Skip to main content

Old Creek Road

After completing Signed County Route G14 I headed on California State Route 46 west of Paso Robles to Old Creek Road.






Old Creek Road is a short connecting route between CA 46 and CA 1.  Old Creek Road is a somewhat infamous road in San Luis Obispo County that draws a lot of interest from motorcycle groups.  Interestingly Old Creek Road not only has a junction with CA 46 but also Santa Rosa Creek Road which was a former alignment of CA 41 before the 1964 Highway Renumbering in addition to post 1964 CA 46. 





Old Creek Road starts with a simple advisory sign that the next 5 miles are curvy which is an understatement.


From CA 46 Old Creek Road descends on a tall downhill grade from about 1,300 feet above sea level to 220 feet at the Whale Rock Reservoir.  Old Creek Road is extremely narrow through this section and the road bed has deep groves to deter lane crossing. 
















The Whale Rock Reservoir was completed in 1961 and impound Old Creek.  Its kind of strange to see a man-made lake floating above the Pacific Ocean which clearly can be seen not far to the west.





At the Whale Rock Reservoir the grade of Old Creek Road becomes far more shallow and it enters Cayucos where it terminates at CA 1.






Interestingly Old Creek Road has been around for quite a long time and probably was an even more useful road before CA 46 was realigned onto it's modern routing off Santa Rosa Creek Road.  The alignment of Old Creek Road can clearly be seen on the 1935 California Division of Highways map of San Luis Obispo County.  Interestingly it appears Old Creek Road used to run through what is now Whale Rock Reservoir onto 13th Street in Cayucos.  I find it odd that Old Creek Road never received a Signed County Route designation given that it would have made for a decent addition to the system and is old enough to be exempt from modern width requirements.

1935 San Luis Obispo County Highway Map



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Old River Lock & Control Structure (Lettsworth, LA)

  The Old River Control Structure (ORCS) and its connecting satellite facilities combine to form one of the most impressive flood control complexes in North America. Located along the west bank of the Mississippi River near the confluence with the Red River and Atchafalaya River nearby, this structure system was fundamentally made possible by the Flood Control Act of 1928 that was passed by the United States Congress in the aftermath of the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 however a second, less obvious motivation influenced the construction here. The Mississippi River’s channel has gradually elongated and meandered in the area over the centuries, creating new oxbows and sandbars that made navigation of the river challenging and time-consuming through the steamboat era of the 1800s. This treacherous area of the river known as “Turnbull’s Bend” was where the mouth of the Red River was located that the upriver end of the bend and the Atchafalaya River, then effectively an outflow

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

  Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third

California State Route 203 the proposed Minaret Summit Highway

California State Route 203 is an approximately nine-mile State Highway located near Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Mono County.  California State Route 203 as presently configured begins at US Route 395, passes through Mammoth Lakes and terminates at the Madera County line at Minaret Summit.  What is now California State Route 203 was added to the State Highway System in 1933 as Legislative Route Number 112.  The original Mammoth Lakes State Highway ended at Lake Mary near the site of Old Mammoth and was renumbered to California State Route 203 in 1964.  The modern alignment of the highway to Minaret Summit was adopted during 1967.   The corridor of Minaret Summit and Mammoth Pass have been subject to numerous proposed Trans-Sierra Highways.  The first corridor was proposed over Mammoth Pass following a Southern Pacific Railroad survey in 1901.  In 1931 a corridor between the Minarets Wilderness and High Sierra Peaks Wilderness was reserved by the Forest Service for po