Cruising for Burgers : Diner Traffic Prompts Road Between Valleys

In the early days of California statehood, the need to develop trade with the north sent Army crews, armed with picks and shovels, to carve roads through the narrow Newhall Pass that links the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys.

Today, the latest effort to connect the two valleys was prompted by a modern sort of problem: hamburgers.

In December, residents of a new housing tract west of the Golden State Freeway discovered the inconvenience of living near what many have dubbed Hamburger Hill, a collection of fast-food restaurants on Pico Canyon Road and Chiquella Lane. Pico Canyon is the area’s only on-ramp to the freeway, and when an In-N-Out Burger opened for business, huge crowds hungry for burgers and fries clogged the road, trapping motorists.

The motorists were stuck because Chiquella Lane, which parallels the freeway, comes to a dead end north of a hill. But last month, work crews began lowering the hill to connect Chiquella with the Old Road, which comes to a dead end south of the hill.

The $468,000 project could be completed in late September, said Jean Granucci, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works. Workers will move 120,000 cubic yards of dirt to accomplish the linkup, she said.

The rush for hamburgers, which has since subsided, prompted work on the road. “There were some problems then,” Granucci said with some understatement.

When completed, the roadway will provide motorists west of the freeway their first non-freeway route to the San Fernando Valley. They will be able to take a circuitous drive along the Old Road, which winds eastward underneath the freeway and eventually connects with San Fernando Road.

Although bulldozers have replaced picks and shovels, the extension of Chiquella Lane is just the latest effort to solve the age-old problem of linking the two valleys. From the time of the pioneers to the present, the mountains have given road builders and travelers few options.

“Geography has never been our buddy,” said J. J. O’Brien, a retired California Highway Patrol officer who patroled the Santa Clarita Valley for years. Traffic congestion in the valley is not a modern problem, he said. “The past wasn’t that perfect.”

One of the earliest efforts to link the two valleys was spearheaded by Gen. Edward Fitzgerald Beale, who in 1862 directed the digging of what became known as Beale’s Cut, an 80-yard-long slash through the mountains just east of where Sierra Highway and Clampitt Road are today. The 90-foot-deep Beale’s Cut, which still exists but is surrounded by a chain-link fence, was immortalized on film when Hollywood cowboy Tom Mix leaped across it on horseback in 1923.

In time, the cut was replaced as a traffic carrier by the Newhall Tunnel just to the west. The tunnel was later opened up by the route carved for Sierra Highway.

Just as county supervisors ordered the present roadwork on Chiquella Lane, earlier county governments responded to growth by building bigger and better roads to link the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys.

In 1928, the Los Angeles Times reported on one such project. “Road Through Mountains to Relieve Newhall Tunnel Congestion,” the headline said. “Highway By-passing Newhall Tunnel Promises Relief from Traffic Jams.”