Tag: San Francisquito Canyon Road

A St. Francis Dam Followup

Susie and I were up in the Santa Clarita area last week and we thought we would attempt to find the St. Francis Dam site.  A quick Google search brought us to a map, we took a right off I-5 at the 126, and we soon found ourselves on San Francisquito Canyon Road.  Wow, after a bit of the burbs it grew rural real fast.   I know great roads, and folks, this is one.  San Francisquito Canyon Road is an awesome set of twisties, one I plan to return to soon on my motorcycle.

An amazing road, San Francisquito Canyon Road was, and there was a lot more of it. I’ll be back, and I’ll be back on two wheels.

We were only traveled a few miles when we came upon a large art deco building (an LA Department of Water and Power plant).  We had arrived.

LA DWP’s Plant 2, an art deco hydroelectric generation facility on San Francisquito Road. The three huge pipes behind it carry water from the California aqueduct system.

The DWP building was magnificent, and when we parked, we found this plaque:

There you have it: The story, the plaque, and the location. We had arrived. Everything was behind a chain link fence, but it was still very cool. I’m going to guess the concrete behind the plaque is from the St. Francis dam.  We were standing where the wall of water released by the dam had passed.
A timeline of events leading up to the St. Francis Dam disaster of 1928.

As the plaque said, we were a mile and a half from where the actual dam had stood, so we continued north on San Francisquito Canyon Road.  The building (the one in the photo above) is a replacement…the original power plant was swept away when the dam collapsed.   I would think so; when the dam collapsed it released a 10-story tall 12 1/2 billion gallons of water.

We didn’t see the actual dam; the Internet told us it was a 5-minute hike east of the road (you can’t drive to it), and according to what we read, there’s not much of the dam left.   We drove north a little further and saw the dirt road leading to the site, but there was a gate and it was closed.  Maybe next time.

I was very intrigued by San Francisquito Canyon Road, and I wanted to know where it went.  I found this satellite photo map on Google:

The bottom arrow points to LA DWP Plant 2, the building you see in the photo at the top of this blog. The upper arrow points to our turnaround point. The site I found on the Internet said you can park there and hike to the actual dam site. The distance from one arrow to the other is about a mile and a half.  The other roads shown in this photo are all dirt.

From the map, I could see that continuing north on San Francisquito Canyon Road would brings us to Elizabeth Lake Road, and from there it’s Lake Hughes Road south to get back to Interstate 5 near Castaic.   The little bit we did on San Francisquito Canyon Road showed it to be a great road.  I had ridden Elizabeth Lake Road on previous motorcycle rides (without realizing how close I was to the St. Francis Dam disaster site).  On the map, Lake Hughes Road appears to be even twistier than San Francisquito Canyon Road, and it looks like it would be a great ride.

My planned motorcycle ride: East at CA 126 off I-5, northeast on San Francisquito road to Elizabeth Lake Road, and then south on Lake Hughes Road. It’s going to be a good one.

I’m going to return to this area on my motorcycle and do the ride you see above.  It’s going to be great, and you’ll read about it right here.

Stay tuned!