The Road to Porterville, part 2
...Continued from previous journal.
Heading east from Gilroy, Route 152 threads through the southern end of the Diablo Mountain range. It's a sparsely populated section of California between US-101 and I-5 that feels surprisingly remote given that it's not terribly far from the Bay Area and its millions of inhabitants. In the middle of this nowhere is a surprising oasis, Casa de Fruta. [Links: Their website, Wikipedia page]
Casa de Fruta is one of those overgrown, gas-food-and-everything-else places that grow up in certain places. It's like South Dakota's Wall Drug or South Carolina's South Of The Border, though less garish. Their shtick is that everything is "Casa de ___". For example, they have a narrow gauge railroad for the kids, and it's called Casa de Choo Choo. I wouldn't be surprised if the bathrooms are named "Casa de Shit".
Route 152 quickly leaves behind Casa de Mátame Ahora as it climbs the Pacheco Pass, topping out at 1,368 ft (417 m). From the ridge line you can see down across the massive San Luis Reservoir and out into California's Central Valley. You can see the reservoir alongside the route marked on the map. It looks like a lake.
The feeling of remoteness continues as we wind around the reservoir. It really is huge. The highway wraps around it for about 12 miles. According to its Wikipedia page, the San Luis Reservoir is held behind one of the largest natural embankment dams in the US. Just as astonishing as how big it is is how low it is right now. Thanks to an unusually dry winter it's at only 43% of capacity [link]. You can see that in the long slopes down to the shore and the "bathtub ring" hundreds of feet upslope from the water's edge.
Continuing east from the reservoir we are back near sea level in California's huge Central Valley. I used the term "huge" a few sentences back to describe a reservoir, but this valley is a hundred miles across and several hundred miles long. In some parts of the world it'd be its own country. Or three. But here it's just part of one state.
Route 152 crosses I-5 on its way through the dusty farm town of Los Banos. If Los Banos had a nickname it'd probably be "Los Banos, a good place to take a leak." (See? That's funny because [Google Translate]. And it really is a good place to stop for the bathroom.)
East of Los Banos, 152 cuts through serious farm country. It's wide and flat here, with fields on both sides of the four lane road. I'm not too handy at recognizing different types of trees but I think a lot of the plants here are almonds. Almonds are the second largest crop in California, after grapes, and are worth more than $4 billion annually [link].
Route 152 ends as it intersects California 99. Here our path turns southwest along 99. This road was once part of US-99, the first paved road running the entirety of the Western US from the Canadian border to the Mexican border. Parts of it became I-5 with the construction of the Interstate Highway System in the 1960s, and the orphaned bits were decommissioned from US Route status. Today they are State Routes 99 in California, Oregon, and Washington; and still serve as important arteries. [Wikipedia links: CA 99, US 99.]
Here in the Central Valley, CA-99 connects basically all the agricultural cities. I-5 is routed well to the west of many of them, which makes it a faster drive for long distances (less local traffic) but also very boring (little to see and few places to stop).
One of the cities connected by Highway 99 is Fresno. With a population now just over 500,000 it's surprisingly large for a cow town most of us scoff at. In fact it's the fifth largest city in California and the 34th in the US. Some cities that are less populous than Fresno are Minneapolis (pop. 400,070), New Orleans (378,715), Miami (417,650), and Atlanta (447,841). Now who's a cow town?
Regardless of what you consider Fresno to be, once you're 10 miles outside of it you really are out in the sticks. Except for the city of Bakersfield and a few small towns along the way, it's all farm country from here on down to the mountains north of Los Angeles. ...Not that we have to go that far, thankfully. For this trip we exit onto Highway 190 eastbound at the tiny town of Tipton (pop. 2,500-ish) and finish for the night at Porterville. What, with its population of 55,000 Porterville is comparatively urban!
Next in this series: Mountain Home Is My Mountain Home
Heading east from Gilroy, Route 152 threads through the southern end of the Diablo Mountain range. It's a sparsely populated section of California between US-101 and I-5 that feels surprisingly remote given that it's not terribly far from the Bay Area and its millions of inhabitants. In the middle of this nowhere is a surprising oasis, Casa de Fruta. [Links: Their website, Wikipedia page]
Casa de Fruta is one of those overgrown, gas-food-and-everything-else places that grow up in certain places. It's like South Dakota's Wall Drug or South Carolina's South Of The Border, though less garish. Their shtick is that everything is "Casa de ___". For example, they have a narrow gauge railroad for the kids, and it's called Casa de Choo Choo. I wouldn't be surprised if the bathrooms are named "Casa de Shit".
Route 152 quickly leaves behind Casa de Mátame Ahora as it climbs the Pacheco Pass, topping out at 1,368 ft (417 m). From the ridge line you can see down across the massive San Luis Reservoir and out into California's Central Valley. You can see the reservoir alongside the route marked on the map. It looks like a lake.
The feeling of remoteness continues as we wind around the reservoir. It really is huge. The highway wraps around it for about 12 miles. According to its Wikipedia page, the San Luis Reservoir is held behind one of the largest natural embankment dams in the US. Just as astonishing as how big it is is how low it is right now. Thanks to an unusually dry winter it's at only 43% of capacity [link]. You can see that in the long slopes down to the shore and the "bathtub ring" hundreds of feet upslope from the water's edge.
Continuing east from the reservoir we are back near sea level in California's huge Central Valley. I used the term "huge" a few sentences back to describe a reservoir, but this valley is a hundred miles across and several hundred miles long. In some parts of the world it'd be its own country. Or three. But here it's just part of one state.
Route 152 crosses I-5 on its way through the dusty farm town of Los Banos. If Los Banos had a nickname it'd probably be "Los Banos, a good place to take a leak." (See? That's funny because [Google Translate]. And it really is a good place to stop for the bathroom.)
East of Los Banos, 152 cuts through serious farm country. It's wide and flat here, with fields on both sides of the four lane road. I'm not too handy at recognizing different types of trees but I think a lot of the plants here are almonds. Almonds are the second largest crop in California, after grapes, and are worth more than $4 billion annually [link].
Route 152 ends as it intersects California 99. Here our path turns southwest along 99. This road was once part of US-99, the first paved road running the entirety of the Western US from the Canadian border to the Mexican border. Parts of it became I-5 with the construction of the Interstate Highway System in the 1960s, and the orphaned bits were decommissioned from US Route status. Today they are State Routes 99 in California, Oregon, and Washington; and still serve as important arteries. [Wikipedia links: CA 99, US 99.]
Here in the Central Valley, CA-99 connects basically all the agricultural cities. I-5 is routed well to the west of many of them, which makes it a faster drive for long distances (less local traffic) but also very boring (little to see and few places to stop).
One of the cities connected by Highway 99 is Fresno. With a population now just over 500,000 it's surprisingly large for a cow town most of us scoff at. In fact it's the fifth largest city in California and the 34th in the US. Some cities that are less populous than Fresno are Minneapolis (pop. 400,070), New Orleans (378,715), Miami (417,650), and Atlanta (447,841). Now who's a cow town?
Regardless of what you consider Fresno to be, once you're 10 miles outside of it you really are out in the sticks. Except for the city of Bakersfield and a few small towns along the way, it's all farm country from here on down to the mountains north of Los Angeles. ...Not that we have to go that far, thankfully. For this trip we exit onto Highway 190 eastbound at the tiny town of Tipton (pop. 2,500-ish) and finish for the night at Porterville. What, with its population of 55,000 Porterville is comparatively urban!
Next in this series: Mountain Home Is My Mountain Home