The Sanctuary and The Highways

More reflections on the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and how it protects two major north-south highways systems: Interstate Route One, carved precariously from the seaside granite cliffs, and the more robust and very wet “Kelp Highway.” And how, when a massive slide on the land highway killed many organisms on the kelp highway, Sanctuary staff did a dramatic highway rescue.

Highways are designed to get you there fast, so they tend to be loud and dangerous.  I lived for a year just a few blocks from busy noisy Highway 101.  I tried to block out the noise by imagining the constant traffic roar was a massive waterfall.  I knew it was dangerous because of the frequent police and ambulance sirens.

Highway 101 is not the only north-south highway on the west coast.  The older Highway One cleaves even closer to the coast, and gets me home every day here in the Big Sur area.   This  narrow windy interstate was first blasted out of steep granite cliffs as a WPA project in the 30’s.  Today millions of tourist every year move as fast as they can around the curves, while the precarious road itself is constantly in motion, shifting down the cliff or blocked by rockslides.

Last May after record rainfall, 13 acres of rock fell down onto the highway and across into the ocean, creating a new peninsula on the coastline the size of 10 football fields, 2 million cubic meters of earth.  Like the famous tree falling in the woods, no one in the remote slide area heard the avalanche, but surely it roared louder than any waterfall or speedway.  Remote it may be, but the 4 million tourists who drive that stretch between Southern and Northern California annually have noticed the blockade.  Our area’s economy has likewise been slowed down or blocked. 

The Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary protects 300 miles of coastline from San Francisco south to Cambria, including this dramatic granite cliff stretch.  Whenever, as in the past year, rockslides send large amounts of sediments onto the road, the Sanctuary Advisory Council and the local press debate whether these are “natural” phenomenon on a steep stormy west coast, or are human caused (should there really be a highway on this cliff?).  Should the road be repaired simply by bulldozing all that debris into the water, or would that constitute “discharge of dredge material into the Sanctuary,” which is outlawed in the Sanctuary’s Act, because it seriously harms the marine ecosystem?  The land highway usually wins out, but the Sanctuary has worked with CalTrans so that dumping happens in areas with fewer marine mammals and smaller animals who filter feed and would be choked by all the sediment.  It’s a balance, just as the land highway is balanced on the cliff.

Besides the several land highways along the west coast, 101 and 1, there are at least two ocean-based highways, whose many travelers are mostly non-human, and which are not built on rock but in air and under water. Millions of birds every year travel the Pacific “flyway” north and south, taking advantage of lagoons and estuaries for rest areas and refueling stations.  The so-called “kelp highway” parallels most of the US and Mexican coast, and then resumes off Peru and Chile.  This near shore forest (it grows only as deep as the sun can penetrate, 80-100 ft) provides a safe sheltered route of nutritious and hospitable algae.  Tens of thousands of grey whales swim this highway every year on their 12,000 mile round trip between Alaska to Baja to have babies in the protected Mexican lagoons. 

(Recent archeology and anthropology also suggests that early humans traveled this kelp highway from Russia and Alaska south, feeding on the rich marine organisms.  The traditional theory was that humans migrated inland, based on tools found in New Mexico from 13,000 years ago.  But recent discoveries of 18,000 year old tools on the Chilean coast, found in a campfire mixed with kelp ash suggest we humans may have sailed and beachcombed this kelp highway also. Scientists also posit that as our ancestors ate the nutrition rich marine organisms along the route - constant fish markets – it sped up the evolution of our brain power – more reasons to live by the sea!)

Bixby BridgeRock from the 2017 massive slide on Highway One (named appropriately for the nearest creek, the Mud Creek Slide) buried and killed many marine organisms, including a rare black abalone that clings to the underwater rocks of this remote stretch of coast.  Abalone were having a hard enough time as it was before the slide.  They are a protected threatened species because of several challenges – they are hemophiliacs and will bleed to death if torn from rocks.  Their diet is mostly kelp, but because of rising ocean temperatures and changing chemistry the kelp forests are shrinking, and the abalone are starving.  Abalone also plays a key role in the kelp ecosystem; they are an essential food source for the sea otters, without whom there would be no kelp (and hence no kelp highway).  Abalone and urchin are voracious kelp eaters, and without otters eating them, these invertebrates would clear cut the forest.  So abalone are protected for their own sake and for the sake of the otters and kelp. Because of their important and fragile status, the lucrative abalone industry has been shut down, and no humans are allowed to remove abalone anywhere on the California Coast.

When the massive slide seemed to have settled, the CalTrans Highway Department began a massive several year-long project to rebuild the highways.  As they prepared to bulldoze many of those 13 acres of rock and debris into the ocean, Marine Sanctuary staff went to work to rescue and relocate as many black abalone as they could.  We heard about their efforts at the January meeting of the Advisory Council.  The agenda was mostly a series of hard and depressing debates about how our current administration is rolling back all kinds of environmental protections, climate change policies, and is proposing to open up the West Coast to oil and gas drilling again.  

But then Sanctuary Superintendent Paul Michel told a small success story of a rescue mission he and a few volunteers made to the Mud Creek Slide.  For two days they gently removed (with a pie server) and relocated baby black abalone to a safer rocky section a few miles north.  400 of these rare black abalones had already died from the slide, but mid the crashing waves and continuing unstable cliffs, they moved 25 abalone to a new safe home up the coast, in the first known successful translocation of this species!

A worthy use of our tax dollars?  Well, to reopen the nine miles of closed land highway will cost $40 million.  Responding to this big abalone accident on the kelp highway with a few days of staff time and the bonus of one success story at an otherwise depressing meeting was totally worth it for this taxpayer.  Thanks, Paul. 

 Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter