I can get from LA to SLO and Cambria, can't i?
Bummer that Big Sur was hit so badly with the slides. Was that the same area hit by fires last year?
There were fires there about a year ago which probably helped get the slide going.
Cambria is where the coast range gets down near the coast, but the nerrowing happens north of town. The town exists because there is still room between the mountains and the ocean for a town.
My parents moved to Morro Bay in 1984 and I went to Cal Poly. I know the SLO area fairly well.
Tesla is advertising a new supercharger going in somewhere in the SLO area and there is one in Atascadero that has been there since around 2013 or 2014. It was one of the early superchargers. When I went down in October, I stayed overnight in Morro Bay, but didn't charge there. I had plenty of charge after charging at Atascadero to run around town in Morro Bay, stay the night, then head back and supercharge while having a so-so breakfast at Dennys next door to the supercharger. I took the attached picture from the door of the Dennys, it reminded me of the supercharger picture on Tesla's site.
Since whenever something so bizarre happens to close US-101 would much more likely affect fragile California Highway 1 and therefore would probably already have Hwy 1 closed before it even gets to 101, it doesn't make that much sense that Cambria would be a backup to Atascadero for people trying to bypass 101 closures on 1, but it might act as a backup when Atascadero SC has some other type of failure (such as equipment failure or something local and non-road oriented).
OMG! By rough count, 300 cars could fit in the dirt of that slide where the road was! That's enormous! For reference, only 200 cars were caught in the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake Oakland thingiemajiggie. The biggest differences being that the Oakland thing was a man made object (not very Earthquake proof) with a lot of traffic, and Big Sur is nature doing its thing and probably had 0 people there when it happened (but if there were, we'd never know unless someone had a buried skeletal tracker).
I like the idea of those who want to go North on 1 from the South being able to do so with a nice southerly charging location. Last time I wanted to see if my car could make it, I set out South on Hwy 1 from Carmel many months ago after some of the rains, but was stopped by some of the most mean law enforcement I've ever seen; they actually acted like it was illegal for me to be driving in the rain. I think they are garbage, but that's probably why they were sent on that donut run right there. They claimed the road was closed because there was some sort of blockage; I wonder if that mud slide was related to the closure those law enforcement were stopping us for. I'm not there often enough to memorize it.
I sometimes consider what it would be like to live there, and quite frankly, the hills come out of the ocean right there, so it's not exactly easy terrain for living. Electric flying vehicles would be a smarter way to live on some solid rock around there, not on the slippery mud with that little rolling car roadway thread hanging off the mud on the side of the cliff they call Highway 1. That's why it's a highway: no way could that thing elevate to the status of anything else but the lowest rung of roadways, a highway. (In California, "highway" is defined to be a rough and tumble anything-goes road where you better watch out, and used for that in instructions and laws to be a big warning that you must be a really capable driver and car to be on a highway (although by law, anybody and any vehicle on the road must be "highway capable", meaning to handle the worst possible most stressful situation of driving). Pretty much every other type of roadway is superior to a highway in terms of at least one of but never all of: orderliness, safety, expense, capacity, controls, or speed. Highway 1 is the perfect descriptor for that road, as was Highway 17 back when it was not divided and Highway 152 and Highway 156 when they weren't divided, and I used to hear old timers complain about Highway 99 all the time back when it wasn't as easy going as now.)
It's a massive slide. According to the stories I read a bridge just south of Carmel started collapsing due to the hillside shifting back in February. That might be when you encountered the police. I also read replacing that bridge alone is going to be around $26 million. They have no idea how much this slide repair is going to cost yet because the hillside is still shifting and it could get bigger.
Before the slide the highway was already closed because of some minor slides that hadn't done any damage, but had covered the road. The crews working on that area decided it would be smart to get out of there because small slides were coming down and one worker got hit with a small rock. The slide happened the night after they cleared out.
There is a resort almost isolated because of the two closures. There is one very winding mountain road that connects to highway 101 that is the only road locals can use. The resort is offering exclusive getaways with access via helicopter from Monterey airport. They have had a lot of takers from all over the world. I think the package starts at $4300.
When I was in college I spent a lot of my time off from school at my sister's in Bakersfield. I drove highway 58 through the middle of nowhere. It has a bad reputation because of about 12 miles of really treacherous mountain road (there are two 180 degree curves). I rarely saw another car out there and I could drive as fast as the laws of Physics would let me.
I saw a lot of wildlife including two California condors, the second one a few weeks after they had announced they had collected all of them from the wild. Those are massive birds. On one occasion I came around a curve and it was sitting in the middle of the highway. When it took off, its wingtips touched the shoulders on each side of the highway. It flew parallel to my car for about a quarter mile and I got an excellent look at it.
An owl saved my life late one night. I was having trouble staying awake, but had to get back for class the next day. I came around a curve and there was a blinding white flash of light as a white owl took off and its wings reflected my headlights back at me. I had an enough of an adrenaline rush to not only get home, but stay awake a couple of hours after I did.
Yet another time I got caught in a cattle drive. I drove up just as some rancher were moving cattle out of one pasture down the highway to another. One of the cowboys gave me a look like "city slicker who's going to freak out". I drove slowly and the cattle stayed out of my way. They took up the opposing lane of traffic and I stayed on the right, both of us headed the same direction.
Last time I was down there I drove part of that route in my Model S and found driving really windy mountain roads with regen braking is sooo much fun. I've driven the Columbia River Gorge on SR 14 which is kind of curvy and that's pretty nice, but those coast range roads are even better.
California has some nice drives with no other traffic, but you need to know where they are.