The Caltrans Angeles Crest Highway Road Status should be a very useful page giving the conditions along the Crest Highway (SR2), akin to the wonderful pages giving current incident status on major highways. Unfortunately, perhaps because the status of the Crest Highway changes slowly, or because they obtain the status of that Highway differently from their other highways, that page is often out of date with actual conditions, or just plain wrong.
Here are some examples of discrepancies:
- On 3/17/00, 3/20/00 and 4/7/00, the Caltrans webpage said that the closure was extended to the Snow Crest Ski Lift due to snow. In fact, the road was observed to be closed only at Islip Saddle by Jim Carter on 3/19/00 and by Jane Strong on 4/7/00.
- Dave Anderberg reported that the Angeles Crest Highway was completely open on 5/9/00, even though the Caltrans website erroneously said on 5/9/00 and 5/10/00 that SR2 was still closed between Islip Saddle and 5 mi west of Big Pines.
- On 2/16/01 the Caltrans webpage said that avalanche closure from 2.2 miles north of I-210 to Islip Saddle is the normal winter closure, which of course wasn't true.
- The Caltrans webpage stated that SR2 was open on 1/4/03 and 1/5/03, despite Jane observing the closure on 1/4/03. Others also verified the closure on 1/5/03, and a USFS Fire Captain at Big Pines verified that the winter closure was in effect. The winter closure probably went into effect with the storms of 12/16/02. Finally, on 1/7/03, the Caltrans page reported the closure.
- The Caltrans webpage on 5/23/03 through at least 5/25/03 stated that SR2 was open on that Memorial Day weekend even though the road was still closed as of 6/2/03, when their page properly reported that the winter closure was still in effect. (In this case, I think everyone was working hard to try to get SR2 open by Memorial Day, but due to a winter landslide which took out part of the road, there was simply too much work to be done to open it by then. So the Caltrans page was anticipating what the status would be, rather than reporting what the status was.)
So take the conditions reported there with a grain of salt...
See also March 2006 road damage.
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Copyright © 2000-2006 by Tom Chester.
Permission is freely granted to reproduce any or all of this page as long as credit is given to me at this source:
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Comments and feedback: Tom Chester
Last update: 26 November 2006.