Are days numbered for longtime SR 140 detour?

By Reed Parsell
CT News editor

When I visited the Ferguson Slide alongside State Route 140 in July …

Whoa! Time out! The Ferguson Slide is decidedly atop State Route 140, not alongside it. Thanks to the original massive rock slide in 2006 and another substantial one in 2015 (chronicled in the accompanying story by District 10 Public Information Officer Warren Alford), more than 70,000 cubic yards of crumbled mountainside must still be removed from the roadway before a rock shed can be installed and the original route reopened. Now as I was saying …

When I visited the site in July, the scene was largely unchanged from what I had encountered 12 years earlier. Have you experienced that stretch of Highway 140? It shares a steep-sloped canyon with the Merced River, which when generously fed with melting Sierra Nevada snow is a mesmerizing spectacle of blue water splashing over boulders. Across the river, on the northern side, is a decaying, narrow ledge that’s now topped with dirt and low-lying vegetation but over which the Yosemite Valley Railroad chugged from 1902 to 1945.

State Route 140 is one of the state’s many, many breathtakingly scenic drives.

Back in 2008, a chatty bus driver and I were the only ones aboard a big Yosemite Area Regional Transportation System coach as it glided eastward on Highway 140 toward Yosemite National Park. While we were stopped at an incongruously located red light for several minutes to wait our turn on the one-way detour and I asked him what was going on, the YARTS driver smiled and told me to wait.  Finally the light turned green and the big bus delicately threaded its way over the narrow, bare-bones bridge and we were on the river’s opposite slope.

Suddenly the massive slide came into view and I, presumably like most people who see it for the first time, was astonished. “Incredible,” I said to the driver.

“Ain’t that the truth,” replied the driver, who went on to describe in detail when and how the slide had occurred, mentioning that it was a miracle no one had been injured.

Since then, I have ridden YARTS or driven over that stretch of Highway 140 well over a dozen times. Once – it must have been just before the second big rock slide, in 2015 – I saw trucks and other construction equipment parked on cleared patches among the Ferguson Slide rubble. Until then, and this was all several years before I joined Caltrans, I had assumed the task of restoring that deeply buried stretch of roadway was laughably improbable, if not impossible. “No way,” I would think.

But that one time there appeared to have been progress. “I’ll be,” I said to my surprised self.

The next time I drove by, the trucks and other equipment were nowhere in sight. The slide seemed to have reasserted itself. (It had.) I shrugged and deduced that any pretense of trying to fix the road had been abandoned. (It had not.)

This summer I was trying to come up with a Caltrans history story for CT News – feel free to suggest candidates by emailing me at reed.parsell@dot.ca.gov – when again I thought of the Ferguson Slide. “That’s a done deal, it’s historical,” I thought. Then I did a little research.

Turns out that under Gov. Jerry Brown 2.0, not quite a decade ago, the state took steps to repair Highway 140. Those steps included having the Department of Fish and Game move to place the endangered limestone salamander in an ecological reserve, and Caltrans engineers – buoyed by the success of the Rain Rocks Rock Shed on U.S. Highway 1, between Big Sur and San Simeon – to decide that a rock shed could resolve the State Route 140 problem.

The 2015 slide was a major setback, for sure, but not the end of the story. When I reached out to my colleague Alford, he passed along his newsletter story and shared this update:

The Ferguson Slide’s rock fragments, otherwise known as talus, are to be re-attacked this this summer. Crews are going to "trim" loose rocks from the slope, basically knocking down overhanging rocks and other unstable areas. Next summer, the bulk of the road-blocking talus will be removed.

During those talus-removal operations, Caltrans engineers will keep a close eye on safety and be prepared to employ remote-controlled machinery when needed.

Construction of the rock shed, which is still in the design phase, is scheduled for summer 2022. Although funding for the estimated $238 million project has not yet been fully secured, the plan is to proceed on that timetable. The rock shed has been deemed the safest and fastest way to re-open that long-buried stretch of State Route 140.

Reportedly, some of the Caltrans engineers who have been involved with this daunting highway challenge are delaying their retirements so that they can help see the project through to completion. I, too, plan to stick around to see the final results. I was blown away when I first witnessed the slide’s damage, and I anticipate being even more astonished when YARTS buses and my car no longer have to take the quaint, charming yet officially (incredibly!) “temporary” Ferguson Slide detour.