A Tale of Two Passes and a Century of the Ridge Route (13 Jun 15 by gins)

A few years back, in the post ‘Broadband: Lifeblood, not Luxury,’ I wrote about the roles the Lincoln Highway and the Donner Pass played in connecting California to the rest of the nation.  Indians, traders, covered wagons, the railroad, the highway, not to mention cables and fibers all wound their way from east to west.   But there is another in California with an equally storied history, this time connecting the north and the south.

Separating the two parts of the state are the Tehachapi and San Emigdio Mountains, bisected by the Tejon Pass, and the role this pass plays today is possibly more important than the Donner.  Heading south from Bakersfield, the terrain rises thousands of feet before dropping into the San Fernando Valley.  Oil and gas pipelines, power lines, the California Aqueduct, fiber cables, and of course roads all traverse the pass.  It is the roads that are the most interesting, an open history book spanning the last century of the automobile.  The Lincoln Highway, then US 40, and now I-80 all lay claim to the Donner Pass.  In the same way, the Pacific Highway, US 99, and I-5 have all shared the Tejon at various times. 

The most interesting is the ‘Old’ Ridge Route, the first planned and paved link crossing the pass, completed a hundred years ago.  At the time it was considered an engineering marvel, but it was soon obsolete due to faster and better-designed cars.  Unfortunately, today it is no longer possible to follow it in its entirety due to washouts and abandonment, and we had to turn back after a few miles due to slides, even with an SUV.  No other cars were to be seen.  Another road built at about the same time, the Old Santa Cruz Highway, which was the first paved route across the Santa Cruz Mountains, suffers the same curves and narrow pavement.  And speaking of pavement, an interesting note - the Pacific Highway was once the longest paved auto road in the world.  This was probably a real improvement over the much older Siskiyou Trail, whose path it followed from Oregon to California.

History aside, one mode of transportation notably absent from the Tejon Pass is rail, due to the steepness of the terrain.  Here the two passes differ.   In ‘The Ties That Bind’ I wrote about high-speed rail.   Assuming all goes as planned, the train will in eventually link San Francisco with Los Angeles, but after Bakersfield the line will run east to Palmdale before heading into the LA Basin.   A tunnel, though technically feasible, just doesn’t make financial sense – we’re not the Swiss!