that opened trade between Los Angeles and the north during the heady days of the California Gold Rush.

In 1875, engineers and stonemasons brought to California from China slowly carved a 6,976-foot-long railroad tunnel through the heart of the Santa Susana Mountains.

The tunnel, still used today, passes directly below the freeway interchange.

The tunnel enabled Los Angeles to be linked to San Francisco and is credited with spurring Los Angeles’ development.

Foot and horse traffic, meanwhile, continued to use Beale’s Cut.

The cut was an improvement over the Indian trail but was located at the end of a steep grade.

It is said that when automobiles arrived in California at the turn of the century, Northern Californians who purchased cars in Los Angeles would only accept them if they could make it through Beale’s Cut in the vehicle unaided.

Cars had to traverse the 13-foot-wide cut in single file.

Finally in 1910, the 434-foot-long Newhall Tunnel was cut through the mountains about a quarter-mile west of Beale’s Cut.

But the tunnel was only 17 1/2-feet wide, barely enough room for two trucks to pass, and it quickly became a bottleneck as notorious as Beale’s Cut and the Indian trail.

In 1938, the Newhall Tunnel was replaced by a giant cut in the mountain wide enough for a four-lane roadway.

It was an engineering feat that required the removal of 300,000 cubic yards of soil and rock.

The new roadway became the Sierra Highway and state highway officials predicted that the road would solve the chronic traffic congestion at the pass.

Engineers said the road would handle tremendous amounts of traffic, and according to a 1938 publication by the state Department of Highways and Public Works: “Using conservative estimates of 4,000 cars per day as average for 365 days during the year, we have 1.46 million car trips over this highway per year.”

Little did they know that the Newhall Pass would have 194,000 trips per day in 1988, or 70 million trips a year.

“That would be the low estimate,” said Pat Reid, a Caltrans spokeswoman. “By now, 1990, it’s even more than that.”

The Golden State and Antelope Valley freeways finally provided a smooth link between the valleys, but the 1971 Sylmar earthquake sent parts of the interchange crashing to the ground and the Santa Clarita Valley was once again cut off from it’s neighbor to the south.

The freeway was rebuilt, but it remains a fragile link between the valleys, susceptible to auto wrecks and quirks of weather.

“We had a real big snow up in here in 1974,” Reynolds recalled. “It was several inches of real live snow.” The Newhall Pass was closed for days.