September 7, 2005 - A Labor Day Weekend Adventure

September 7, 2005 - A Labor Day Weekend Adventure

Early Saturday morning—an overcast sky at 8:00 AM giving way to a late sunrise an hour later—my wife IM and I pack up her car and drive onto Highway 101 southbound at just before 10:00 AM. We are among the millions hitting the highway this Labor Day Weekend bound for some place other than where we are. In our case, our destination is Irvine, California where we plan to celebrate our daughter RD’s thirty something birthday and have a housewarming for the new place she and the family have just moved into. Southbound 101 is moving at a good pace and not with the heavy traffic we had expected to encounter. Gas being over $3 a gallon thanks to Hurricane Katrina or so they say, some among us might have chosen to stay home and have a neighborhood barbecue.

We exit Highway 101 at Highway 152 eastbound and stop just after we cross over 101 at a recently built shopping mall on the right hand side of 152 just east of the 101 interchange. There’s a new Mimi’s Restaurant in the center and we stop for breakfast. Arriving just after 10:00 AM we have no trouble getting a table. For those unfamiliar with Mimi’s, it’s a restaurant chain—we first encountered the chain in Orange County years back—with a country French ambiance: brick exterior with a patio seating area and booths around the walls and tables within the two to three dining areas inside. The walls are decorated with late 19th and turn of the 20th century posters of French artwork: Can Can dancers and the like. And the waitresses are attired in white blouse and skirt that suggest a French period that I would be hard pressed to identify.

As we place our order we hear sirens blaring on Highway 152 and turn to see CHP cruisers and fire trucks heading east on 152. “Pacheco Pass,” the waitress says, “it’s usually an accident on Pacheco Pass Road that gets the fire and CHP rolling.” I get concern thinking we’ll be tied up for hours as the emergency teams attend to a road-closing accident. There was nothing we could do however but press on as our only other alternative was to drive down 101 to Highway 46 at Paso Robles—think convoys of RVs as far as the eye can see on a two-lane blacktop between Paso Robles and Interstate 5 some seventy miles or so east. We chose the devil we knew over the devil we didn’t.

Highway 152 is a hazardous,1930s-1940s vintage road: two lanes of twisting macadam snaking from Gilroy, California all the way to Interstate 5, some 40 miles east. Right after 101, the highway passes the large Gilroy Garlic processing facility on the right, then over Llagos Creek, next curving left though a corridor of flat farmland for a mile of so then bending right passing more farms on either side of the road. After several miles, the flat terrain begins to give way to hills on the left side of the road, a stretch of neatly trellised vineyard, belonging to Mistral Vineyards on the left, a dairy farm missing its dairy herd on the right, the Cathy Grimes horse stable further along on the right. At the start of a holiday weekend, we’re curving and bending left and right continually along this stretch with 18-wheelers coming toward us at 50 MPH or more and a string of traffic in front or behind us. This morning, however, the amount of traffic is remarkably lighter than usual

The two-lane blacktop nears an end as we approach a steep incline where highway 152 races over a steep grade toward its rendezvous with Highway 156 at the bottom of the incline. We are completely surprised that we haven’t seen any sign of an accident or emergency activity. The waitress had been wrong. At the bottom of the grade, the road curves left and becomes a divided four-lane highway full of twists and turns as it runs toward its dizzying climb over Pacheco Pass. Two or three miles after Highway 152 widens, it passes Casa de Fruta, the fruit stand that has morphed into a destination spot along 152. It hosts the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in the Fall and offers a large RV park, gas station, restaurant and other amusements for vacationing families. Beyond Casa de Fruta, 152 picks up speed, as travelers hurry on their way to Interstate 5.

The amount of traffic approaching the grade is relatively sparse for a Labor Day Weekend Saturday as we begin our ascent to the top of Pacheco Pass. Caltrans has built concrete dividers between the eastbound and westbound lanes to prevent cars from crossing the short medium that previously separated the fast moving traffic. Before the concrete barriers, heavily traveled weekends would find someone driving across the medium and taking themselves and an unsuspecting oncoming traveler into eternity. We crest the pass and begin the roller coaster descent past the massive earthen O'Neill Dam holding back the waters of San Luis Reservoir, speeding past O'Neill Forebay—a huge bulge in the California Aqueduct, past Highway 33 and the truck stop at Santa Nella. About a mile or two down the road from the truck stop, we finally reach the onramp to Interstate 5—the California Aqueduct has likewise left the forebay, slid under I-5, and begins to follow us in our southward sojourn.

Interstate 5 is the high-speed, north-south corridor between the top and bottom of the state. Four hours at 70 MPH will bring us into LA, but the traffic along the road is easily doing 80 to 85 MPH, at times bursting to 90 or above along intermittent stretches of open road. The traffic clusters around unintentional convoys of 18-wheelers and slower moving RVs with a long line in the fast lane trying to pass the slower moving behemoths in the right and impatient drivers racing along on the right jumping the line of passing cars, SUVs, and minivans closer to the bottleneck.

Thirty miles south after getting on I-5 we stop at the Panoche Road exit and gas up with enough fuel to get us through LA and into Irvine without another stop—$3.39 a gallon! Thus, we avoid the rest stops further south that are continuously jammed with travelers making a pit stop, eating, or refueling as the day progresses. Back on the freeway, we notice a Sigalert on an electronic sign warning of a fire at Tejon Pass on the Grapevine with CHP escorting traffic over the summit. The Grapevine is so named because of grapevines found on early trails over the mountain. We quicken our passed concerned that in the two hours it will take us to get to the Grapevine, the CHP will have closed the road meaning a possible overnight in a motel at the bottom of the incline or a long wait in a long line of traffic in 100-degree F heat of the San Joaquin Valley floor.

As we near the base of the Grapevine, I-5 races toward its junction with Highway 99, the other north-south highway connecting the two extremes of the state. At the confluence, the road becomes as wide as six lanes in spots, eventually narrowing to four lanes where the road begins to ascend the grapevine—the right-most lane, dedicated to slow moving vehicles. There is nothing to suggest that the warning about a fire over the Tejon Pass might possibly have closed the road, except an ominous cloud of smoke that we see looming over the mountain range as we begin the ascent. Our concern is that smoke from the blaze—common this time of year in the Angeles National Forest though which I-5 runs—had become so dense that driving becomes too hazardous. We would simply get into lne and wait for the CHP escort once we neared the smoke affected area of the road.

The ascent up the grapevine is a long stretch of twisting road taxing every engine that mounts an assault. If there is an undetected problem in an older model car, this stretch of road will find it. Since our car is relatively new, just two years old, we ignore the warning to shut off the air conditioner before climbing the grade. And instead of nursing the car at 50 MPH, I’ve put the accelerator to the floor managing to reach 70 MPH or more on open stretches of uphill highway. As we reach the crest of the steep grade, we pass the Old Fort Tejon State Park and the CHP station on the left and begin a more gradual climb toward Lebec and Frazier Mountain Park Road at the summit of El Tejon Pass. I-5 from the CHP station is a stretch about five miles long of straight open road. At the end of the straightaway, begins a slow curve to the right as it heads toward the peak.

As we come around the gradual right curve—the Flying J Ranch across the highway on our left side, we are confronted with an horizon of smoke, darkening the sky on either side of the I-5. It reminds me of angry clouds that spawn tornados—lots of churning and swirling within the mass of gray-black darkness. As we race toward the curtain of ominous dark cloud hugging the ground, we have the impression of going into a tunnel. Nearing the Frazier Mountain Park Road exit on I-5, the traffic all begins to move into the two left lanes leaving the two right lanes completely open. I floor the accelerator passing cars on my left as the speedometer registered 75 and 80 MPH. As we approached the exit, we realized why all the cars had begun to merge left. Flames from the fire are leaping up the sides from the underpass of the highway licking maliciously at everything within reach. I began to move left into the third lane from the right and as we pass the exit, we can feel the flames’ heat permeating the passenger side of the car. The tunnel of smoke lasts no more than a quarter of mile along the left curving length of southbound I-5. Thereafter, the sun reappears and the road is completely open with only a sparse stream of fast moving traffic.

On the other side of the highway, the conditions are not as good: five lanes of slow-and-go traffic with a CHP pickup escorting the pack toward the inferno we had just traversed, the fire much more ominous on the northbound side as the flames rage for a longer stretch of the highway. The CHP would have been better advised to close down the two right-most lanes to keep cars away from harm. As we crest the left curving rise in I-5 a mile or so up the road beyond Frazier Peak, we see more smoke pouring onto the roadway from the right side as another part of the wildfire licks away at the dried fuel along the highway. Though there is smoke billowing up from the blaze, flames have not yet threatened the thinned stream of southbound traffic. However as we draw close to the smoke, we notice in the right most lanes closest to the flames not one but two large gasoline tanker trucks. I keep the accelerator floored—the car now traveling at nearly 75 MPH—and moved into the leftmost lane farthest from the fuel trucks.

As we reach the summit and begin the descent toward the Gorman exit on I-5, we put the fire further in our rearview mirror. On the northbound side of I-5, the traffic is slowed to a crawl across all four lanes waiting for CHP escorts to take clumps past the maelstrom. The ominous sirens we had heard at the start of our journey had foretold an emergency elsewhere. And I had reason to be concerned as we learned in radio news reports we heard an hour later as we reached the northern suburbs of Los Angeles—“I-5 over the Grapevine had been closed in both directions due to wildfires raging on either side of the highway.”