Portal:U.S. roads/Selected article/September 2009

Looking north through Swede's Cut

The Ridge Route, officially the Castaic–Tejon Route, is a narrow two-lane highway in the northern Greater Los Angeles Area of the U.S. state of California. Opened in 1915 and paved with concrete from 1917 to 1921, the road was the first paved highway directly linking the Los Angeles Basin with the San Joaquin Valley over the Tejon Pass and the rugged ridge south of Gorman; it was particularly used to travel from the city of Los Angeles to and beyond Bakersfield. Most of the road was bypassed in 1933 by the Ridge Route Alternate (then U.S. Route 99), which has since been upgraded to a modern freeway (Interstate 5). The portion of the old road within the Angeles National Forest was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1997, and is temporarily closed pending repairs; the other remnants of the original two-lane road not destroyed by later construction are used by local traffic.

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