Cascade Loop & Volcanic Legacy Scenic Byway

Driving The Cascade Loop and Volcanic Legacy Scenic Byway

After a break of four years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I travelled back to America in 2023 for another road trip. This time I did The Cascade Loop and Volcanic Legacy Scenic Byway. I did manage to visit Hawaii last Fall with my wife for a big-time wedding anniversary vacation. I wanted to do a road trip as well that year, but with the expense of and time in Hawaii, it just wasn’t feasible. We did however stop off in San Francisco on the way back and went to see the 49ers play!

My original plan for this trip was to drive the coast from Seattle to San Diego. In fact I have this planned out in full. Unfortunately that plan got blown out by California’s weather over the winter of 2022 and in early ’23. My route would have seen me revisit the Pacific Coast Highway element of my road trip in 2015. However those storms, as they often can, caused landslides on Highway 1 in Big Sur and blocked the road in places. Normally Caltrans does sterling work and gets the road re-opened by late spring the same year.

PCH Still Closed

Last year was particularly bad for large, violent storms though. As of summer 2023 there was a small section of PCH in Big Sur, about a mile long, still closed. This is despite continuous work by Caltrans since the closure. There was over 500,000 cubic yards of debris to remove at Paul’s Slide.

So mid-2023 I had to make a decision of whether to hang on until the last minute and see if PCH did re-open. However that would leave me open to not being able to get the flights I wanted nor possibly book the hotels I’d identified to stay in. I wasn’t going to do the coastal Seattle to San Diego route if I couldn’t drive PCH again. So about a month before planned departure, I decided to postpone until 2024 – hopefully – and find another route for 2023. Note that after writing up this 2023 trip and posting these pages in mid-2024, Caltrans still didn’t have a re-opening date in May of that year.

I used part of the Seattle-San Diego plan and added something new after doing more research. And instead of seeing the 49ers in the middle of the trip, I’d end up in San Jose. This is the story of the trip.