10 miles up the twisty State Route 39 in Southern California, a road popular with night drifters and speed junkies, a graffiti covered steel barrier blocks the way. That's all you get, 10 miles.
The End.
While the drive up consists of some of the best canyon roads in the area, 4 additional miles of car enthusiasts heaven has been inaccessible since 1978. Past The End, the 39 once connected to the legendary Angeles Crest Highway (CA2), a road perhaps even more legendary, iconic, and notorious to car enthusiasts.
The 39 was initially closed nearly 47 years ago due to an “emergency” which is quite honestly more ominously vague than it should be! Maybe an alien spacecraft crash landed there and created an unmistakable scar on the mountainside. Maybe a portal to an alternate dimension was opened up by an experiment gone awry, and the government has things tightly under guard? Surely the conspiracies are out there, but more likely it closed due to a series of landslides that deem the road impassable to anything but emergency vehicles. Over the decades, there were plans to re-open it, but the cost of fixing the 4 mile stretch, and the decay over the years has made it increasingly difficult.
It's a bit of a shame, as what lines beyond The End on the 39 was considered one of the most beautiful drives in Southern California. That's high praise considering the company it keeps. The CA2 itself and backroads of Malibu Canyon are quite beautiful, so the 39 must be utterly breathtaking!
One day, I would love to drive it, because lower down the mountain, on the way up to The End, the 39 currently intersects with Glendora Mountain Road (GMR). GMR is popular for extremely tight and technical cuts up and down the canyon. Connecting not just two, but three of the best drives in the area, starting with GMR, then up the 39, then cutting into ACH, would be nearly 80 miles of scenic, technically diverse twisty canyon road. One could drive almost all day provided they have enough fuel!
For now, this is as far as it goes. I stopped, took a bunch of photos of my M2 at the very last patch of road, met some fellow car enthusiasts who gather here at all times of the day and night, and could only imagine what could be. As I drove back down the 39 and the sun began to set, I comforted my self with the thought that maybe this tiny fraction of 4 miles road wasn't all that great and we're merely romanticizing the unobtainable. Maybe it's just the forbidden fruit of SoCal driving roads.
Or maybe I'll just never get to drive one of the best roads... in the world.