San Francisquito
Cny & Spunky Canyon Rd
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Spunky Canyon Road:
Rates 2 on our 5
scale-
Spunky Canyon Rd serves to help us to avoid as much of the eastern segment of Elizabeth Lake Rd as possible. It's a short drive, up to the summit, then downhill, into Green Valley, from Bouquet Reservoir. Its slow, dirt laden switch-backs would otherwise permit practice throttle induced oversteer if not having to worry about oncoming traffic. Spunky Cny Rd serves to connect hermit like Green Valley forest dwellers to the rest of the world, and us, as we carom off Bouquet, around the reservoir, toward our beloved Pine Canyon.
San Francisquito Canyon: Rates 2.5 on our 5 scale-
We anticipate that San Francisquito Canyon Road will soon compete with the ever inefficient State Hwy 14. Rapid development of Santa Clarita is cutting an ever more direct path to this once obscure road. It was once only accessible via Seco Canyon Road at its southern terminus, but now a bridge has been erected over San Francisquito Creek connecting Rye Canyon Road to Copper Hill Drive. With this now accomplished in tandem with the ongoing expansion of State Hwy 126 through Fillmore, San Francisquito Canyon Road will provide the most expedient access to Santa Clarita, Fillmore, and Ventura from the high desert, a task that State Highway 14 miserably attempts to do.
Going NE to SW, San Francisquito is a short downhill that can be taken at mostly highway speeds. About midpoint along the drive, you'll light your tail lights a little for some second gear stuff. San Francisquito is a better hill climb than it is a downhill. Hence, it drives best from the SW to the NE. We seldom drive San Francisquito. We much prefer Bouquet Canyon as a hill climb, then Pine Canyon to Three Points, or perhaps Lake Hughes Road going to Castaic.
Much of the Geology in San Francisquito Canyon was shaped by the very hand of William Mulholland, himself. Quite inadvertently, though. William Mulholland, circa 1927, attempted to build a dam in San Francisquito Canyon. He named after the Holy Patron Saint of Writers, Saint Francis.
St. Francis Dam was a monumental failure that serves as a titanic combination of near- sightedness, and sheer stupidity. Fair and square, Saint Francis Dam attributed to his undoing. Publically humiliated, he subsequently fell off polite society's "A-list," and thereafter resigned himself to private life.
Geologists actually tried to stop Muholland. They told Muholland that the site he selected was unsuitable for a Dam. One of many examples cited was the eastern wall. The eastern wall of the Dam was built against metamorphic rock, with foliation planes running parallel to the sides of the valley. Any Engineer of that epoch would exclaim that this is a signal indication that rock will fall under the weight of gravity alone, much less by relentless fluid force of some 11,500 pounds per square foot generated by a 200 foot Dam.
If that wasn't enough, the aforementioned eastern wall wasn't Geologist's primary concern. At the base of the site, fair-and-square in the middle, was a seismic fault (!) littered with characteristic ground up rock staring straight up at Mulholland's engineers...Another red flag (Mr. Bill was a very bad boy; Mr. Bill didn't listen to his geologists).
The real problem lie opposite the east wall. Opposite the east wall was rock composed primarily of red sandstone (!). Back in the days of Barney and Betty Rubble, common knowledge that red sandstone dissolves in water was a given. The experiment that proves this is older than the Magna Carta. See for yourself: Get some water, put it in a bucket, then drop in some red sandstone. It dissolves.
A colossal blunder. If ever there was a place NOT to build a Dam, San Francisquito Canyon was it. Beavers build better dams than Mulholland did Saint Francis. Perhaps he should be credited the record for the largest land generated Tsunami!
Mulholland will forever remain an example of a stubborn old guy who walked into every wall he saw. When people, usually old people, say: "You know? They just don't build 'um like they use to." my mind produces a cornucopia of pictorial images of mankind's marvelous triumphs of craftsmanship over design: The Spruce-Goose, monosodium glutamate, Dow Chemical's vanity breast implant, but forever foremost, William Mulholland's St. Francis Dam.
The "actual" body count lay somewhere around 400. Revised estimates today have that count exceeding 10,000. When Saint Francis Dam broke, a wall of water cascaded down San Francisquito Canyon into Santa Clarita, then across the Santa Clara River Valley past Fillmore to Ventura, before spilling into the Pacific Ocean. The high water mark is still visible today. The geographical landscape of the Santa Clarita and the Santa Clara River Valley was forever altered. Appropriately, the road that is namesake to this man indeed fits quite well: Indicative of an endless lifetime of early and late apex blind curves, meanders, and steep canyon cliffs where brave drivers drive, long after his death Mulholland still exacts a toll in human life - by A.S. Joseph.
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