Surfer babes and bros in LA know it as the PCH. In sandy-chic Carmel, the realm Dirty Harry once ruled, it’s called the Big Sur Coast Highway. To Santa Crustaceans in Banana Slug country, it’s the Cabrillo Highway or — when they’re trolling, and they always are — Mission Street. Meanwhile, Mendocino’s clandestine Parnassian pot growers prefer the Shoreline Highway.

But to the greater universe, it’s lovingly “the One.” As in Highway 1.

Stretching from the SoCal town of Dana Point in the OC to the rugged redwoods of Leggett in Northern California’s Mendocino County, it’s fitting that the polyonymous strip to the stars has more AKAs than Kanye West, who used to live right off of it in Malibu.

But California’s longest state route is considerably more low-key than it, having been created over the last century (at times, by cheap prison labor from San Quentin) in slow-moving, piecemeal fashion as a scenic, sexier alternative to US Route 101, often connecting otherwise unreachable coastal towns to the rest of the state (to the chagrin of some).

Highway 1’s problem child is its Big Sur leg, home to the most celebrated star of “Big Little Lies” after Reese Witherspoon: the Bixby Bridge.

Abusive Mother Nature — in the form of rainstorm-fueled rockslides, landslides, mudslides, basically all the slides that aren’t electric — closed the 90-mile stretch between Carmel and Cambria for the last three years.

And that’s not out of character. Points along that way literally include Paul’s Slide, Dolan Point Slide and Regent’s Slide.

Drivers had to be tragically detoured through the Salinas Valley on the 101. Never forget.

But hooray, in mid-January of this year, it reopened … until a month later in mid-February when, womp womp, after several thunderstorms, a 6.8-mile stretch of it near Regent’s Slide between the Esalen Institute and Lucia closed again due to mudslides and cleanup, only to be partially re-re-opened with one-way traffic.

And on and on it goes. Perils of that Central Coast grind. Remember: Traffic and weather on the 8s is not a lost art if you have a car radio.

Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos