California marked a milestone this month with the return of an uninterrupted Highway 1 through the perilous, yet spectacular cliffs of Big Sur.
The famed coastal road was closed for more than three years after two major landslides buried the two-lane highway, and it took unprecedented engineering might and precarious debris removal to once again connect northern Big Sur with its southern neighbors.
But no one expects this will be the end of Highway 1’s battle with the forces of nature, especially in a world facing the intensifying effects of human-caused climate change.
“We, in Big Sur, know to plan with a grain of salt,” said Matt Glazer, executive director of Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn, located near the northern end of the closure. “This is a snapshot in time, and the ever-changing coast of Big Sur is something that makes it beautiful.”
A turbulent climate always has been the nemesis of Highway 1’s splendor. The seaside road routinely has closed because of rockslides, mudflows, flooding, wildfires and coastal erosion, most notably in Big Sur but also in several sections from Malibu up through the North Coast.
But this latest closure — what appears to be the longest in Highway 1’s 90-year history — raises new questions about how the highway can survive amid increasingly strong and unpredictable storms, seas and fires.
“If our storm and other conditions were normal, we would expect closures and losses at some points,” said Michael Beck, director of UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Coastal Climate Resilience. “The challenge is that we’re now clear that the events that are going to cause impacts — these particularly extreme events — are getting more common. … Climate change is here and now, it’s no longer a problem of the future.”
And those intensifying climate conditions — higher, stronger waves that accelerate erosion; wetter, more volatile atmospheric river storms that trigger landslides; and hotter, more destructive fires that create conditions ripe for mudflows — affect much of the 650-mile coastal highway running from south Orange County to Mendocino County.
But the confluence of these climatological issues is particularly apparent in Big Sur, where waves, storms and wildfire regularly affect its uniquely steep and fragile landscape, made up of a “melange” of rock types especially susceptible to change, said Jonathan Warrick, a U.S. Geological Survey research geologist at the Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz.
“We have waves undercutting [the cliffs] … and then we get big rains that kind of provide a lubrication for these things to crumble and fail,” Warrick said. “And then we have wildfires, and when that happens, often we can have debris flows coming down these mountainsides.”
Glazer said he can’t remember a so-called normal year in Big Sur — one without major road closures, dangerous wildfire or damaging flooding — since before 2015.
The last decade has been marked by turmoil in the region from major wildfires that forced evacuations and destroyed homes, causing burn scars that fostered dangerous debris flows. Most notably in 2017, heavy rains caused back-to-back emergencies: first the failure of the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge and then a major landslide near Mud Creek that left residents cut off for months as the California Department of Transportation worked on repairs through 2019. Then, storms in the winter of 2022-23 triggered the first of two major landslides that kicked off the roadway’s subsequent three-year closure.
“That’s 11 years of something happening,” Glazer said. “It’s unquestionable that climate change and environmental impacts are impacting the speed and severity of which things change. … Climate resilience has to be part of the conversation.”
And while California has continued to lead many of the nation’s discussions and efforts related to climate change mitigation, specifics about how it is preparing for and responding to issues across Big Sur and Highway 1 remain relatively elusive.
Caltrans, the agency tasked with Highway 1’s upkeep, has spent millions each year on such efforts, specifically an estimated $162 million on four major repairs and stabilization projects since January 2023, according to agency spokesperson Kevin Drabinski. But he did not respond to questions from The Times about the agency’s large-scale climate resiliency planning for Big Sur and the entirety of Highway 1.
