Place Name Guide · Big Sur
How busy this road is, how that changes through the year, and how often the mountain takes it away.
A year counts as cut on any day the coast road was shut to through traffic somewhere between Carmel and San Simeon. Overlapping closures are not double counted — in 2017 there were three at once.
Slide or slip-outBridge failure or replacementWildfireStorm damage or debris flow
Caltrans gives two honest numbers for this coast: the annual average, and the busiest month, which runs about 17% above it. There is no permanent counter on Big Sur, so there is no published month-by-month profile. This curve is anchored on those two points and shaped by the season — treat it as the pattern, not as measurements.
peak shoulder quiet
Annual average daily traffic at each Caltrans count location on the coast road. These are two-way totals: there is no published northbound/southbound split for Highway 1 through Big Sur.
| Closure | Cause | From | Until | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Timber Fireabove the coast, mid-Big Sur | Wildfire | 2026-08-08 | open-ended | Burning since 8 August 2026. The coast road is cut mid-coast and both ends remain open. Seven months after Regent's Slide reopened. |
| Regent's SlideRocky Creek | Slide or slip-out | 2024-02 | 2026-01-14 | The longest recent closure. Reopened on 14 January 2026, about ninety days ahead of the estimate, restoring the whole coast route for the first time in nearly two years. |
| Paul's SlideLucia | Slide or slip-out | 2023-01 | 2024-06 | The same slide as 2017, moving again. Seventeen months. |
| Colorado FirePalo Colorado | Wildfire | 2022-01 | 2022-01 | A January wildfire, which is its own kind of warning. |
| Rat Creek15 miles south of Big Sur village | Storm damage or debris flow | 2021-01-29 | 2021-04 | A storm on the Dolan Fire burn scar sent debris through a culvert and took 150 feet of highway into the sea. The bare ground left by the fire five months earlier is the reason. |
| Dolan FireBig Sur, inland | Wildfire | 2020-08 | 2020-09 | Burned about 125,000 acres. It also stripped the slopes above Rat Creek, which is why the following winter did what it did. |
| Mud Creeknorth of Salmon Creek, near the county line | Slide or slip-out | 2017-05 | 2018-07 | Five million cubic feet of mountain came down and buried a quarter mile of highway under dozens of feet of rock. Caltrans rebuilt the road across the top of the slide rather than clearing it. Fourteen months. |
| Pfeiffer Canyon BridgeBig Sur village | Bridge failure or replacement | 2017-02 | 2017-10 | The ground under the bridge supports moved and the bridge had to be demolished. A steel replacement was fabricated in the Bay Area and dropped in that October. For eight months the village was split in two and children were walking a trail to get to school. |
| Paul's SlideLucia | Slide or slip-out | 2017-01 | 2017-07 | One of several slides in the wet winter of 2017, the year the coast road was cut in three places at once. |
Major through-closures of Highway 1 on the Big Sur coast. A closure is listed when the coast road was cut to through traffic between Carmel and San Simeon. Assembled from Caltrans District 5 releases, Governor's office announcements and contemporary reporting; every entry carries its confidence. Dates given as month precision unless a specific day was announced.
Journalists, businesses and residents are welcome to use this work. It exists so the people who depend on this road can plan around it. One condition: say where it came from.
Charts, analysis, closure compilation and written material © 2026 Bill Alderson, Place Name Guide. Free to reproduce and republish with attribution to Place Name Guide and a link to this page. Reproduction without attribution is not permitted.
Cite it like this
“Highway 1 by the numbers”, Place Name Guide
(Bill Alderson), 24 August 2026.
https://placenameguide.com/highway-1-statistics.html
The underlying facts are public record and nobody owns them — Caltrans count figures and the dates a road shut belong to everyone. What is claimed here is the work done on top of them: which closures were gathered and judged worth listing, how the years were computed, the charts, the analysis and the writing. That is a real and defensible claim, and stating it precisely is what makes it one.