Beauty and a Beast : California 126’s Pastoral Scenery Belies Deadly Stretch

Golden fields of zinnias glitter against ragged purple mountains, and century-old avocado trees throw shadows along the twisting California 126.

The road’s shoulders are lined with giant flowering oleanders and eucalyptus trees, whose scent in the spring competes with fragrant sweet pea flowers and in autumn with the spicy-sweet perfume of red peppers.

Produce stands display peaches, pineapples, cantaloupes, watercress and tomatoes that lure weekend drivers off the road, which follows the Santa Clara Valley through Ventura County for 35 miles.

But despite the beauty, to drive along the 126 is to flirt with mortality.

Between 1990 and 1994, 34 people died on California 126, according to the California Highway Patrol, which has not finished tabulating numbers for last year. That compares with 35 deaths in the same period on the Ventura Freeway, where the daily traffic volume is about four or five times higher.

A two-lane, six-mile segment of the 126 known as “Blood Alley” averages one accident a week, CHP officials say, and has claimed dozens of lives.

The number of fatalities along Blood Alley, which stretches from east of Fillmore to Powell Road on Piru’s western edge, was 227% higher than the state average between 1992 and 1994, according to California Department of Transportation engineer Stephen Pang.

A slight curve that skirts a hill near Fish Hatchery Road, east of Fillmore, is Blood Alley’s darkest stretch. Most accidents there are head-on collisions, CHP records show.

“There have been more accidents there than anywhere else on the highway,” said Fillmore Mayor Roger Campbell, who is also assistant chief in the Fillmore Volunteer Fire Department. “It’s like a gravitation that pulls people into the other lane.”

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In a yellow house atop the deadly hill live Tobey and Chub Bowers, who say they are often awakened at night by the sound of metal crashing into metal.

Eighteen people have been killed in hundreds of accidents during the 16 years the couple have lived there.

“It’s awful,” Tobey Bowers said. “There have been countless times when we wake up with the ‘bang, bang’ sounds of cars crashing.”

There was Thanksgiving Day in 1983, when seven people--including a pregnant woman and several children--died in a head-on collision.

Then there was the young woman who fell asleep at the wheel and whose car rolled through the ivy that separates the Bowers’ property from the highway.

And the time the Bowers’ oldest daughter, who is a nurse, ran down the hill to an accident scene and gave CPR to two young men, one of of whom died later.

“I think this stretch of the highway needs to be straightened up,” Chub Bowers said. “No one seems to know why, but when people drive by this hill, they seem to lose control of their vehicles.”

Even at less notorious spots, the story is similar. George Aguire, 95, has lived his entire life in a house 50 yards from California 126 near Piru, and says collisions are almost routine.

“Over the years, traffic has increased and so have accidents. It used to be that my heart would beat really fast when I heard the sounds of cars crashing, but now it’s just another sound,” said Aguire, who often has opened his door to victims of accidents. “People often knock asking to use the phone.”

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CHP Officer Brian DeMatia, who patrolled California 126 for six years, says the highway should not be blamed for the accidents.

He said commuters who live in Santa Clarita and work as far away as Santa Barbara tend to speed when they are running late. DeMatia said motorists who get behind farmers’ trucks sometimes get impatient and speed in a non-passing lane, and some just drink and drive.

Also, farmers who grow crops along the valley often have to make left turns in a two-lane stretch, causing traffic to stop.

“The 126 was originally designed as a rural road, but it has become a commuter zone where people drive like maniacs,” DeMatia said.

Long before it was even a rural road, what is now California 126 was a footpath for 18th-century Spanish priests--the only route linking the San Fernando and San Buenaventura missions.

As settlers put down roots and established ranchos, the route became more traveled.

In the 1870s, Ventura County pioneer and U.S. Sen. Thomas R. Bard launched a campaign to build a road across the Santa Clara Valley, according to newspaper clippings at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art.

Bard was trying to connect the newly established Hueneme Wharf with ore mines in Inyo County in the northeast, according to Charles Johnson of the county museum. The road would supplant the old mission-to-mission route.

Initially, it was named Santa Clara Road. Later, it was renamed Route 79, and in 1963 the road became California 126.

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Ranchos and oil industries gave way to citrus groves, and the route became popular not only locally but among Central Valley truckers hauling crops to the Port of Hueneme and for Navy trucks traveling to Ventura County’s two military bases. Today, the 126 is also a prime commuter route connecting Santa Clarita and Ventura.

Caltrans straightened some curves in the 1940s and built the four-lane freeway from Ventura to Santa Paula in the 1960s--yet it was still possible, as today, to tag along behind a tractor-trailer piled with shiny, fragrant lemons.

In the 1970s, alarmed by the number of people being killed near their homes, about 20 residents began lobbying state officials to turn the highway into four lanes from Santa Paula to the county line.

From 1974 to 1985, the Highway 126 Improvement Assn. met once a month as part of the crusade to make the highway safer.

“We were having a tremendous amount of accidents and we were concerned for our safety and our families’ safety,” said Carl Beringer, who spearheaded the group. “There wasn’t a day that we didn’t have an accident along the highway.”

Foreseeing an increase in traffic, Caltrans in 1985 began widening California 126 from Santa Paula to Interstate 5 at Castaic Junction. The project is expected to be completed early this year.

“We have seen a tremendous improvement since we have had four lanes,” said Beringer, who lives in Santa Paula. “We just wish it had been four lanes from the time it was built. We have lost many lives.”

Despite the fatalities, many nearby residents--including the Aguires and the Bowers--say they can’t move because they have fallen in love with the Santa Clara Valley.

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“It’s a beautiful valley and we wouldn’t exchange it for anything else,” said Tobey Bowers as she stood by a kitchen window, watching traffic flow along the blacktop through citrus orchards.

The character of the road, like the valley it follows, changes from section to section. From Ventura to Santa Paula, the highway is a 14-mile, arrow-straight stretch of four lanes with a center divider of 12-foot pink, red and white oleanders that sway in the breeze.

Suburbs pepper the landscape between the two cities, but after Santa Paula the road begins to wind and the only signs of housing are the Victorian rooftops that occasionally peer out from a citrus grove.

Tucked beneath green trees but facing naked mountains to the north, a century-old red clapboard schoolhouse appears four miles east of Santa Paula. Daily, it still receives the sons and daughters of farmers living in the Santa Clara Valley.

Farther along, a lone sycamore tree, also more than 100 years old, guards the entrance to Hall Road. A sign by the tree notes that in 1848, Gen. John C. Fremont stopped here on his way to sign a treaty that would allow the United States to annex California.

Twelve miles east of Santa Paula is Fillmore, a town of 13,000 with 1950s buildings and charming tree-lined streets that have been the setting of many Hollywood movies--most recently, “How to Make an American Quilt.”

A wooden, Old West-style sign welcomes visitors to the community, home to the only steam-powered train in the county.

As the highway nears the hills at the base of the Sespe Wilderness, citrus groves lie in green ribbons between the road and the sharp mountain peaks.

About a mile before the western entrance to Piru is the only convenience store on the rural stretch of the highway. Dusty and worn as a Western movie set--which it has been--the Piru Ranch Market still thrives, though the gas station next door has closed and the oil industry workers who once crowded it have long gone.

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As California 126 continues east, it passes the tiny hamlet of Piru, which sits against treeless, jagged mountain terrain that cradles the deep blue-green of Lake Piru.

From Piru, the 126 stretches another six miles east to the Los Angeles County line, then crosses the barren, cactus-prickled hills for nearly 13 miles before ending at Santa Clarita.

For Fillmore resident Lucian Meyers, who commuted to Glendale for 24 years before retiring, the statistics on the dangers of the highway could never eclipse his love for it. The 126 and its scenery are still a part of his daily life.

“I don’t think that you can find a finer place to live in the county than this valley,” said Meyers, 71. “I miss the scenery. That’s why I walk every day in places near the highway.”