Decker

State Hwy 23: Decker Canyon Rd & Westlake Blvd ~

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Brutal: A 3.75 on our 5 scale (perfect 5/5, before they put the stop signs) ~

Mile for mile, Decker/Westlake is the toughest canyon road on machinery you'll ever drive. It's murder on brakes... murder on everything.

Today, Decker Canyon Road is relegated to the small swath of asphalt that runs south from Mulholland Hwy to the Pacific Ocean. That's not the way things use to be. From Thousand Oaks Boulevard to Pacific Coast Hwy, State Highway 23 used to be called Decker Road, the whole thing, all the way through. But, they changed the FIDs. City planners though it sounded... "stylish." Westlake Blvd runs south, from Hwy 101 to Mulholland. Mulholland was once punctuated by Decker Canyon Road. No more. Now, there's a stop sign, out in the middle of nowhere. They really screwed it up.

For us, however, end to end, it will always be Decker Canyon Rd.

Decker Canyon Road is the epiphany of what the typical motorist dreads. Most people who live in Thousand Oaks choose to go around it, via Kanan-Dune Rd, when they go to the coast. But for us, Decker Canyon Road was the bomb, baby! The day I got my license, I made a B-line, straight to Decker Canyon Road, for no good reason than to thrash out what little remained of my youth.

Well, it didn't take long to lose my confidence in my pappy's car. Day I got my driver's license, Dad's new Buick would never quite be the same. After a repeated thrashing over Decker Canyon Road, several times in one day, three of the four hubcaps careened off cliffs too steep to retreive them. About my eighth run, "sssssssss," the Skylark overheated, necessitating a tow to the local service station for new head gaskets. Brakes were shot. Tires were gone.

What was once a rather solid General Motors product seemed to wither, into a creaking bucket of bolts that rattled down the road over the next month, until it finally expired. None of the gaps between the body parts were ever quite the same since my first solo drive. The U-Joints gave way a couple weeks later. The transmission subsequently began to slip, infrequently, likely a function of having worked the column shifter too aggressively. Then, it began to leek oil. Every time the Buick went over a speed bump, it made the most awful booming sound. Needless to say, Decker Canyon Road is murder on the machinery.

Scantly 30 thousand miles on the odometer, the Buick was shot, through and through. Decker Canyon Road just killed that car. Perhaps that's why people go around.

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