Just one week after heavy rains in early January caused new rock falls six miles south of Regent’s Slide, temporarily closing access to the area of California Highway 1 that had been under repair since February 9, 2024, the California Department of Transportation District 5 announced on January 14 that the road has reopened. Construction on the road leading to Big Sur ended more than two months ahead of schedule.
Caltrans previously said it expected the 6.9-mile stretch to reopen by the end of March, at the earliest.
In the days following the recent rains, Caltrans’ geotech team removed large rocks and boulders from the newly repaved road, restoring access and allowing workers to make the finishing touches.
The reopening brings much relief to Big Sur businesses where access had been severely limited. An adjacent slide had closed a major section of the highway for three years.
“We will continue to monitor slope movement at Regent’s Slide through surface-mounted prisms and a series of underground shape arrays,” said Caltrans District 5 spokesman Kevin Drabinski. “One of the successes of the repairs is that the slope above the roadway is stable and can be checked with our measuring equipment.”
The stability of the slope had been so tenuous during the repair work that two remote-controlled excavators and two remote-controlled excavators were used to increase productivity while protecting workers from the instability of the slide zone.
The protective net covering the bottom third of the Regent’s Slide repairs, preventing rocks and debris from falling onto the roadway, is intended to be permanent. There are similar nets at dozens of other locations along the Big Sur coast. “During two recent rain events, the network has performed as expected,” says Drabinski.
During the repair work, crews installed more than 4,600 shear studs—60-foot-long steel rods that were drilled and cemented into the upper two-thirds of the slope. “These are helping to stabilize the slope in the short and long term,” says Drabinski.
Caltrans has estimated the cost of the repairs at $82 million.
