The Soul of a State

Lester Giacomini has been driving California’s coastal route since before most of the state’s population was born.

And still, after more than 60 years, the sights along Highway 1 on the Mendocino coast take his breath away.

“Gorgeous,” says the retired logging trucker, interrupting a late afternoon poker dice session at the Pirate’s Cove Cafe in Point Arena to talk about the coast road. “Every turn is a picture postcard.”

Indeed, for most of its 1,111 miles, the coastal route is a world-class roadway, a place of sweeping ocean vistas, towering redwoods and rock-strewn coves, of waterfront mansions and funky geodesic domes, of cattle ranches and prickly fields of artichokes, of art galleries and aquariums, of vast state and national parks and of twists and turns that can terrify the timid.

Route 66 may have been the Mother Road of the Southwest, and Interstates 99 and 5 the freeways through California’s agricultural heartland.

But the coast route is the pathway to the soul of the state.

Mission Bay, the cottages of Laguna Beach, the colorful crowds in Venice, the cliffs and coves of the central coast, the sweeping curve of Monterey Bay, Muir Woods, the northern redwood groves, all are images that say “California” as assuredly as does the Golden Gate Bridge.

A little digression here on a critical point: While California’s Highway 1 is, indeed, part of the coast route, the coast route is not all Highway 1.

The road didn’t exist until the late 1930s. Before then, motorists journeying the length of the state alternated between coastal and inland highways. Much of the rugged coast north of Santa Monica was served by dirt and gravel county roads.

Giacomini remembers taking a helper along as he drove his logging truck down the coast toward San Francisco. The man’s job was to jump out every few miles and run ahead of the slow-moving truck to open the gates that spanned the roads to keep cattle from wandering onto the wrong ranches. “That was before the state came through in ’36 and took over the roads and oiled ‘em,” he says. Now, a series of grates embedded in the road surface keep cattle contained and let vehicles go unimpeded.

Even today, the Highway 1 designation applies only to the coastal road from San Clemente to Ventura and from Gaviota State Park above Santa Barbara to the Northern California logging town of Leggett. It is U.S. 101 along the Santa Barbara coast, for a short jog from Pismo Beach to San Luis Obispo and again from Leggett to the Oregon line.

Like its name, the coast route and its surroundings aren’t static. The drive has been improved in some places, damaged in others--by nature and by people.

It is now possible, for example, to get through Santa Barbara without succumbing to road rage (except at rush hour) because a freeway project removed the traffic signals on U.S. 101 through town about a decade ago.

But the drive through Malibu and along the central coast is regularly interrupted by one-way detours around California Department of Transportation crews repairing landslide damage and rebuilding weakened bridges.

Despite that El Nino-induced damage, the road remains one of the best-kempt in the state and the asphalt is in remarkably good shape.

The toll of progress is that some things once familiar to coast route users aren’t there anymore. A 1922 Automobile Club of Southern California booklet on touring the Pacific Highway, which was an inland route once past southern Orange County, illustrates it it best:

“A vivid contrast to this spectacle [the Mission of San Juan Capistrano] is afforded as the motorist approaches Santa Ana, in miles of brilliant orange and lemon orchards, radiant in green and gold, and bearing their double gifts of fruitage and blossom.”

Those neat rows of citrus have largely given way to neat rows of houses, less than radiant in their earth-tone stucco wrappers.

A lot of the route, though, remains largely as it was in 1924 when state politicians decided it would be good to tie the entire California coast together with a single road.

Again from that 1922 Auto Club guide:

“Flanked by mountains to the north, and the measureless tides of old ocean to the south, it is a thoroughfare of Nature’s most striking grandeur and unique loveliness.”

The writer was rhapsodizing about the coastal road from Ventura to Gaviota Beach, and the 77-year-old description still applies. It could easily be used, as well, to describe hundreds of miles of the coast road today.

To rediscover the route for The Times’ own Highway 1 section (which, not coincidentally, marks completion of its first year with this issue), I recently packed a bag, a cooler, a bundle of maps and a navigator-cum-historical advisor--my father, a veteran of scores of Highway 1 runs from the late 1930s to the mid-’50s--and headed down to the Mexican border.

Many people who drive the coast do so to get from somewhere to somewhere else; we drove it solely for the drive and the scenery. So our trip probably won’t resemble yours. We drove only during daylight hours, stopped during drive time mainly for gas, meals and other necessities and did little sightseeing that couldn’t be done from the seats of a moving car.

Saner motoring enthusiasts might want to tackle only one or two sections of the route during a vacation trip, lingering over some of the magnificent sights and stopping to enjoy attractions along the way.

But whether the drive is fast or slow, nonstop or stop-and-go, it remains a trip well worth the taking. You can’t begin to appreciate California without have seen it end to end along the Pacific Coast.

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Day 1: Mexican Border to Santa Barbara

Distance traveled: 276 miles

Total time: 8 hours (including stops for lunch, gas, calls of nature and photo session)

Driving time: 6.75 hours

Average speed: 41 mph

Mom always said it was important to start a trip with a good breakfast, but down on the Mexican border in San Ysidro there aren’t many choices.

So we did what the savvy traveler always does and went where the locals were chowing down: the border Burger King (sausage biscuits and orange juice).

Lumbering back to the car afterward, we politely asked a couple of locals to please stop leaning on the fenders, fired up the engine and, at 9:01 a.m., May 10, left the border crossing, heading for Oregon.

This first leg of the trip, for a Southern Californian, can seem about as exciting as the fine print in an auto insurance policy.

But it actually has a lot to recommend it.

San Diego is familiar, but the coast road meanders along the inner edge of San Diego Bay and through the bougainvillea-bedecked cottage communities of Mission Beach and Pacific Beach.

La Jolla, with its fancy shops and restaurants, is part of a string of pearls threaded onto the coast route from Torrey Pines to the Oceanside yacht basin. Del Mar, Solana Beach, Cardiff by the Sea, Encinitas, Leucadia and Carlsbad all have charms for motorists who choose to bypass the San Diego Freeway and hug the ocean on State Route 21.

My dad, who knew this part of the state as a young Navy chief, says the areas around the San Diego Naval Base and the bay are a lot tamer now than when the fleet was in during the late 1930s. But except for far more homes and far fewer roadhouses, the scenery on the southern coast was pretty much the same as he recalled.

From Oceanside to San Onofre, the original coast road is gone. The only route open to civilians is the San Diego Freeway cutting through the sprawling Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base, all rolling ocean to the west and brush-covered hills and canyons to the east.

A little piece of the original coast road does still remain, though, at San Onofre State Beach.

It bears little resemblance, however, to the “Coast Highway” that Dad remembered from his days in the Navy and that I recalled from trips down to Tijuana and Rosarito Beach in my high school years.

Back then, it was all roaring cars and, at night, blinding lights. Marines from Pendleton and El Toro, swabbies from Navy bases in Long Beach and San Diego and scores of local travelers--many heading up from a night of revelry in Baja--collided with such frequency on the curving stretch between San Clemente and San Onofre that it was commonly called Slaughter Alley.

Now, it is just a tame ribbon of asphalt edged with parking spaces and fire pits for the rows of recreational vehicles and campers’ tents that crowd the park all through the summer.

The southern start of Highway 1 is marked by an offramp sign in San Clemente. The road meanders up the coast through Dana Point and the quartet of “Beach” cities--Laguna, Newport, Huntington and Seal--with their galleries, shops, restaurants and panoramic sweeps of ocean. After Seal Beach, it turns inland at Long Beach to skirt the Palos Verdes Peninsula and plow through the cities of the South Bay.

The driving challenge here is timing the traffic lights to scoot through as many as possible without having to stop.

The road also provides a glimpse of a Southern California most of us never see as we fly the freeways: the gritty port sections of Long Beach and Wilmington, the rich industrial area around Los Angeles International Airport, and everywhere the multilingual, multiethnic stew that the Los Angeles area has become.

Driving for pleasure begins again as Highway 1 turns to parallel the beach in Santa Monica and continues unabated through the long sweep of Malibu and into Oxnard, then along the Santa Barbara coast. Here are the first tastes of the killer views and challenging curves the coast route provides in increasing abundance as it heads north.

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Day 2: Santa Barbara to Half Moon Bay

Distance: 371 miles

Total time: 8.5 hours

Driving time: 7 hours

Average speed: 53 mph

The coastal haze that dims the sky in Los Angeles and Orange counties this time of year was down in L.A. and Orange where it belongs as we pulled out of Santa Barbara.

Sun was glinting off the water as we blasted past Gaviota Beach under a bright blue sky on U.S. 101--eyeballing a lone buffalo grazing on a private ranch at the side of the freeway--and took the Highway 1 turnoff to Lompoc. Those who like missiles and rockets flock there to watch launches from nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base.

One local sight far removed from the era of space flight is the La Purisima Mission State Historic Park.

The mission has been left pretty much in ruins, and it gives a better glimpse into the past than do many of the restored missions along the way. But the sight that really thrills is the dim dirt track leading away from the mission toward Solvang.

It is a piece of the original El Camino Real--a dirt road etched permanently into the landscape by the passage of thousands of Indians, soldiers, settlers and Spanish priests and friars more than a century ago.

From there to Cambria, the road runs mostly inland in a series of soft curves through country in which flat farmland alternates with vineyards and rolling hills crowned with oaks and carpeted with yellow mustard.

At Cambria, a resort town tucked into a pine forest, the Highway 1 of films, auto ads and state tourism posters begins. For the next 98 miles it runs parallel to the coast in a stunning series of switchbacks and hill climbs that put the fun back in driving--at least until that first RV comes into view.

(Paul Dean reviews a Winnebago in today’s Highway 1, and whatever his pronouncements about fit and finish, handling and homeyness, cruising speed and accouterments, let me state for the record that following RVs on the coast route is no fun. Period.)

Thankfully, the road builders did provide a few passing zones along the way.

Heading north past San Simeon and the Hearst Castle (a worthwhile stop if you have all day to tour it properly), the often-tortuous route is packed with driving challenges and nonstop ocean views. The difficulty lies in choosing one thing--driving or sightseeing--and sticking with it.

A note of caution: This is landslide country and there are repair crews, warning signs and one-way stretches that require Caltrans-led caravans all along the 74-mile stretch between Ragged Point and Carmel.

Major slowdowns--especially on weekends, when traffic is heaviest--are the rule at the spectacular stone-and-concrete arched bridges built over steep coastal canyons at Big Creek and Bixby Creek in the early ‘30s to open up this stretch of coast. Both bridges are under repair.

Dai Lesty, a 31-year resident of Big Sur (including 13 as cook at the famed Esalen Institute, a wellspring of the human potentialities movement) holds Lady Bird Johnson responsible for a lot of the traffic on Highway 1.

Before the then-first lady declared the road a scenic highway in the mid-1960s, Lesty says, it was used mostly by locals and a few sports car drivers and motorcyclists beguiled by its dangerous curves.

“Now, with all the tourists in the summer, it’s bumper-to-bumper traffic around here all day long,” he says with a resigned sigh.

And when my dad commented that Big Sur still looks about the same as it did in the 1950s, Lesty snorted:

“It all seems unchanged, but if you get up on the ridges you can look down and see all the houses that have been built on the hills since the 1960s. Used to be a couple hundred people here. Now there’s 1,200 or so.”

Just outside Big Sur, at the entrance to Andrew Molera State Park, a small dirt road marked with two signs splits off of Highway 1 and heads up into the coastal hills. One sign says “Coast Road.” The other, a yellow warning, reads, “Impassible in wet weather.” The narrow passage is one of the last remaining pieces of the local road system that existed before completion of the Bixby Creek bridge opened this coastal section of Highway 1 in 1932.

It is nine miles of washboard and takes about an hour--versus 20 minutes on the paved highway. It wanders away from the coast and down into half a dozen little valleys so dense with coastal redwoods the sun disappears at times. It mounts hilltops that provide a view of the Pacific all the way to a horizon that hides Japan. It provides an hour with almost no interruptions from passing traffic--a detour my father and I unanimously voted the find of the trip.

Old Coast Road, as it is labeled on local maps, rejoins Highway 1 at the north end of Bixby Creek Bridge. From there it is a quick and uneventful drive up the coast and around the eastern edge of the Monterey Peninsula. (A cornucopia of suggested side trips: Carmel and 17 Mile Drive; Pebble Beach; downtown Monterey and its famed Cannery Row; the Monterey Bay Aquarium; and Pacific Grove with its Victorian homes and, from October to March, hosts of nesting monarch butterflies.)

Highway 1 is mostly freeway here, leading through artichoke fields around Castroville and Watsonville and into downtown Santa Cruz. The road is smooth and easy, the scenery alternates between pine forests and urban development, and the best thing about the drive it that it gets you closer to San Francisco and the northern coast beyond.

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Day 3: Half Moon Bay to Garberville

Distance: 288 miles

Total time: 10.75 hours

Driving time: 7.5 hours

Average speed: 38 mph

The longest and slowest day began with a misty rush-hour traffic jam in San Francisco. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant--that stretch took us through Golden Gate Park, an example to municipal park authorities everywhere of how to do it right.

In a made-for-the-movies moment, the sun broke out as we hit the Golden Gate Bridge and left the traffic behind us--geographically and mentally.

The highway passes Muir Woods--a must-see walk through towering redwoods--and then twists up and down the coastal hills until it drops you abruptly into Stinson Beach, with its seal-studded tidal flats and cozy clapboard downtown.

Just outside of town the road winds through a forest of huge eucalyptuses, passes into the rolling hills of Marin County’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area, past the entrance to the Point Reyes National Seashore and out around the eastern edge of Tomales Bay.

This is a part of the coast route I had never traveled--like many Southern Californians I use U.S. 101 when driving north of San Francisco--and it had been decades since my dad had been this way. But he says the parts he remembers looked pretty much the same.

The big difference is that a new cash crop has been introduced to the region.

We’re talking bed-and-breakfasts.

There are fields of picture-perfect inns in every little north coast town, and individual B&Bs; sprout like wildflowers at every scenic curve from Stinson Beach to Fort Bragg.

From oyster-rich Tomales Bay, with its bone-white piles of shells and restaurants featuring the mollusks cooked in every conceivable style, including barbecue, Highway 1 winds (and that’s what it mostly does until Leggett) through coastal vineyards, dairy farms and cattle and sheep ranches into the resort area of Bodega Bay.

There, the route leaves Marin County and enters Sonoma--but it is not the vineyards-and-wineries Sonoma of U.S. 101 just a few miles inland. (Nor, later, does coastal Mendocino County bear much resemblance to the Mendocino of wine country brochures).

From Bodega Harbor, Highway 1 rides a rugged coast of cliffs, rocky promontories and river estuaries. At Sea Ranch, a residential and country club development begun more than 30 years ago and still building, modern redwood houses line the coast for almost 35 miles.

About 15 miles past the Sea Ranch golf club, over the line in Mendocino County, Barbara and Richard Tanis run the Pirate’s Cove Cafe, where he plays a mean game of poker dice with daily visitors such as Lester Giacomini.

Barbara was born and raised in Point Arena but moved to New Jersey for 28 years after she married Richard. The couple came back when he retired 12 years ago and bought the cafe. Now he’s a confirmed coastal dweller and president of the Point Arena Lighthouse Keepers Assn., while she admits to chafing a bit at the isolation. Both, however, agree with Giacomini that the area offers incomparable scenery.

Some of it is in the county seat of Mendocino, whose weathered wooden buildings house a multitude of shops, eateries and the ubiquitous B&Bs.; (Giacomini, ever the practical trucker, offered this bit of advice as we left Point Arena: “You’ve gotta see Mendocino, it’s the Carmel of the North Coast. But don’t stay there, it’s too expensive.”)

We didn’t stay, enjoying instead the extra daylight that comes with being 700 miles north of Los Angeles and spending the time on the almost traffic-free highway running through the coastal towns.

Just after Fort Bragg, Highway 1 turns inland for a 22-mile run to its terminus in the tiny logging town of Leggett, where it becomes part of U.S. 101 heading north.

The inland run took us into the coastal mountains for a change of scenery and driving conditions--up and down as well as round and round an almost seamless series of curves, bordered now by tall pines instead of coastal oaks and ocean.

*

Day 4: Garberville to Oregon Line

Distance: 176 miles

Total time: 3.5 hours

Driving time: 3 hours

Average speed: 59 mph

This is a short, quick drive along a gentle mountain road that plows through stands of redwoods and follows the scenic Eel River into the Humboldt Valley--a land of dairy farms, lumber mills, fishing boats and the old port city of Eureka with its Victorian mansions built by long-ago lumber barons.

In my memories, it is a pretty little town, just south of my late Aunt Betty’s 28 acres of redwoods in the lumber town of Trinidad. We used to drive down to Eureka for ice cream and to gaze at the Carson House mansion, which locals claim is the prettiest Victorian in the country.

So the industrial sprawl on the outskirts of the town--indeed, the fact that there now are outskirts at all--caught both Dad and me by surprise.

But the drive through town doesn’t take long, and the road soon is back in the coastal mountains with just 96 miles to go to the state line.

Although this is timber country, and has been for hundreds of miles, lumber trucks seem relatively scarce. We saw fewer than a dozen--most of them empty--in two days of driving on Highway 1 and U.S. 101.

Dad recalls fighting for space on the road with hundreds of logging trucks on trips north in the ‘50s and early ‘60s.

The logging industry, hurt by private and governmental moves to protect old-growth forests, is still active, though, and still looking for acceptance.

At the Eel River Sawmill Co. north of Garberville, for instance, a billboard guarding a mile-long stack of felled trees reminds passersby that the homes they live in started off in the same kind of stack.

The last 90 minutes of driving on the coast route in California is a riot of big trees and blue skies.

The road alternates between four-lane freeway and two-lane highway as it runs through the coastal pines and redwoods, past Yurok tribal lands (stop for some smoked salmon if the smokehouses are open) and down into Crescent City, the only California town ever wiped out by a tidal wave.

It happened on March 28, 1964, in a tsunami caused by the Alaskan earthquake--and is an event the tour books don’t mention. But it does explain why the whole town, though founded in 1853, looks as if it was built of stucco and concrete in the 1960s: It was.

From Crescent City, the coast road runs through the Smith River Valley--a miniature version of the Humboldt Valley, with dairy farms in the flats and lumber operations on the hills--and, just a minute or so before the border, past the Ship Ashore Gift Shop. It’s a big steel fishing boat that was hauled inland and set up next to the highway decades ago. In its incongruity, it seems a fitting conclusion to a trip through California.

Times staff writer John O’Dell can be reached at john.odell@latimes.com.

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The Coast With the Most

Califoria’s coastal route offers a huge selection of attractions.

The scenic and sinuous coast road also is a favorite of driving enthusiasts. The map traces a four-day coastal drive.

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Final Tally

Distance: 1,111 miles on coast route trip (880 miles on return to Orange County along U.S. 101 and Santa Ana and Riverside freeways).

Vehicle: Author’s 1999 Subaru Legacy Outback with five-speed manual transmission.

Average speed: 46 mph on trip; 66 mph on return.

Hours behind the wheel: 24.25 on trip; 13.25 on return.

Gasoline used: 104.1 gallons round trip.

Average price per gallon: $1.55.

Highest gas price: $1.739 in Half Moon Bay.

Lowest gas price: $1.399 a gallon in Whittier.

CDs listened to: 20.