Highway 101: The History of El Camino Real

THE REDWOOD HIGHWAY

Just a little north of San Francisco, U.S. 101 reaches the northernmost of California’s 21 missions—San Francisco de Solano in Sonoma County—and stops being El Camino Real. Northward, it’s the Redwood Highway.

It’s not hard to see why.

The heart of that drive takes you through one of the most breathtaking stretches of countryside you’re likely to see, featuring views of old-growth redwoods whose history far predates that of the road itself or the motorcars that traverse it.

In 1922, P. A. McFarland of Concord told the Oakland Tribune of the beauty he found on the northern section of this road, between Eureka and the Oregon state line: “From Eureka to Crescent City, the route winds through virgin redwood forests much of the way. In many places the road is cut out of the side of the cliffs which drop off, almost sheer into the ocean. On the one side is a great forest of redwood and on the other the sea pounding against the cliffs.”

That estimation hasn’t changed today, with travelers and road enthusiasts remarking at the highway’s beauty throughout the Redwood Empire, as it is known.

The Redwood Tree Service Station is still an eye-catching sight in Ukiah.

The road itself, however, wasn’t always easy to drive.

Harvey M. Harper was reportedly the first man to see the redwoods from the front seat of his car when he drove his Model T from Phoenix to Eureka in 1912. It took him 40 days to get there, but he must have liked what he saw, because he founded one of the country’s oldest Ford dealerships in Eureka that same year. His son, Harvey G. Harper, who inherited the business, recalled what his father had told him about the trip, made six years before the younger Harper was born.

His father, he said, used a shovel to clear a path around the giant trees so his car wouldn’t get stuck on the muddy trail.

Later, his father took the family on picnic trips some 70 miles south to Twin Trees, near Benbow on the Eel River. Even then, in the 1920s, the road was little more than a dirt-and-gravel path that spewed forth clouds of dirt and dust as the car traversed it.

“My mother said she could never live in southern Humboldt [County because] it was too dusty,” the younger Harper said. “Further south, Mendocino County even had a law against automobiles for a while, when noisy engines spooked horses.”

Harper added that his father “sold tractors and road equipment to the Highway 101 crews that improved the road over the years: It was tough country, and they went through a lot of equipment to build the road back then.”

Another section of the old highway between Ukiah and Willits was so narrow and winding that “you could get stuck behind a truck for what seemed like forever,” Harvey G. Harper recalled.

Farther south, dirt wasn’t the problem; marshland was. According to A History of Corte Madera, roadbuilders laid in a section of U.S. 101 directly across the North Bay marshes of Marin County. When waters sometimes rose with the tide on both sides of the thoroughfare, worried drivers were eager to get to the other side. A quarter-mile bridge across Richardson Bay was built in 1931 using, appropriately enough, redwood.

“It was built out of redwood timbers, supposedly to last hundreds of years,” Caltrans historian Alicia Whitten said of the Redwood Bridge, “but just 25 years later, in 1956, it was replaced with a much wider steel and concrete structure.”

A trip up the coast from the North Bay to Eureka would take you a couple of days in the early 1920s—compared to maybe six hours today—but with so much scenery to take in, it wasn’t a trip most travelers were inclined to rush. A. J. Beckett, one of the proprietors of an Oakland distributing company, sang the praises of the roadway in 1922:

“From Willits north the scenic country begins. The road climbs up and down among the mountains there with easy grades and fine traveled roads all the way to Eureka. … From Cummings, about 40 miles above Willits, the road follows the Eel River most of the way to Eureka, and the scenery is well worthwhile.

If you take along a camping outfit you should be sure and have enough blankets, because the nights are chilly there, even if the elevation is not so great.

There are many places to stop along the road. Most of the resorts run the year round. They are really hunting lodges, because there always is some sort of game in season in Mendocino and Humboldt counties.”

The old highway through the heart of Petaluma.

PETALUMA TO WILLITS

Of course, the road wasn’t the same as it is today. As with other highways, alignments were upgraded and bypassed with straighter, wider roads.

Traveling north, the old highway went straight through Petaluma on Petaluma Boulevard until it was bypassed in 1956. Among the sights of note there are the old Mystic Theatre, a vaudeville house that opened in January 1912 and played host to a scene from American Graffiti, and the Hotel Petaluma, which welcomed its first guests 12 years later.

The hotel was Petaluma’s love letter to the world. More than 1 in 10 of the town’s residents—850 in all—pooled their resources and came up with $250,000 of the $350,000 needed to build the establishment, which served not only as a hotel but a hub of social activity in the community. A bronze placard at the hotel declared, “It stands as evidence and proof of the faith which the people of Petaluma have in each other and in their city.”

Petaluma was known as “the World’s Egg Basket” for good reason. The 1939 WPA Guide noted that the roads leading into town were “often clogged by trucks heavily loaded with crates of eggs and white leghorns,” adding that “the slopes around town echo with the cackle of hundreds of thousands of chickens.” So devoted was the town to its fowl pursuit that it even had a chicken pharmacy.

The highway was a perfect location for shipping the town’s most renowned product to the world at large. So, in 1927, Bill McCarter chose a spot just north of town in Penngrove as the site for his new “electric hatchery.” By the time he sold the brick building in 1944, McCarter’s Penngrove Hatchery had a laying capacity of about 360,000 eggs in a day. Mechanical incubators turned the eggs, a trayful at a time, and the chicks hatched there were nurtured in heated brooders. The building ceased being used as a hatchery sometime in the late 20^th century and later became a saddle shop.

The historic Mystic Theatre and Music Hall in downtown Petaluma was built in 1911 and is still open.

In the same area was the Green Mill Inn, which started out as a roadside stand selling (surprise) chicken, along with fruit pies. It soon expanded to include a dining room that hosted various social functions. A 1932 ad in the Petaluma Argus-Courier said you could get either chicken and dumplings or a roast goose dinner for 75 cents.

“By the 1940s, it was a popular spot for upscale dining and dancing,” said U.S. 101 historian Dan Young. “In the ’60s, I loved going there with my family, because every meal included unlimited trips to the generous smorgasbord. Couples looking for a romantic evening could take advantage of two private dining rooms.”

Young said the restaurant closed in the 1980s and has stood idle ever since, but “if you stop and peek through the curtains, you’ll see the tables in the dining room still laid for dinner.”

The Old Redwood Highway heads north into Cotati, another old poultry town, after which the it makes its way through Santa Rosa as Santa Rosa and Mendocino Avenues. As you entered town from the south, you’d come upon the inevitable row of motels, auto courts, and service stations eager for your business. Most are gone, but at least one, the 1950s-era Monte Vista Motel, was still open for business as of this writing.

On the right, just before you hit down-town, is the Santa Rosa Marketplace, a modern outdoor shopping center anchored by various big-box stores. In earlier times, though, it was the site of the El Rancho Tropicana (did every town along the highway have an inn called the El Rancho?). With 180 “deluxe hotel units,” 14 banquet and meeting rooms, and the requisite 24-hour coffee shop, it billed itself in a 1966 newspaper ad as “the finest deluxe hotel, restaurant and cocktail lounge in the Redwood Empire.”

Whether that claim was true or hyperbolic, the Oakland Raiders weren’t about to argue. In fact, they had a hand in making the El Rancho what it was.

From 1963 to 1984, the motel served as the pro football team’s summer headquarters. The team was still a member of the upstart American Football League, and Al Davis—who was just 33 at the time—had just taken over as the team’s head coach and general manager when he drove up Highway 101 and came upon the El Rancho Tropicana. Other teams held their summer training camps on college campuses, but Davis wanted his players to get out of Oakland as they prepped for the coming season, and the El Rancho seemed to him like the perfect place.

The Raiders set up a locker room and had practice fields behind the hotel (where an Office Depot now stands), and they studied films of the practices in the motel’s conference rooms. They had their own section of the motel: An annex out back with a central courtyard, it was dubbed “the Zoo.” The players were encouraged to stay away from the guests in the main area of the motel, but they’d ignore that advice to hang out beside one of the three pools—where swimsuit-clad female guests were, not coincidentally, also known to congregate.

Look closely: This home a couple of blocks off U.S. 101 in Santa Rosa is actually a converted Richfield Beacon station.

“I worked at a gas station across the street, which has since been demolished,” Dan Young recalled. “Some of the team used to come in to the store—not the first-string guys, though. But anyone could go behind the motel and watch them practice, there was no security or anything.”

The motel grew during the Raiders’ tenure there from a 25-room horseshoe-shaped motor inn to a 275-room complex. The Raiders kept training there for three years after Davis moved the team south to L.A. in 1982, then looked to the El Rancho again when he moved the team back to Oakland in ’95. But the old motel had been torn down just months earlier.

The old highway’s name changes from Santa Rosa Avenue to Mendocino Avenue near the center of town. For a quick detour, head east for a block on Chanate Road and turn right on Lomitas Avenue. One house down from the corner on the west side of the street is a house whose architecture might look familiar. That’s because the house is actually a converted Richfield Beacon station (in the southern Spanish mission style). No gas pumps. No tower. Just your standard landscaping out front and an SUV in the driveway.

The Old Redwood Highway continues north of Santa Rosa and morphs into Healdsburg Avenue through the community of the same name. Before you get to town, you’ll pass what’s left of a 1920s-era roadhouse called Windsor Castle. It just looks like a two-story residence these days, but the old-style wooden overhang in the front betrays what used to be the gas pump island. It also gives the place its “castle” feel.

“Like most nightclubs at that time it was a speakeasy, with liquor available if you knew the password,” Dan Young said. “It continued to operate into the ’50s, with a coffee shop and some cabins in the back. Today all that’s left is the building which once housed the gas station.”

This 1920s-era roadhouse in Healdsburg, north of Santa Rosa, was known as Windsor Castle.

A mile and a half farther north, the road passes under a 1915 railroad crossing, one of the few landmarks in the area that predate the 101 designation. Another bridge—one that carries the cars on the old highway across the Russian River—marks the entrance to Healdsburg. The 1921 Pennsylvania truss bridge was renovated at a cost of $12 million in 2015, with the upgrade including bridge lamps made in the style used during the Roaring Twenties.

The bridge nearly didn’t make it to the 21^st century: Caltrans gave it a poor safety rating in 1979, and there was talk of tearing it down. But the agency eventually withdrew that rating, saying it had been faulty and the bridge was safe to carry legal loads.

From Healdsburg north, the highway grows more rural, with fewer subdivisions and more farms and vineyards lining the road, called Geyserville Avenue through that small community and Cloverdale Boulevard farther on. When you hit Cloverdale, you’ll get a look at a couple of old eateries on the old alignment through the down-town area. The Owl Café is closed now, but when I drove by, it still sported a vintage neon sign in the shape of its avian namesake, and the tables inside were set as if the next lunch crowd was about to arrive.

Pick’s Drive In at First Street in the center of town has been around even longer, dating back to 1923, and is still in business.

If you go another mile north, you’ll hit the junction with State Route 128, where you’ll want to turn left, away from the current highway. This road will take you north-west up into the hills to Mountain House Estate, at which point you’ll veer north again on the winding Mountain House Road. While it may seem unlikely, this was the U.S. 101 Alignment until roughly 1934. Dan Young describes the drive:

Pick’s Drive In in Cloverdale has been operating since 1923.

For the next nine miles, you will experience motoring as it was almost one hundred years ago. This is a lightly traveled route. In fact, you may not meet another vehicle until you reach Hopland where the old route converges again with the modern highway. You’ll enjoy some pretty scenery, including cow pastures, vineyards and acres of moss-laden trees.

You’ll cross a couple of old bridges, too, although they don’t stand out and it would be easy to drive on through without even noticing them. One dates to 1913 and another, near the entrance to the Red Barn Ranch, was built a year earlier and upgraded in ’32. Both dates are stamped into the bridge’s concrete, and Young says it’s the only bridge he’s ever seen with two dates stamped in the same place.

North of Cloverdale, the two main stops before the redwoods are Ukiah and Willits.

In Ukiah, the old alignment follows State Street, where you’ll find such landmarks as the Ukiah Theater and the Redwood Tree Service Station.

The Willits sign welcomes U.S. 101 travelers to the northern California city, which has since been bypassed by a new freeway alignment that opened in late 2016.

Willits, a few miles north of Ukiah, offers proof that highway bypasses are still being constructed, even into the 21^st century. The Willits Bypass finally opened to traffic in November 2016, six decades after it was originally proposed. Construction began in 2012, and the project cost $300 million to complete. You can still take the old alignment through town, of course, passing beneath the distinctive neon-lit Willits arch just south of the junction with State Route 20.

INTO THE TREES

Heading north into the hills, it was more of a challenge to build the highway. If you want evidence, all you have to do is look at a couple of viaducts that hug the hillsides—sections of highway no longer in use. One’s still mostly intact, and the other is now mostly not.

The first one—the “mostly intact” one—is the Sidehill Viaduct, which Young also referred to as “The Tilt-A-Whirl,” “the Roller Coaster,” “the Slab” and “the Rock Star of Old 101.” It’s about 90 years old, and it’s been out of service for the last 30 years of that. You might have to walk over or past some rocks that have slid down from the hillside, but you can still walk the length of it at this writing. Much of the old concrete railing is still intact, and you can peer out beyond it to the Eel River below and the modern highway. You can also tell how difficult it would have been for two-way traffic, especially trucks, to pass this way.

“Imagine driving out onto this narrow viaduct on a pitch black rainy night, coming around the bend and finding a lumber truck bearing down on you,” Young said. “I experienced this myself in the 1970s multiple times.”

The second old viaduct is just a mile farther north. Turn off the highway at the longtime tourist stop called Confusion Hill and keep going to the end of the parking lot. You’re actually driving on the old highway here, but there’s a gate at the far end that keeps you from going any farther. If you want, though, you can get out and walk past the gate. You can go a short distance on foot along the old highway pavement before it starts to disappear beneath sticker-filled grass (if you do this, be sure to bring extra shoes and socks), along with newly planted trees in the middle of the old route that are being used to reclaim the land—and help hold it in place.

There’s a reason this mountainside is called the “Confusion Hill Slide”: In the days when the highway used this route, the rainy season caused frequent mudslides and road damage—and closures. Between 1997 and 2006, Caltrans spent an estimated $33 million clearing away debris that had fallen down onto the road. Today, much of the old viaduct is gone, having slid down the hill into the canyon below, but you can look across from this vantage point and see the bridge that carries the modern highway, towering over the south fork of the Eel River below.

The majestic south bridge towers 255 feet above the river. Two bridges were actually built to span the river over a quarter-mile distance, with the pair being completed in 2009 at a cost of $67 million.

Despite its impressive height, the south span isn’t the highest bridge on Old 101. An open-spandrel concrete arch called the Cedar Creek Bridge actually rises 291 feet, farther above the creek for which it’s named than the Golden Gate is above San Francisco Bay. It’s part of a section of highway—now State Route 271—through Leggett that dates back to 1917, when prison laborers from San Quentin were conscripted to do the work.

To get a better look at the abandoned Confusion Hill viaduct, your best bet is to drive to the north end of the bridge, take an immediate right onto the other end of the old highway, and follow it back south as far as you can. It eventually stops, and from there, you can hike out onto a section of the abandoned viaduct that’s still intact. You’ll see where some of the aforementioned trees have been planted, and runoff has cut into the flat area in at least one place. Farther on, some of the old railing is still in place. But a word of warning: This is nothing like the Sidehill Viaduct, and I wouldn’t recommend going too far. You’ll see plenty of rockslides on the hill, and you don’t want to end up at the bottom of a new one. At a certain point, you won’t be able to make it any farther without losing the road entirely, and it may not be many years before the entire area is impassible on foot.

FLOOD OF THE MILLENNIUM

The Confusion Hill Viaduct hasn’t been the only victim of geology and the elements along the Redwood Highway.

Entire portions of the highway built during the first half of the 20^th century are gone for good—not only because of bypasses and new alignments but, in some cases, because they were literally washed away.

In the winter of 1964, Mother Nature came calling before Santa could get his sleigh packed up and delivered the kind of “gift” North Coast residents would never dream of putting on their Christmas lists. This wasn’t any ordinary lump of coal. It was a full-on tirade, the likes of which no one in the area had ever seen.

This photo taken from the Confusion Hill Viaduct shows the stone guardrail from the old, overgrown alignment in the foreground and the new, state-of-the-art span in the distance.

Nine years earlier, almost to the day, the area had endured “the storm of the century.”

If that was the case, this was the storm of the millennium.

The 1955 storms were still fresh in the memories of local residents. They remembered the flood warnings issued on December 18 of that year, followed in short order by the floods themselves. It was worst along U.S. 101, which ran parallel to the Eel River, and the Redwood Empire stood defenseless against the river’s onslaught as it escaped its banks and inundated the highway.

A federal report on the flood of ’55 tallied the damage:

“The high-velocity flow carrying heavy debris either flattened buildings or swept them from their foundations,” the report read. The lumber industry took the heaviest damage, “as facilities were destroyed and large stocks of logs and finished lumber were swept away.” A photo taken near Fernbridge showed the Eel River having taken a Godzilla-sized bite out of old Highway 101, at one point consuming the entire southbound lane of asphalt.

The communities of Stafford, Elinor Pepperwood, Shively, South Fork, Myers Flat, Phillipsville, and Bull Creek were “devastated,” the report read.

Word arrived of people clinging to the rooftops of houses and even barns that were being swept away by the river’s fury. The torrent did even more damage by sweeping up cut logs and slamming them into the sides of buildings that still clung to their foundations. Roads were so severely damaged that communities found themselves isolated for weeks after the storm, and residents couldn’t even get word out to family members because the phone lines were down, too. Even the massive redwoods were no match for the floodwaters. Trees as thick as 15 feet in diameter collapsed, unable to stay upright in the saturated earth, with as many as 500 fallen trees clogging Bull Creek.

Livestock was swept away and perished by the hundreds. A skating rink in Scotia was destroyed, never to be rebuilt, and a similar fate was feared for the historic Stafford Inn, which had been built as a bunk house in the late 19^th century by lumber mill owner (and town founder) Percy Brown. Before the flood, the inn had advertised “the finest cuisine in a traditionally hospitable setting,” with a complete dinner of pork chops in charcuterie sauce with water chestnuts for a mere $3. But afterward, a New Year’s Eve headline in the Humboldt Times had to reassure its readers: “Stafford Inn Still There.”

“All during the big flood, and even afterwards, stories continued to filter out that the Stafford Inn had disappeared,” the Times reported. “Topping off its experience of having the river all around it, the Stafford Inn is holding its final night of the current season this evening.”

The inn did, indeed survive the flood of ’55—only to be destroyed nine years later in a deluge that made its predecessor seem gentle by comparison.

There were warning signs before the big storm hit. Earlier storms had moved through the area in November, softening up hillsides and feeding rivers and streams around the area. A high-pressure system had choked off the flow of storms in early December, but then it began to weaken, and as it did, it gave way to a new storm track nearly 500 miles wide, extending from Hawaii to Northern California.

The band of clouds heading in from the tropics was flush with precipitation just waiting to be delivered to the north end of the state.

The first rains fell from December 15 to 20 and on December 18, the National Weather Service sounded the alarm, issued flood warnings for the days ahead, and urged area ranchers to evacuate their livestock.

Then the second storm hit December 21 to 24.

The results were devastating.

In 1955, the highest single-day rainfall total in Garberville had been 3.23 inches in 1955; the top figure in ’64 was more than 2½ times that amount: 8.29 inches. More than 4 inches fell in ’64 near the mouth of the Smith River, just off the highway a few miles south of the Oregon border. That was significantly more than the 2.74 inches recorded there nine years earlier, but also much less than fell in the mountains, where swollen headwaters fueled the frantic floodwaters’ rush downhill to meet the ocean.

By midday on December 21, water from the Eel River was 8 inches over Fish Creek Bridge near Benbow, site of the historic Benbow Inn. The Tudor-style lodge just off the highway that opened in 1926—the same year the highway was designated U.S. 101—and attracted the likes of Basil Rathbone, Joan Fontaine, Clark Gable, Herbert Hoover, Alan Ladd, Charles Laughton, Eleanor Roosevelt and Spencer Tracy in its heyday.

The inn itself survived the flood, even as mud and debris choked off the highway.

An Arcata High School teacher named Erling Daastol watched events unfold from a trailer at the H and H trailer park in Stafford, just below U.S. 101, on September 22, 1964. He and a friend had spent the previous night in the trailer, taking a “wait and see” approach, but when they awoke the next morning, the water was rising steadily—about a foot and a half each hour.

“At about noon, the river water seemed to be breaking through the woods over by Stafford Inn, heading for the trailer court and the area around Kemp’s grocery store,” Daastol wrote. “My friend and I hooked up the trailer and headed up the hill toward the P. L. logging road. It was high time. The water was right below the pan of our pickup.”

Their wheels were stuck in the mud, but a red-haired gentleman, known to Daastol only as “Red,” managed to pull them out using a four-wheel-drive Jeep and parked it up the hill. He repeated the procedure with two other trailers and a Lincoln. But by the time he got to the third and final trailer at the park, he didn’t have enough time to secure it using the trailer hitch. So, he “threw a heavy chain around the tongue of the trailer and floated the trailer out of the water,” Daastol recalled. “The water was so high that the top of the wheels of the Jeep was under water. The top of the river was approaching the highway now. Kemp’s grocery and the homes immediately below the road were filling with water.”

Daastol joined others in rushing to remove the owners’ belongings.

“Want us to get anything?” he asked Kemp, the owner of the grocery store.

“There are some clothes on top of the TV. Get them.”

“How about the TV?”

“Let the river have it.”

A short time later, the red-haired man returned, this time in a motorboat, carrying a family to safety. By late afternoon, Daaston said, the water was well above the highway in front of Kemp’s and was continuing to rise.

“Into the evening and night we could hear the eerie boom-boom—sounds as logs and houses hit the two bridges crossing 101 below Stafford,” he recalled. “At about 10 p.m., we heard a tremendous crash, and we assumed that one or both of the bridges had collapsed.”

The river crested during the night, and the next day, Daaston and his friend were airlifted from Scotia to Eureka in time to spend Christmas Eve with their families.

The Douglas Memorial Bridge, with its iconic bear guardians, was closed after a massive flood destroyed the 1926 span. A new bridge was later rebuilt, with new bears. Library of Congress, public domain.

By then, five people had been killed and 5,000 others evacuated in the flooding, as Gov. Pat Brown declared disaster areas in Mendocino, Shasta, Del Norte, and Humboldt Counties. The highway was so badly damaged that the president of the Redwood Highway Association predicted it would take a month to reopen it to traffic and twice that long to make it suitable for trucks. A Christmas morning photo on the front page of the Humboldt Standard displayed evidence of the floods’ brutality. The caption declared that “the new highway from Fernbridge to Ferndale is demolished, completely ruined by the Eel and Van Duzen Rivers, which flooded this week.”

Ginger Nunes of Fortuna later recalled the experience of sitting in her Fortuna home along the Eel River as a log smashed through a window and debris threatened to cave in the kitchen wall. Two men in boats managed to rescue her family, but not before one of the boats nearly capsized in the effort.

When the rains finally stopped during the first week in January, residents and highway workers alike surveyed the damage. In Pepperwood, a town of about 400 people along the highway, just two or three ruined buildings were still standing by the time the waters receded. Several thousand logs had been swept away from the Pacific Lumber Company in Scotia, and railroad boxcars were “tossed around like dice thrown from a cup,” according to a California Highways report.

The final toll: 29 people killed and nearly 1,700 injured, along with 5,000 head of livestock. More than 4,700 homes destroyed, in addition to 374 businesses and 800 farm buildings. Some 4,000 lumber mill employees were out of a job.

Seven bridges along the Redwood Highway were among the eighteen destroyed. One casualty was a concrete arch bridge over the Klamath River famous for its statues of California bears on either end. The town of Klamath itself lost its entire business section to the floodwaters. Mudslides—some containing half a million yards of earth—buried the highway at numerous points. Still, thanks to a herculean effort from state highway workers, it took a little less than a month to reopen the road: On January 16, a highway patrol truck convoy dubbed Operation Lifeline cleared U.S. 101 to one-way traffic between San Francisco and the Oregon state line.

The Fortuna Theatre, built in 1938, is still open, housing six theaters in downtown Fortuna.

“Highway construction crews cut out a road in raw mud along the hillside to bypass the slides and hauled in rock to give the vehicles some degree of traction,” California Highways engineer Sam Helwer said. “We have equipment there, four-wheel-drive motor graders, to pull out vehicles if they get stuck, and our people will continue to improve the one-way road so we can lift restrictions.”

AVENUE OF THE GIANTS AND BEYOND

Most of the communities nestled among the redwoods aren’t full-blown cities; some are towns, some are villages, and others still are little more than road stops. Along the Avenue of the Giants, a 30-mile stretch of road that used to be 101, you’ll pass through places like Phillipsville with its 140 residents and Miranda (formerly known as Jacobsen’s), a community of 520 people. Later, you’ll hit Myers Flat, population 146, and Redcrest, population 89. But the most notable residents along this area of twolane highway are the redwoods themselves, bathing the road in dappled sunlight in some places and shading it entirely in others.

Back on the new highway, you’ll hit Fortuna, where the old alignment veers due north from the Kenmar Road turnoff as Fortuna Boulevard, east of the freeway, then curls back east as Main Street through the old downtown. Tomkins Hill Road, which provides access to the College of the Redwoods just south of Eureka, was also once a section of the main highway. Now, it parallels the modern 101 to the east.

An old alignment of U.S. 101, Endert’s Beach Road, enters Crescent City from the south. Library of Congress.

From Eureka, the road heads north through Arcata, a city of some 17,000 people with a name that sounds suspiciously like Arcadia—which is also in California, but way down in Los Angeles County, close to the other end of the state. It’s easy to be tricked into thinking Eureka’s right on the Oregon border, but it’s not. There’re nearly 90 miles more to travel before you get there, and Arcata’s your first stop. Originally known as Union Town, it’s home to Humboldt State University. G Street, which swings west as you’re traveling northward, is just a twolane road but is probably the original routing of U.S. 101.

North of Arcata is McKinleyville, an unincorporated town of about 15,000 that includes an old alignment of 101 called Central Avenue. It crosses under the modern freeway north of town and continues on the ocean side as Clam Beach Drive.

Scenic Drive, a two-lane, heavily wooded, and winding road that morphs into Patrick’s Point Drive, may be another remnant of Old 101.

Crescent City, the only incorporated city in Del Norte County, is the last major stop before the border. Its population, which is shy of 8,000, includes the inmate population of Pelican State Prison. A segment of Old 101 enters town from the south as Endert’s Beach Road, while the modern 101 splits in two through the center of town, with northbound traffic heading one way on three-lane M Street and southbound traffic a block west on L Street. The town itself is so small that this bifurcation lasts just about a mile before the two sides reconverge and head on to Smith River, a community of fewer than 1,000 people just this side of the state line.

There, U.S. 101 crosses into Oregon as the Oregon Coast Highway, and there we end our tour. There’s plenty more to discover northward, but that’s another story, another journey, another road.