Half Moon Bay Memories & El Granada Observer

That’s Half Moon Bay in the distance–with the San Mateo-Half Moon Bay Road leading to the town. Note: there doesn’t seem to be anything on either side of the road–which means it must have been taken prior to the 1940s.

This is my favorite pix of old way to Half Moon Bay…

Photo: That’s me, standing beside the jeep…on the old, very bumpy Pedro Mtn Rd, circa 1970s…Guess you can’t see me…but I was there….

And here’s Pedro Mtn Road when it was much newer…1915?

The Coastside has a history of shuttle “buses”. This one shuttled passengers from San Gregorio, Pescadero and Swanton to Santa Cruz and back. Note the conductor sitting on his perch.

I wonder if our new shuttle be as colorful.

Photo: Randolph Brandt

Half Bay Memories & the El Granada Observer has commissioned an unofficial survey of the number of big commercial trucks and big rigs traveling to and fro on Highway 92.

And the numbers from this unofficial “eye count� are in.

“Approximately every sixth vehicle,â€? according to the ‘eye count’ survey, “is either a large commercial vehicle or big rig sandwiched in between commuter and passenger cars and smaller working trucks traveling to and from the Coastside during daylight hours on the weekdays.â€?

Well, there you have it. Every sixth vehicle is a large truck or big rig.

Are they all going to Devil’s Slide, to help fix the broken road?

Are they going to the dump?

Where are they going?

Should they be on the road during daylight hours while Devil’s Slide is closed, making life miserable for commuters and almost impossible for those who would come to shop and visit the Coastside?

From Montara Bob:

June, I finally have the solution for the Devil’s Slide fiasco.

We’re lucky to have Bechtel, the world’s mega-engineering firm based in San Francisco.

Bechtel has built total cities from scratch, railroads in Trinidad, power plants all over the world…..

Hey, Bechtel! How about giving us about a week-and-a-half, pro bono?

And clean up that little mess on Highway 1.

Easy ride “over the hill” yesterday, Saturday, May 27–but my sources tell me that 92 was very crowded coming & going yesterday, Sunday the 28th of May.

Bring the troops here to fix Devil’s Slide

Yesterday, I left home in El Granada at 9:50 a.m.: it’s only four miles to Half Moon Bay but forty minutes later found me mired in traffic on two-lane Hwy 92 about a mile east of Half Moon Bay.

It was confirmed that there had been an accident–a big, locally owned commercial truck hit head-on and the traffic was impossibly backed up. As I crawled up the mountain I saw quite a few cars strewn on the side of the road, with steam spewing out of their overheated engines.

It took me 1 & 1/2 hours to drive from El Granada to 280 in San Mateo, a ride that used to take 20 minutes. The stagecoach in the 19th century did better.

(There was one benefit: at this very slow pace I enjoyed the beautiful coastside scenery that I hadn’t noticed in years when whizzing by—what a terrific opportunity to practice patience and meditation—-unfortunately, the meditation led to drowsiness and I realized, with lids growing heavy, that I better stay alert or I’d fall asleep at the wheel).

Later, on the way home (you’d better make your return early, or you hit the commute traffic and you’re back bumper-to-bumper) I shopped at the Half Moon Bay Safeway. Another “victimâ€? standing in the checkout line was calculating the cost of driving “over the hillâ€? and back–$20 was his calculaltion. He was numbed by his own mathematics.

It’s incomprehensible that there is no solution, even temporary, to reopening the breathtaking stretch of Highway 1 known as Devil’s Slide.

It’s alleged by some that “the U.S. military can build a road anywhere in the world in about two hours”. Hey, how about bringing the troops to Devil’s Slide? It would give these young men and women a healthy and useful project to work on.

If getting the army to Devil’s Slide isn’t possible, remember we’re just a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley and Stanford, the birthplace of high tech– and we ‘re drowning in Nobel Prize winners. Surely someone can come up with a solution to get Devil’s Slide re-opened.

In the grand scale of things, a broken road is a very small deal…but what if one day we had a real disaster like an earthquake or a tsunami…I shudder at the thought….

What a weekend it was.

Last Saturday night, not only was Devil’s Slide shut down, the phones lines were down, the internet was down– God forbid if you had an emergency and had to call 911 because all you got was a busy signal (and one that sounded like a racing heartbeat).

For some unexplained reason the TV worked throughout.

And the local news told us that a landslide on Highway 92 (the only road open now that Devil’s Slide has slipped away) caused the service outages.

The time estimates on when service would be restored varied from unknown to 4 p.m. to midnight. Bay City News got it right on the button–around 4 p.m. on Sunday afternoon the landline came back to life, followed closely by the cell phone & 911 and the Internet. (We celebrated…quietly).

During the hours we were “without connection to the outside world” we took a ride “over the hill” and saw the many phone company vehicles parked near the cemetery, presumably close to the site of the landslide. There’s been construction going on there and a fiber optic line had been severed. (Don’t think too hard about that!).

We listened to the radio news and a county official confirmed coastsiders couldn’t get through to 911. Until phone service was back on line, he said police vehicles had been stationed at signal lights along Highway 1. Cops were told to roll down their windows so they could hear anyone shouting for help.

24 hours without phones, without Internet, without 911. Funny– when we got it all back, we took it all in stride, as if nothing had happened at all.

As a dear friend always says: “If you hang by the neck long enough, you get used to it.�