California’s iconic Highway 1 is fighting a losing battle against climate change. Can it survive?

California marked a milestone this month with the return of an uninterrupted Highway 1 through the perilous, yet spectacular cliffs of Big Sur.

The famed coastal road was closed for more than three years after two major landslides buried the two-lane highway, and it took unprecedented engineering might and precarious debris removal to once again connect northern Big Sur with its southern neighbors.

But no one expects this will be the end of Highway 1’s battle with the forces of nature, especially in a world facing the intensifying effects of human-caused climate change.

“We, in Big Sur, know to plan with a grain of salt,” said Matt Glazer, executive director of Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn, located near the northern end of the closure. “This is a snapshot in time, and the ever-changing coast of Big Sur is something that makes it beautiful.”

A turbulent climate always has been the nemesis of Highway 1’s splendor. The seaside road routinely has closed because of rockslides, mudflows, flooding, wildfires and coastal erosion, most notably in Big Sur but also in several sections from Malibu up through the North Coast.

But this latest closure — what appears to be the longest in Highway 1’s 90-year history — raises new questions about how the highway can survive amid increasingly strong and unpredictable storms, seas and fires.

“If our storm and other conditions were normal, we would expect closures and losses at some points,” said Michael Beck, director of UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Coastal Climate Resilience. “The challenge is that we’re now clear that the events that are going to cause impacts — these particularly extreme events — are getting more common. … Climate change is here and now, it’s no longer a problem of the future.”

Read more: After 3 years of repairs, Highway 1 through Big Sur fully reopens

And those intensifying climate conditions — higher, stronger waves that accelerate erosion; wetter, more volatile atmospheric river storms that trigger landslides; and hotter, more destructive fires that create conditions ripe for mudflows — affect much of the 650-mile coastal highway running from south Orange County to Mendocino County.

But the confluence of these climatological issues is particularly apparent in Big Sur, where waves, storms and wildfire regularly affect its uniquely steep and fragile landscape, made up of a “melange” of rock types especially susceptible to change, said Jonathan Warrick, a U.S. Geological Survey research geologist at the Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz.

“We have waves undercutting [the cliffs] … and then we get big rains that kind of provide a lubrication for these things to crumble and fail,” Warrick said. “And then we have wildfires, and when that happens, often we can have debris flows coming down these mountainsides.”

Glazer said he can’t remember a so-called normal year in Big Sur — one without major road closures, dangerous wildfire or damaging flooding — since before 2015.

The last decade has been marked by turmoil in the region from major wildfires that forced evacuations and destroyed homes, causing burn scars that fostered dangerous debris flows. Most notably in 2017, heavy rains caused back-to-back emergencies: first the failure of the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge and then a major landslide near Mud Creek that left residents cut off for months as the California Department of Transportation worked on repairs through 2019. Then, storms in the winter of 2022-23 triggered the first of two major landslides that kicked off the roadway’s subsequent three-year closure.

“That’s 11 years of something happening,” Glazer said. “It’s unquestionable that climate change and environmental impacts are impacting the speed and severity of which things change. … Climate resilience has to be part of the conversation.”

And while California has continued to lead many of the nation’s discussions and efforts related to climate change mitigation, specifics about how it is preparing for and responding to issues across Big Sur and Highway 1 remain relatively elusive.

Caltrans, the agency tasked with Highway 1’s upkeep, has spent millions each year on such efforts, specifically an estimated $162 million on four major repairs and stabilization projects since January 2023, according to agency spokesperson Kevin Drabinski. But he did not respond to questions from The Times about the agency’s large-scale climate resiliency planning for Big Sur and the entirety of Highway 1.

Read more: The time is now for a Highway 1 road trip: ‘It’s so rare to experience Big Sur like this’

Storms, mudslides and erosion also routinely have caused short-term closures in the Malibu area, where the road is typically known as the Pacific Coast Highway, adding to a long list of the highway’s costly and inconvenient repairs.

“It requires a lot of maintenance and it’s going to continue to require a lot of maintenance,” Warrick said. Highway 1’s future “is an engineering and political and financial will question more than anything.”

Like clockwork, road failures and landslides tend to bring up questions about when, or if, it might make sense to abandon or reconfigure parts of Highway 1. When does it become too costly to maintain? Or is there a way to transform it, perhaps as a toll road that might limit its exposure and help pay for its increasing costs?

In a few, rare cases, officials settled on major modifications to the highway, including a tunnel that in 2013 replaced a treacherous stretch of the road known as Devil’s Slide south of Pacifica. And farther north along Gleason Beach in Sonoma County, rapid erosion finally forced officials in 2020 to move a section of the road inland, to further avoid the ocean’s wrath.

But, for the most part, the focus in California has been on repairing existing infrastructure, Beck said.

“We’re going to need to get more innovative overall in the solutions, including how we pay for them,” Beck said. “We can’t just simply hold on to the past.”

“We’ve got to do a lot more to accommodate, even advance, in the new futures that are coming,” he added.

While parts of California’s geography, geology and meteorology make circumstances unique along Highway 1, Beck said, precarious — and even crumbling — coastal highways are a relatively common problem across the globe. While there likely will be no single solution, he sees possibilities for improvements along a continuum — from resistance to realignment — including market-based solutions, such as improving how risk is priced, and nature-based solutions, such as fortifying dunes and wetlands, which can help ease erosion.

But for locals, keeping the road open and in place remains the priority, even in the foreboding face of climate change.

“There’s knowledge that things may become more challenging in the next 10, 20 years,” said Ryne Leuzinger, chair of the board of directors for the Big Sur Community Assn., which is working to increase fundraising to better prepare for the next disaster. “If conditions are somehow more difficult … the community will be there to help one another.”

What’s important, he said, is the “unanimity about the importance of Highway 1,” something he’s continued to hear from California leaders, who look at Highway 1 as a worldwide tourist attraction and driver for local and statewide business.

Although Glazer would like to see more focus from officials on preventative and proactive work to stabilize the area, instead of reactive repairs, he said there’s no doubt in his mind that it’s a road worth maintaining.

“Come drive the road and it will answer your own question,” Glazer said. “It is ever-changing and elements will evolve and engineering will evolve, but it’s a National Scenic [Byway] for a reason.”

Gregory Hawthorne, owner of Hawthorne Gallery in Big Sur, doesn’t want to go back to “island” life as they experienced in 2017, or the cul-de-sac of the last three years, but he also knows that’s sometimes the price you pay for living in this stunning region.

“Sometimes when you live on the edge, the edge falls off,” Hawthorne, 74, said. “The benefits outweigh the tragedies or the different things that happen. … You got to be tough to live in Big Sur.”

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.