Entries tagged with “Point Reyes-Petaluma Road”.


Around Christmas, my only pair of slippers came apart, and a cobbler in San Rafael insisted the damage could not be repaired. This would not be that big a deal for most people, but I wear size 15-wide, and no shoe store in Marin County handles slippers that large.

I went online to see if anyone around here does and found a shoe store in Santa Rosa which has shoes and slippers that big and bigger, Santa Rosa Shoes on Cleveland Avenue, so Lynn and I took my car to Santa Rosa Saturday to check out the selection. Sure, that was a long way to go for a pair of slippers, but who wants cold feet?

We headed east on the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road on a warm, sunny day until we reached the McEvoy Olive Ranch on Red Hill where a Highway Patrol officer standing on the road signaled us to stop. We, of course, did.

The reason was obvious. Less than an hour earlier (around 1:45 p.m.), a big rig tractor-and-trailer combination, which the CHP later said was traveling too fast for the road, had overturned. It was now lying on its side. Its cab was still on the pavement, but its trailer was dangling precariously down a steep embankment.

The driver of the truck, 54-year-old Douglas Schmidt of Winton [Merced County], was uninjured,” Highway Patrol press officer Andrew Barclay reported today. “Schmidt related that the refrigerated truck was full with miscellaneous grocery items and that he had lost control of the vehicle after he felt the trailer begin to sway from side to side as he navigated a series of reversing curves.

One lane of the road was open, but by the time I’d picked out a pair of slippers and we’d enjoyed dinner in Kettles Vietnamese Bistro near the shoe store, the situation had changed. When we tried to drive back home on the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road, we discovered both lanes were blocked.

The heavy equipment being used to pull the trailer back onto the road needed all the maneuvering room it could get.

Traffic was being rerouted onto San Antonio Road or back through Petaluma to Western Avenue. The officer directing traffic said he believed the San Antonio Road-Highway 101 connection, which has been closed for construction, was momentarily open. So we tried that route. Bad idea.

Not only was the connection still closed, we ended up driving for miles on frontage roads before heading back to Petaluma. From there, we drove west on Western Avenue toward Hicks Valley and saw an amazing scene. All the traffic on the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road was being diverted onto much smaller, rural roads, making backroads seem as crowded as Highway 101.

When we finally got to Hicks Valley, another roadblock was diverting eastbound traffic off the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road. But we were westbound, and we  were able to continue on our way back to Point Reyes Station. It had been a surprisingly tiring hunting trip, considering that our quarry had merely been a pair of slippers, but we did survive.

The road, which had been closed nine hours, was reopened today at 12:40 a.m.

CHP press officer Andrew Barclay reported this morning, “Our preliminary investigation indicates that unsafe speed for the roadway was the likely cause of this collision.”

Caltrans plans to hold a public meeting from 7 to 9 p.m. this Thursday, March 9, at West Marin School to discuss replacing the Green Bridge which carries Highway 1 over Papermill Creek in Point Reyes Station.

You’re familiar with Caltrans’ bridge work, I’m sure. Its star-crossed replacement of the eastern span of the Oakland Bay Bridge has become an endless story in the Bay Area news media.

Caltrans, which wants to spend $5.8 million replacing this bridge, says it has come up with four designs for a new one. The public will have a chance Thursday to comment on them.

In the mid-1800s, Olema was a far busier place than Point Reyes Station, and a ferry carried travelers going back and forth between the two towns. In 1875, the County of Marin built the first bridge in this location. Its modern replacement was obviously built in 1929.

This 100-foot-long span on Highway 1 carries approximately 3,000 vehicles per day, 4 percent of them trucks, Caltrans reports. The 10,000-foot-long Bay Bridge on Interstate 80 in comparison carries about 240,000 vehicles per day between Oakland and San Francisco.

Caltrans questions whether the 24-foot-wide Green Bridge is earthquake safe, saying its structure is okay, but its “deck geometry” is “basically intolerable.”

1959 photo by D.M. Gunn, courtesy of Dewey Livingston

The old Tocaloma Bridge was built in 1927 to carry Sir Francis Drake traffic over Papermill Creek in the town of Tocaloma, which lies 1.8 miles east of Highway 1 at Olema. The bridge was designed by J.C. Oglesby.

Oglesby also designed the matching Alexander Avenue bridge still in use in Larkspur. (Wikipedia Commons photo)

Oglesby’s old Tocaloma Bridge as it looks today.

The new Tocaloma Bridge carrying Sir Francis Drake traffic over Papermill Creek is immediately upstream from the old bridge. The state built the new bridge in 1962 at a cost of $210,000.

San Antonio Creek forms the boundary between Marin and Sonoma Counties, as seen from the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road while heading west.

The San Antonio Creek Bridge along the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road straddles the Marin-Sonoma county line just east of Union School.

The 102-foot-long bridge over San Antonio Creek was built in 1919 and replaced in 1962.

The continuous-concrete-slab construction of the 1919 bridge still looks solid. However, the bridge’s width and deteriorating pavement brought about its being replaced with the wider, better-paved bridge beside it.

When I set off to shoot these photos, I was well aware that West Marin’s abandoned bridges are in scenic locales, but this view from the old San Antonio Creek Bridge was, nonetheless, a pleasant surprise.

If Caltrans has its way, the Green Bridge will likewise be abandoned in the near future. Will it then become an historic relic like these? Or will it be cut up and sold as scrap iron?

Nowhere is the effect of the ongoing drought more dramatic than at Nicasio Reservoir, which is currently only half full. According to Marin Municipal Water District (MMWD) which owns the reservoir, West Marin is in its ninth drought since 1975. At least as measured on Mount Tamalpais.

MMWD, however, is not yet hurting for water. Its seven reservoirs together are still 92 percent full thanks to late-spring rains.

Nicasio Reservoir is so low because the district is steadily drawing on it to supply the San Geronimo Valley treatment plant while leaving as much water as possible in its other reservoirs, which are slower to fill. These include Lagunitas, Phoenix, Alpine, Bon Tempe, Kent, and Soulajule.

Today’s Nicasio Valley Road can be seen to the left of the low-lying old Nicasio Valley Road. This photo of Nicasio Reservoir was taken in 2009 when the water level was also dropping.

Nicasio Reservoir was created by the erection of Seeger Dam in 1961. The new reservoir flooded a number of longtime ranches and inundated the north end of Nicasio Valley Road, which had to be relocated to higher ground (as seen at left).

When the water level dropped this year, thousands of freshwater clams were left stranded and easy prey for various creatures.

Among the creatures currently scavenging on the reservoir’s increasingly exposed bottom are daily flocks of Canada geese.

The old Nicasio Valley Road and its bridge often remain submerged for several years at a time. These days they are high and dry, far from the water’s edge.

Even the centerline on the usually flooded old road is visible in many places now that the water level has dropped.

January, 2010

Creation of the reservoir in 1961 also necessitated relocating a large section of the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road, a project that cost more than acquiring land and building a dam.

A relic of a mishap that occurred during the construction of today’s roadway can still be found half-hidden in fennel and Andean grass on the south side of the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road between Platform Bridge and Seeger Dam.

It’s easy to overlook this rusted steel bar sticking out of a basalt roadcut about 50 yards downhill from Laurel Canyon Road, but according to oldtimers there is a curious history behind it.

As part of blasting through the rock 55 years ago, the road builders one day were drilling a hole for some explosives when their drill shaft broke. Removing it would have required considerable work, so they merely cut off the top and left the bent shaft sticking up beside the road where it can still be seen.

I first heard this account from an oldtimer I knew decades ago, and today I asked Pete Maendle of Inverness Park if it was accurate. Pete is the senior road maintenance supervisor in West Marin for the country Department of Public Works, and he said he had heard the same thing from oldtimers in his department.

So see if you can spot the broken drill shaft the next time you drive slowly by. It’s easy to miss because of all the vegetation around it, but it’s a relic of an historical mishap.