Highway 1 south of San Francisco closes almost every winter at the same half-mile stretch, a slab of cliff so unstable that Caltrans crews have rebuilt the road across it again and again since 1937, only for the hillside to slide it right back toward the ocean. Locals started calling it Devil’s Slide before the pavement was even finished, and the name stuck for nearly a century.
During World War II, the military built a concrete watch station on the point above the slide, part of San Francisco’s coastal defense network, where soldiers scanned the horizon for enemy ships and radioed coordinates to a six-inch gun battery nearby. The bunker was abandoned in 1949 once radar made it obsolete, and sometime before 1970, construction crews cut away part of the summit it sat on for a project that was never finished, leaving the bunker balanced on the cliff edge exactly the way it still sits today, roofless and covered in decades of graffiti, fenced off from a public that keeps finding ways in anyway.
The road itself finally got its bypass in 2013, when a tunnel opened and drivers stopped having to cross the slide at all. The old bunker is still up there watching an ocean nobody is defending it from anymore.
Makes you wonder if a stretch of coastline this unstable was ever meant to hold a road, or a watch post, in the first place.
Geology, or a place that has been trying to shrug people off since before the highway existed?
What do you think about this? Edgar Cayce gave over 14,000 trance readings, all written down and still on file. He said proof of Atlantis would rise near Bimini in 1968. That year divers found a half mile road of giant stone blocks there. True seer, or lucky guess?
What do you think about this? Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky built a 500 foot tunnel just to move its dead out of sight of the living. It closed in 1961. Visitors still report a boy rolling a ball across empty floors. Restless spirits, or a dark building playing tricks on the mind?
What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
What do you think about this? Puma Punku’s H-shaped stone blocks, cut from andesite by a culture dating to roughly 600 CE, are flat to within a couple millimeters, with no known metal tools hard enough to do it. Lost technique, or something we haven’t caught up to yet?
What do you think about this? The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned anonymously in 1979 by a man calling himself R.C. Christian, and no one ever learned his real name before the monument was bombed on July 6, 2022. Message, or a monument that did not deserve to stand?
What do you think about this? Pacifica’s Devil’s Slide has swallowed sections of Highway 1 since 1937, and a WWII watch bunker still perched on its cliff edge has sat abandoned there since 1949. Geology, or a stretch of coast that keeps trying to shrug people off?
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