Link to the Past : California 23 Retains Much of Its Early Character

No one can say for sure who began this road.

Centuries ago, cows or coyotes, Chumash settlers or Spanish conquistadors might have carved the twisted way from the Pacific Ocean across two rugged mountain ranges to the lush Santa Clara River Valley.

Muscle and dynamite, wind, rain and wheels hammered the rough, curving ridge-side path into its modern form: California 23.

Money, vision and a yen in city folk for country life pumped up tiny stagecoach villages alongside the road, shaping Moorpark, Thousand Oaks and Westlake Village.

But beneath the 23’s motley layers of pavement, the gnarled path etched across southeastern Ventura County’s mountains and meadows remains the same.

California 23’s two twisting lanes start at the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, and just before their end at Highway 126, convulse into a brutal knot of mountain switchbacks, exposing some of the road’s oldest roots.

These gnarled Grimes Canyon curves--like the ones on California 23’s southern leg in the Santa Monica Mountains--were gouged from sandstone by the Decker family.

When Earl Decker’s father moved his family to Malibu in 1928, the road was a narrow, treacherous dirt wagon trail. Atha Decker worked for the Los Angeles County highway department, shoving rock falls off the road with shovel and wheelbarrow, flattening washboard ruts with a horse team and scraper.

At their father’s side, Earl and brother Jimmy learned the explosives trade, and latched onto a big state contract to widen the road that today in Malibu bears their name.

The Decker brothers led state highway crews, jackhammering holes into rocky hillsides that had to be moved. Jimmy would rig the dynamite, and the brothers would take cover.

“You’d see it blow, the bank just blowing up and the rocks going everywhere,” recalled Earl, 79. “The rocks were small, but big enough to kill you.”

Today, shiny Jeeps and Range Rovers tool along the smooth two-lane road, carrying the Deckers’ nouveau riche neighbors toward opulent mountaintop retreats.

Here, remotely posted firefighters and Caltrans workers curse beach-bound surfers and reckless motorcyclists who screech through switchback curves as if the risky road were a raceway.

“I’ve got my signs out--’Road Work Ahead,’ ‘Be Prepared to Stop,’ ‘Flagman Ahead’--and people don’t pay any attention to them,” groused Caltrans worker Rene Ayala, repairing an old culvert.

Out here, California 23 is just a way through the wilderness. The land belongs to manzanita and sage that explode in ferocious wildfires every decade or so, to coyotes that nip into the brush just ahead of passing cars, and to the hawks that wheel overhead.

But the road snakes on toward civilization and the subdivisions of Westlake Boulevard. Where Spanish missionaries en route from Los Angeles once camped at Triunfo, motorists do not slow down.

Tom McDonald remembers the 1960s, when his family moved into a new home here, when traffic was so scarce that deer ambled across the freshly graded dirt street.

“There was kind of an old, rustic, Southern California ‘get-away-from-the-city’ feel out there,” grumbled McDonald, 38, an LAPD sergeant who bought his childhood home. “And then they put in, excuse my French, a . . . freeway.”

The newest neighbors--quake refugees, out-of-state corporate transfers and yuppies fleeing Los Angeles--have swelled traffic at the 23’s junction with the Ventura Freeway to a peak of 37,500 cars per day.

From 1961 to 1970, the California Department of Transportation spent $22 million widening the northern leg of California 23 from the Ventura Freeway along Moorpark Road, creating the Moorpark Freeway.

Just before it blends with the Simi Valley Freeway, California 23 zigzags down an offramp and into downtown Moorpark.

Here it resembles the California 23 of the 1920s, save for recent widening by Caltrans near Moorpark City Hall--and a huge increase in truck traffic.

“The road has been there for years, and the big problem is it’s indicated on maps as a state highway,” said Eloise Brown, Moorpark’s former mayor. “If you see some of those fellows driving 18-wheelers as they come down the ramp, you can see their knuckles turning white.”

As California 23 leaves Moorpark, the road takes shape as a busy route for local commerce: native oranges, sand and gravel quarried nearby, eggs laid by the million-plus chickens at two huge egg ranches.

Traffic rushes down the dizzying hairpin bends of Grimes Canyon.

Unfit for building, farming or much else, the steep mountains barely tolerate the Deckers’ cliff-side turns. Downpours unleash mudslides, and rock falls shaken loose by the 1994 Northridge earthquake temporarily severed the road.

From here, California 23 slopes downhill, curves past a golf course, then beelines to its terminus at California 126 in Fillmore.