[Update: Road Closed] Main Access to Petrolia and Honeydew Compromised

Having a major road that serves a significant local population that goes through a State Park and is under their control can be problematic as the residents of SoHum learned in 2011. Remember the Briceland Road washout through Whittemore Grove in 2011 when the county was trying to detour hundreds of cars per day onto the barely passable, unpaved in spots, Old Briceland road? RHBB covered it. State Parks gave us years of foot dragging excuses why the road that served so many couldn’t be permanently repaired: they needed engineering studies that would take at least a year, old growth trees were impacted by the massive log jam in Redwood Creek, ‘maybe we’ll have the funds next year’, anything but a concrete plan of action. Finally when a major culvert for a small creek under Briceland road near Whittemore Grove’s parking lot failed and had to be replaced on an emergency basis in 2019 the contractors snuck over to the 2011 slip out and quietly removed the concrete K rails and did the roadbed repair to get rid of the one lane bottleneck and the stop signs (which were a running joke–literally). Hint: only tourists stopped, except when there was law enforcement present.

California State Parks is perennially hamstrung by tight budgets and a slowly responding, thickly layered bureaucracy responsible for 1.3 million acres around the state. They can’t be bothered to patch the potholes on “their road” in our little corner of Humboldt.

There are 3 roads roads that are vital to the southwest Humboldt (and a little bit of northwest Mendocino) county’s population that lives and works west of 101 and the South Fork Eel River, which includes tourism access to Shelter Cove, the King Range National Conservation Area and Sinkyone Wilderness State Park : Briceland Road, Bull Creek Flat Road and the Mattole Road from Petrolia to Ferndale. All three roads traverse slide prone geology in the rainiest part of the state (e.g. 32 inches of rain in my gauge for the past 21 days near Ettersburg on the “drier” east side of the middle Mattole valley). Two of the roads run through State Parks where closures have immediate impacts on daily life for the residents. Linking the three roads together is the Ettersburg-Honeydew road along Telegraph and Wilder Ridges that is just as poorly maintained and vulnerable to storm damage and closures.

So the problem is how do we unshackle the county and state so that emergencies are promptly declared when the roads go out to gain access to funding so repairs can be made expeditiously to get the roads back open and the residents are not held hostage by one State agency who often act like they could care less about their neighbors surrounding the lands they manage.