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Opinion Editorials Our View: Some mysteries still out there on old highway
Our View: Some mysteries still out there on old highway
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As a journalist, I like to have all my questions answered. As a hiker, I’m usually satisfied to finish a journey with some mysteries still unsolved, leaving the potential for future discoveries on a return trip. Since I write about many of my hikes in the newspaper, these predilections sometimes clash. So it was when I emerged from a section of the Coastal Trail from Damnation Creek up to Enderts Beach. Much of the trail followed the original Redwood Highway, built in the ’20s and abandoned in the ’30s. Last Saturday, I wrote about the trail’s haunting atmosphere, emanating from the knowledge that many decades ago, early automobiles cruised along the same route. It’s about a seven-mile stretch, and for at least a couple of those miles, the hiking trail leaves the old highway at a point where the road hugged the ocean bluffs so tightly that sections of it fell into the sea. Therein lay the mystery. I was watching closely as I walked north on the Coastal Trail, and I never could discern exactly where the paths diverged a couple miles south of Nickel Creek. A quaint mystery to further investigate someday, my inner-hiker told me. A pesky hole in the story that demands filling, said my inner-journalist.
As usual, the latter spoke loudest, so I took two steps. First, I
procured the book, “Touring the Old Redwood Highway, Del Norte County,”
by Diane Hawk. Then I called Rick Nolan, chief of interpretation for
Redwood National & State Parks, who provided me with a 2001 report
about roads past and present through Del Norte Coast Redwoods State
Park.
The book mainly focuses on the auto camps and other attractions that sprang up along the route of the old highway, while the park report mostly deals with the current stretch of U.S. Highway 101 finished in 1935 to replace the old roadway. Some notable gems of knowledge tumbled out of each: • Construction of the original Redwood Highway initially led to an increase in commercial logging. But when three prominent conservationists drove the route and saw the results of logging activity so close to the highway, they formed the Save the Redwoods League. • For all its precarious cliffs and steep climbs, by 1929 the original highway was hopping. During “peak season,” an average of 1,850 cars passed through the stretch south of Crescent City, “although numbers dropped with the onset of the Great Depression,” the report said. Replacing it in 1935, a highway engineer said at the time, eliminated “205 sharp and dangerous curves.” • Among the vehicles braving the old highway were 16-passenger motor coaches that kept regular schedules. In a precursor to today’s mass-transit rationale, one of the coach operators advertised that “It is cheaper to ride by stage than to drive your own car!” • When northbound motorists passed Enderts Beach and emerged from the wilderness, they faced very different highway routes through Crescent City. The Redwood Highway followed Elk Valley Road northeast toward Gasquet and eventually Grants Pass. To continue north toward Brookings on Highway 101, also then known as the Roosevelt Highway, the route diverted traffic straight through downtown Crescent City by turning left on Second, right on H and right on Ninth. Alas, neither Hawk’s book nor the park report shed much light on exactly where today’s Coastal Trail stops following the old Redwood Highway, although they both displayed a 1934 map showing the serpentine course of the original road south of Crescent City and the streamlined path of the newfangled highway that was about to open. They also both mentioned the county wagon road that was finished in 1894, opening a path from Crescent City to Eureka, via a ferry at Requa. It turns out sections of the Coastal Trail I recently hiked also followed that road. Now if I could just figure out exactly where. |
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