It’ll be a different ride through Devil’s Slide
A stretch of Highway 1 in San Mateo County will be refit for walkers and cyclists after an alternative road that tunnels through San Pedro Mountain is complete. Tunneling is expected to start next month.
The $275-million five-year project will burrow highway through rock while turning Devil’s Slide road -- 400 feet above crashing waves -- into a paved trail with parking lots at each end.
A state-proposed bypass around Devil’s Slide, prone to showers of mud and baseball-size rocks, was tangled in legal and political disputes for three decades. In 1995, storms closed it for 150 days, and the next year county voters approved the tunnel’s construction.
Surfers, anglers and whale watchers can still access nearby Montara State Beach and clothing-optional Gray Whale Cove. Land tagged for the now-defunct bypass will be folded into McNee Ranch State Park.
Save Our Bay wants more studies done on the effect of tunnel blasting, but Mark Delaplaine of the California Coastal Commission calls the project “a happy ending to a civil war.â€
-- Ashley Powers
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