Commentary: Highway bandits, Charles Lindbergh and the 700 curves; The story of the Ridge Route over Tejon Pass

What comes before 5?

Trick question. It’s not a number. The 5 I mean is Interstate 5, the massive road that muscles up and over the 4,160-foot Tejon Pass, connecting two parts of California so distinct from each other — Southern and Central California — that to this day there’s a lot of yakking about splitting the state up there, like a magician’s woman-in-a-box trick, severing us not with a crosscut saw but with a line on a map.

How, before the 5 was completed in 1970, did they do it? How did trucks and tourists and Californians manage the uphills and downhills among inclines and ridges that could be windy or icy or foggy, sometimes all at once? The Tejon Pass isn’t nearly as tall as its grander sister mountain ranges, but no one has to haul a big rig loaded up with peaches over Mt. Baldy or Mt. Whitney.

As you’re motoring away on your time off this summer, perhaps even driving over that very “Grapevine” on the I-5, here’s some backstory drama for you to take along in the passenger seat.

That route has had many historic incarnations, but in the early automobile age, before the I-5, there were two successive ones, each called the Ridge Route. The first one was finished in 1915, and it was one scary ride, crazy as a Mobius strip, with 697 curves in its 36 miles.

You can do the arithmetic: about 20 curves per mile, speed limit 15 mph. The views were spectacular, if you had the guts to swerve your eyes from the white-knuckling road. Only part of the original is open today but rarely and usually just to local traffic and occasional antique car clubs.

About 18 miles of it is on the National Register of Historic Places, and while you can’t see them at work, volunteers from the Ridge Route Preservation Organization are spending their summer months clearing the century-old lanes and filling weather- and rockslide-generated potholes to keep the road a road.

Human travel through those mountains began when Native Americans made the pass their home for a thousand years. They were encountered by Spanish soldiers who first trudged and trekked north in the 1770s.

The community name “Castaic” comes from a Chumash word meaning “the eye” or “eyes.” The Spanish had their own name, Canada de las Uvas, grapes canyon, for the wild Cimarron grapes flourishing there, which sounds a whole lot more romantic than “Tejon Pass.” Tejon means “badger” in Spanish, and all it took was some Spaniard on an 1806 expedition happening upon a dead badger there for the name to stick. Not a very imaginative lot, those Spanish explorers.

The U.S. Army built Ft. Tejon in 1854 mainly to monitor and subdue Native Americans, but before it closed, in 1864, it survived the fiercest recorded earthquake in California history, magnitude 7.9 on Jan. 9, 1857. Alonzo C. Wakeman, the fort’s quartermaster’s deputy, informed the Los Angeles Star that the earth “opened in many places for a distance of 20 miles.”

Obviously, clambering up and down the dangerously steep pass, ferrying goods on horseback or by mule or — for a few wacky, experimental months in the mid-1850s, Army camels — wasn’t workable. On the worst grades, wagons were lifted and lowered by pulley and rope.

A postcard depicting the Ridge Route, overlooking Castaic Creek.

(From Patt Morrison’s private collection)

Through the 1850s, various energetic Californians — men like Phineas Banning, the all-business “father” of the San Pedro port, and Andres Pico, the Californio rancher and senator in the new state Legislature — cut away rock and earth for an easier route through the pass. By 1858, the famous Butterfield stagecoaches were ferrying the mail through the cut over the pass, hazarding a vertiginous angle comparable with San Francisco’s Lombard Street, without the switchbacks.

And a few years after that, a federal appointee named Edward Beale directed Chinese laborers to deepen the cut in the rock until it was a curious-looking notch 90 feet deep and 15 to 20 feet wide. He also was allowed to charge tolls for passage, 25 cents for a man on horseback, a dime per head of cattle, so the name by which we know the site, “Beale’s Cut,” delivers a sardonic double meaning.

The first car to make the crossing was in 1902, a brand-new vehicle called an Autocar, driven by the then-legendary master of the fancy flivver, Ralph Hamlin. When his car stalled going uphill, Hamlin realized it was because no fuel was reaching his engine from the rear-mounted gas tank, so he drove the car in reverse the rest of the way to the summit.

Time, silt and seismic shaking have filled in much of the “cut,” but you can see it in myriad movies, most famously director John Ford’s classic “Stagecoach.”

Even this throughway soon couldn’t handle the traffic between Southern and Central California, and the incline was so dangerous that mule teams had to be summoned to rescue underpowered cars that couldn’t make the grade.

A postcard depicting the Ridge Route, along the “Horseshoe Bend,” overlooking Libra Gulch.

(From Patt Morrison’s private collection)

In December 1910 the Newhall tunnel opened wide — well, about as wide as Beale’s Cut a few hundred yards away. It tunneled 435 feet through the mountains for slightly easier descents and ascents.

It was safer, but short-lived. The first “Ridge Route,” the one with nearly 700 curves cut out of the mountainsides by mule and horse teams dragging scrapers, had opened in 1916 — a motorist’s marvel in the age of engineering marvels such as the L.A. aqueduct, which had opened three years before. The old Ridge Route cut several hours and many miles off a trip from L.A. to Bakersfield.

Road builders lived in settlements along the oiled-dirt road they were creating; the asphalt came several years later. You will not be surprised to know that where the new road went, so did new services — hotels, restaurants and, most vitally, repair garages. Places such as Sandberg’s Summit Hotel and the Lebec Hotel were oases for food and drink and sleep when wind and ice made the road impassable. Ulysses S. Grant Jr., the son of the president who was the Union’s victorious commander, was a guest at Sandberg’s when he died there in his sleep in September 1929.

A few months later, the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh made camp in Lebec to test a glider in the mountain drafts. Lebec’s thrilled schoolkids pouring out of their classrooms just to see Lindbergh come out of the weather station, and wouldn’t go back until Lindy himself told them to.

Death took no holiday on the old Ridge Route. In 1931, an Alabama woman’s car got sideswiped. It went 300 feet into a ravine, and for 50 hours, there she lay, with a broken leg, cradling her dying 12-year-old daughter until someone noticed her smashed car and called for rescuers.

You will also not be surprised to hear that the narrow, twisting, lampless road made perfect pickings for the literal crime of highway robbery. As a sample: in 1917, two thieves stretched a rope across the road, stopped a car, and relieved the dazed driver of his money.

In a single night in December 1923, 20 cars were stopped by robbers. Cars went so slowly that “bandits could run right up and jump on your running board and take your valuables.” That frightening detail comes from Sydney Croasmun, vice president of the Ridge Route preservation group.

She grew up in Santa Clarita and was working around there as a radio reporter one day, trying to get a better look at a fire she was covering, when she happened upon the old Ridge Route, and went back the next day “to nose around.”

That was 10 or 11 years ago. Now she is an equine photographer and she helps to keep the old highway in passable shape, especially in the nearly 18 miles that run through the national forest, the section that’s been designated a national historic place. That’s where the group’s volunteers work in concert with Southern California Gas crews patching the scores of potholes created by extreme nature, not by radial tires.

She has an immense enthusiasm for its isolation, its history and its time-travel beauty. It’s like a Brigadoon of the state’s motoring past. With the “Ridge Route Preservation Organization” sticker on her truck, she sometimes gets waved down by people who’ve gotten lost and ask, “Where are we?” Sometimes people get in touch with one request: “My grandpa wants to see it one last time.”

And sometimes she finds herself simply trying to convince skeptics that the original Ridge Route ever existed, and still does.

There are only a few spots where the big, brawny Interstate 5 overlaps with the old Ridge Routes, mostly for a short bit above the town of Grapevine.

Hundreds of vehicles were halted by a snowstorm on the Ridge Route on Dec. 16, 1940. The Ridge Route was an early route connecting the San Joaquin Valley to the Los Angeles Basin before Interstate 5 was built over the Tehachapi Mountains.

(Los Angeles Times)

The “new” Ridge Route, with its straighter and wider lanes, was called the Alternate when it opened in October 1933. As with any highway improvement, meeting the needs of the moment just increases demands for the future. The same thing happened with the first Ridge Route. By the early 1930s, traffic had outgrown the old route. So Ridge Route 2.0 was built, simply skipping the original, cutting wider lanes with fewer turns, lower down on the mountain grades, and so cutting time and distance off the L.A.-Bakersfield journey.

That newer Ridge Route got upgraded 10 or 12 years after it opened, but in time it was left in the mountain dust by the I-5 in 1970. Part of it, including five bridges, lies below the water of Pyramid Lake.

Along the old Ridge Route is a stretch that earned the name and reputation of Dead Man’s Curve, and the canyon below it as “the Junkyard.” Croasmun has driven the old route myriad times, and “I’m not going to say it’s completely haunted, but in a couple of spots you just feel, oh jeez … “

Snow blankets the top of the Tejon Pass on the I-5 at 4,160 feet between Gorman and Frazier Park on Nov. 27, 2019.

(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

Maybe there’s another reason to feel the prickles on the back of your neck.

Both the original and second Ridge Routes were once part of state Highway 99, and it is likely along the 1933 road that the Joad family traveled in John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Having made their wretched odyssey from the Depression-era Oklahoma dust bowl through deserts and mountains, the Joads finally get their rattletrap car up and over the Tehachapi mountains, and look down on their own promised land, the vast verdant quilt of the Central Valley.

“They drove through Tehachapi in the morning glow, and the sun came up behind them, and then — suddenly they saw the great valley below them. Al jammed on the brake and stopped in the middle of the road, and, ‘Jesus Christ! Look!’ he said.

“The vineyards, the orchards, flat valley, green and beautiful, the trees set in rows, and the farm houses. And Pa said, ‘God Almighty! … I never knowed they was anything like her’ … and Ruthie whispered, ‘It’s California.’”

Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison

Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.