Exploring More of Abandoned Highway 80 Near San Diego

in today's video we visit another abandoned portion of highway 80 this stretch is located on the eastern edge of San Diego County between Hakuba and aqua tio this portion is on the mountain springs grade and was later replaced by Interstate 8 in this video we're at another abandoned part of highway 80 east of San Diego we did a video on abandon highway 80 before near the scan so this portion of it is near Mountain Springs Mountain Springs is right there behind me this portion of the road was actually built in about 1913 and paved in 1926 you could tell it's the 1926 portion of the road because it's 20 feet wide we're right below the desert view tower a little bit but the great thing about this portion of highway 80 versus the portion out by Descanso is that this portion you can actually drive it's still drivable and you just have to take a little dirt road off of Mountain Springs Road for there to get to it interstate 8 cuts right through it so we're gonna drive down and see what we can find to get to this abandoned portion of highway 80 you exit interstate 8 at Mountain Springs Road and you go east on the dirt road where the red marker is on the map you follow the dirt road until it hits highway 80 which is marked with a blue marker on the map you won't need a 4x4 for the dirt road but a high clearance vehicle is recommended there is a couple ruts in the road that are little sketchy one interesting thing about this abandoned portion of highway 80 is it's on BLM lands and shooting is allowed there's a part of the road that a lot of people go out to to do shooting and we'll get to it in just a few minutes [Music] there was this interesting painted portion out here it looks like somebody did some art you can actually see this on if you look at a satellite view on Google Maps you can see this area and I was kind of wondering what it was and getting out here on the ground you could see that it's some art then people did [Music] [Music] here we are at the portion where most of the shooting takes place this area is known as smugglers Gulch not to be confused with the smugglers Gulch that is in San Diego on the border with Tijuana this is a mainly a range and as you saw on the sign it asked for people to pick up after themselves after they go shooting which sadly hasn't really been happening here you see an abandoned TV that's been shot up casings on the ground all sorts of different things that have been shot up there was computers fire extinguishers all sorts of things looks like some people took out their frustration on some office equipment out here as well and then there's some more casings and then on the other side of the road there's also shooting going on as well another range on the other side of the road our makeshift range on the other side of the road what's interesting is this portion of highway 80 is in between two portions of the eight however it's elevated and there's mountains so there's no danger of bullets hitting any cars on the 8 blow as you probably saw from the footage of the drive giant rock freeway down there this was a point through this whitey mouth now this brings great problem as I mentioned the problem that they ended up closer to where the eight is now and get rid of some of the get rid of some of the turns you can see it's a whole portion here that they actually try to extend it at parts with blacktop to make it not quite as narrow as some of these curves we're getting towards the end of the this portion of it before it gets cut off by the eight and we're actually going to park here and just walk to the end as I mentioned before it is a 20 foot Road there's a steep drop on one side and a mountain on the other side so turning around on it isn't the easiest thing par which we have today so we're just gonna walk the few hundred feet to the end this insane this portion was built 1926 1927 it was paved and it was so windy that they had to curves in it and also much wider and they opened the new road in 1938 was bypassed this portion of the road so this road has been virtually abandoned since the 1930s aside from people shooting or any other activities it was a motorcycle that's up in front of us that came down as well [Music] and here we are literally the end of the road as you can see it ends right here now it would have gone downhill and gone around this curve originally and if people get a Google satellite view of this area you can actually see the curves on the other side of this bend here you can actually see some more of the old road as it goes over there however that road reachable here without going on freeway now this was a very important road as prior to this road it would take days to get from San Diego to valid Yuma and then once this road was completed in 1913 the road with the road it would take less than a day to go between Yuma and San Diego that was very important for moving troops from Fort Yuma and also agriculture from the Imperial Valley still as I mentioned earlier because of the wine enos of this road truckers didn't want to take this route so they would avoid it and Los Angeles and they come down actually making it take longer to get stuff to San Diego and that's why they ended up improving the road moving in just 12 years later lots of light so that's our look at this portion of the abandoned highway 80 at Mountain Springs it can't be understated how important this road was to the early 20th century history of the city of San Diego if you have any questions about the road or want more information on how to get out there feel free to leave a comment below if you enjoyed the video please give it a thumbs up consider subscribing and we'll see you next week

Channel: Sidetrack Adventures

Views: 268,480

Keywords: Highway 80, Historic Route 80, Route 80, Mountain Springs, Jacumba Hot Springs, Ocotillo, Desert View Tower, Smugglers Gulch, abandoned highway, San Diego off road, San Diego travel, San Diego County, Dixie Overland Highway, desert roads, road trip, highway, historic highway 80

Id: zHGXCWixOc8

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2020