BOULDER CREEK >> Santa Cruz Mountains residents can expect a number of lane and road closures in the coming weeks, as repair crews restore storm-damaged streets and highways.
Bear Creek Road will be closed from 9 a.m. Monday to 11 p.m. Sept. 20 between Skyline Boulevard and Summit Road, to repair a roadway slip out that occurred during January’s storms. A landslide from the hill above cracked the lane, reducing its width. Cost of the repair is approximately $300,000.
It’s one of several repairs due to mudslides that occurred this winter on Bear Creek Road, a mountain pass between the San Lorenzo Valley and Highway 17. Around 250 cars travel on the road each rush hour period, according to Katie Beach, Caltrans resident engineer.
A $1.3 million repair of another Bear Creek Road wash out, just outside of downtown Boulder Creek near Highway 9, is underway. Traffic is reduced to one lane for now. Later this year, repairs will entail some limited overnight closures, and the public will receive plenty of notice, said Jason Hoppin, Santa Cruz County spokesman.
Crews are working to stabilize the hill and install a culvert. The timeline for completion is unclear, Hoppin said, but the goal is to finish as much as possible before the rains.
Crews also soon will repair a wash out on Bear Creek Road, eight miles east of Highway 9, near the David Bruce Winery, Hoppin said.
Bear Creek Road is managed by multiple jurisdictions, depending on the location. The repair on Bear Creek Road between Skyline Boulevard and Summit Road is paid for by Caltrans, a state department that manages the highway system. That repair is part of a $7 million emergency contract with Granite Construction to fix over 50 locations on highways 1, 9, 35 and 236, Beach said.
The repairs on Bear Creek Road closer to Boulder Creek are managed by the county.
NOTABLE SLV REPAIRS
A slip out on Highway 9 in Brookdale, where a temporary stoplight has been controlling traffic for the past several months, will soon be under construction. Caltrans is in talks with a contractor, so the cost and timeline of the project is unclear, but “the goal is to get it started before winter,” Beach said.
A viaduct will be built at that location, Beach said.
Also, on Highway 35, between Bear Creek Road and Black Road, a series of five wash outs soon will be repaired, Beach said.
WHAT RESIDENTS SAY
Boulder Creek resident Molly Sullivan, who commutes to south San Jose, welcomes the Bear Creek Road repairs even though the detours next week will likely cost her at least 25 more minutes one way.
“They need to be done,” Sullivan said. “We can’t wait for the new rains to come and to destroy the road, because there’ll be no road left.”
Sullivan, a social worker, said she had to miss work a “couple days” this winter, because the mountain roads were impassable. Another week, she had to stay in a San Jose hotel for a few days.
“It was tremendously stressful,” Sullivan said. “There was a couple days where I could just not make it down the hill because, literally, (Highway) 9 closed down, Bear Creek Road closed down, 17 became extremely unstable with one lane in both directions.”
Justin Acton, operator of Boulder Creek Pizza and Pub, said, “We’ve definitely had to make some pretty severe changes to wait times and delivery because the roads have changed. We can’t quite deliver as easily to Ben Lomond.”
Acton, who is also the president of the Boulder Creek Business Association, said the downtown businesses have been negatively impacted by the “delayed tourist season.”
“From food to goods to restaurants to everything, I know people had a very hard start to the year this year because of the hard rain season,” Acton said.
He said mountain residents have rolled with the punches, and more residents now use social media and the online forum Nextdoor for traffic and road updates.
“We’ve been dealing with it a few months now, so it’s become part of my routine to plan for it,” Acton said. “You just kind of adapt. It’s the price for living in paradise, I guess.”