On a misty night in the late 1980s, Dan Moss was driving north on Highway 1 along the cliffs at Devil’s Slide near Pacifica when a deer crossed in front of his car. He swerved to avoid the animal, and his car began to skid toward the side of the highway. Then, in a second, he was over the edge.
Moss dropped 50 feet down a nearly 200-foot cliff toward the water, totaling the vehicle before he climbed back up the jagged rock face and sought help.
He was lucky. He survived with just two broken ribs and a scar on his head.
About 30 years later, his son, Richard Moss, 22, was driving the same stretch of road in the early morning of May 25, 2017. A traffic camera inside the Tom Lantos Tunnels near Devil’s Slide captured his blue Hyundai Tiburon going through, but Richard was never seen again. Nearly a year later, after a lengthy search for him had ended, a beachgoer found his vertebra on Montara State Beach about 200 yards away.
Dan Moss stands along Highway 1 near Devil’s Slide in San Mateo County. His son Richard Moss died after driving off the road there in 2017. Since his son’s death, Dan has been advocating and demanding officials make the road safer.
“That spot there, if you're not paying attention, you can go straight ahead into the ocean, and there's nothing to stop you,” Dan Moss said of the area where officials believe his son went off the road. “There was no barrier. There was no guardrail.”
Between Pacifica and Montara on the western flank of the continent, Devil’s Slide is archetypal California, a beautiful stretch of coastline with stark, rocky cliffs descending into deep blue surf. Officially, it runs 1.3 miles along the water, but many locals refer to a larger span — from the tunnels to the Montara city limit — as Devil’s Slide.
For decades, the postcard-worthy landscape has befuddled engineers and terrorized drivers with its winding asphalt atop eroding bluffs. Dozens of people have driven off the road, many plummeting to their deaths on the rocks or in the surf below.
In 2013, Caltrans opened the Tom Lantos Tunnels, which bypassed a particularly treacherous stretch of the highway and promised to make the road safer. Yet, at least 9 people have died in accidents in the area around and just south of Devil’s Slide since the tunnels opened, according to the California Highway Patrol and Bay Area news reports. Today, according to Caltrans, this section of roadway has an accident rate more than 50% higher than the statewide average for similar highways.
Now, the state transportation agency is considering a new series of barriers along Highway 1 in the area near Devil’s Slide in an effort to curb accidents and prevent deaths. If environmental plans and contracts are approved on schedule, construction will begin in January 2024.
Dan Stegink, a volunteer rescue diver who for 30 years has helped search for missing people believed to have gone over the cliffs, said many factors can cause a person to drive off the road.
“There’s the weather, people who are unfamiliar with the coast, a sharp right angle, the fog, sudden text messages and some gorgeous scenery,” he said. “But if it was a safe place, all these accidents wouldn't be happening within 600 yards of each other.”
Vehicles along Highway 1 near Devil’s Slide in San Mateo County. A proposal from Caltrans would add safety barriers along the road in an effort to prevent off-roadway accidents and deaths.
For as long as people have been traveling through Devil’s Slide, the road has been a problem.
Before a road traced the cliffs, people moving between San Francisco and the coastal area where Pacifica and Montara now stand traversed dangerous routes over the San Pedro and Montara mountains. In 1879, officials started carving a more direct path — the first coastal thoroughfare in the area that would become known as Devil’s Slide.
California State Route 1 opened in 1937, but the road was constructed without emergency shoulders and rockslides were common, especially during the rainy season. Just three years later, officials temporarily closed the Devil’s Slide section of the highway because of frequent landslides.
DEVIL'S SLIDE 01/C/22APR98/MN/CG --- San Mateo County Sherriff's Rescue team members check the cliffside on Devil's Slide where a rental van went over the edge, ejecting the driver who was not found after witnesses said they saw him in the water. A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter and ship searched the water for several hours after the accident but could find no one in the water. (CHRONICLE PHOTO BY CARLOS AVILA GONZALEZ)
DEVIL'S SLIDE 02/C/22APR98/MN/CG --- A crumpled rental truck that plunged down the cliff at Devil's Slide lay in the pounding surf as rescue personael attempted to find the driver who witnesses say was ejected from the vehicle and was seen swimming before being lost in the waves. None of the rescue personnel could get close to the vehicle due to the steep cliff face and the strong waves, however a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter and ship criss-crossed the area searching for the driver. (CHRONICLE PHOTO BY CARLOS AVILA GONZALEZ)
As more vehicles began traversing the road, more began falling from its edge.
During the 1960s, rescue attempts were so common that the Pacifica Fire Department regularly trained its teams in mountain climbing to tackle the formidable cliffs. Officials and residents began advocating for a safer alternative to the highway in the 1970s, but action was slow. Meanwhile, the accidents continued.
A review of news reports from 1990 through 2021 indicates at least 10 rescues and 30 deaths — including six people presumed dead after a minivan drove off the cliff in 1992 — or roughly one fatality per year. California Highway Patrol tracks fatalities only back to 2010, three years before the tunnels opened. Its data counts 167 collisions and eight deaths over the past 11 years, with seven occurring after the tunnels debuted.
But these statistics don't account for every death: CHP doesn't track missing persons cases or incidents classified as suicides, and some victims and vehicles are never recovered.
Richard Moss, who officials initially believed had gone missing, is still not accounted for in the CHP data. “The only reason we know that Richard died there is because of the effort that we all put into the search,” Dan Moss said. “But how many people have gone into that water and nobody knew?”
Cars now enter the tunnels and pass through the hillside instead of skirting the bluffs, and the former coastal roadway has become a popular hiking trail. But outside and just south of the tunnels, eroding cliffs with steep drops to the ocean and a lack of permanent barriers means the area around Devil’s Slide remains dangerous. The crumbling shoulder can prevent drivers from recovering after they leave the pavement, and vehicles continue to go off the highway past the tunnels and a half-mile south at Gray Whale Cove.
“There's really only one specific location that I know of where the cars have been going off consistently,” said CHP spokesman Mark Andrews, referring to Gray Whale Cove. “There is no barrier, there is a raised embankment. Depending on the speed of the car or the angle that it's traveling at, it could potentially avoid the embankment without much of anything to keep it from going over.”
Gray Whale Cove State Beach, south of Devil’s Slide, in San Mateo County. The area has been the site of multiple off-road fatalities in recent years.
But, he added, “as long as you're not distracted or doing something else, you're going to follow the roadway generally 99.9% of the time.”
However, in the last two years, the Devil’s Slide area and Gray Whale Cove, near where Richard Moss died in 2017, have been the site of three fatal incidents and a pair of dramatic rescues.
Yuri Kim, 54, of San Francisco died on Aug. 31, 2020, when her vehicle went off the road at Gray Whale Cove. Two months later, motorcyclist Ion Bolea, 26, of South San Francisco, died after going over the same cliffs. On Sept. 15, 2021, Anthony Colonnese Jr., 73, of San Francisco, was killed when his car veered off the road near the tunnels. Most recently, in November, a man was rescued from the bluffs at Gray Whale Cove after he drove off the highway and crashed into the ocean just south of the tunnel.
Many aren’t as fortunate as that driver.
“If a person makes it all the way to the water, it's pretty rare that they survive,” Stegink said. “The vast majority of these people were going about their daily lives on their way to work or home, and they never saw it coming. Quite frankly, it could happen to anyone.”
Caltrans laid out the stakes in its report about the proposed safety measures: “If these issues are not addressed, there is a risk that vehicles may continue to drive off the highway, causing severe injury or death to motorists and passengers as well as Caltrans maintenance workers.”
Glenda Cota and her fiancé Jason Affolter, who died on April 27, 2004 after his car flew off the roadway on Highway 1 near Devil's Slide in San Mateo County.
Glenda Cota with her son Jason, named after his father Jason Affolter who died at Devil's Slide in San Mateo County in 2004. Affolter died before his son was born.
On the morning of April 27, 2004, Jason Affolter, a 23-year-old father-to-be, left his Moss Beach home, driving north along Highway 1 to his construction job in Pacifica. Twenty minutes later, his fiancee, Glenda Cota, heard helicopters overhead.
“Oh, no,” she thought, “something must have happened on Devil’s Slide.”
Affolter’s car had gone off the road just south of Devil’s Slide, plunging 200 feet into the ocean. His body washed up on shore two months later, just days before his son was born.
A year later, Caltrans broke ground on the Tom Lantos Tunnels, which would bypass a mile of landslide-prone slopes and avoid one of the road’s most dangerous sections.
"Now it's going to be a boon for people who used to take this road with trepidation," Caltrans spokesman Jeff Weiss told The Chronicle in 2005. "It's a happy moment to be able to put Devil's Slide behind us."
Caltrans had begun lobbying for a bypass around Devil's Slide in 1971, but local property owners and environmentalists, who wanted to preserve the natural beauty of the area, fought to prevent construction. The issue stalled until the 1990s, when hazardous weather caused several major closures of the highway, including mudslides in 1995 that shuttered it for months and sparked a vehement debate about how best to fix the highway.
Some of the discord was recorded in letters to The Chronicle:
In 1995, Greg Bayol, then head of public affairs for Caltrans, sent a verse to famed Chronicle columnist Herb Caen about the ongoing challenges of maintaining the road: "Since Herby was a little kid / The road at Devil's Slide has slid / Fixing and patching that road's a hassle / Never getting it done like a bypass'll / But we'll keep paving and spending the dough / Never once saying ‘We told you so!’”
Caltrans workers and media personnel walk the approximately 4,200 feet of completed tunnel at the Devil’s Slide Bypass in June 2010. The Tom Lantos Tunnels opened to the public in 2013.
Opponents of the tunnels said the project was not sufficiently planned and would not adequately prevent deaths and landslides in the area.
“The major issue is that we will not have safe and adequate transportation with a tunnel, period,” Mary Ann Sabie, the co-chairwoman of the committee against the project, told The Chronicle in 1996. “The tunnel fixes one mile. Devil's Slide is 3.5 miles long.''
In November 1996, San Mateo County voters approved the tunnel project. Caltrans, which had advocated for a mountain bypass, changed its position and agreed that a tunnel was the best and most economical method to address the problems at Devil’s Slide.
“The only realistic option was a tunnel,” said Nicholas Sitar, a UC Berkeley professor of civil and environmental engineering. “And the only unusual thing about it is that it took them 30 years to finally decide to do it.”
Boring for the two 30-foot-diameter tunnels began in September 2007. The nearly mile-long tunnels opened to drivers on March 26, 2013, with well-lit corridors, heat and carbon monoxide sensors and 24-hour video monitoring.
“This puts the spotlight on the coast," Cherise Hale McHugh, the executive director of the Half Moon Bay Coastside Chamber of Commerce, told The Chronicle at the time. "It's going to be easier and safer to get here, and we don't have to worry about our road falling into the ocean every six to eight years."
People navigate the Tom Lantos Tunnels, which bypass Devil’s Slide, in San Mateo County. The tunnels have made the road safer, but accidents and fatalities continue nearby.
The Tom Lantos Tunnels were built to make the road safer — and they have — but the danger in the area south of Devil’s Slide has continued. According to the CHP, in the two years before the tunnels opened, there were 29 incidents, including 16 injuries and one fatality. In the two years after, from 2013 to 2015, there were 42 incidents nearby, including 16 injuries and two fatalities.
Sitar said the tunnels have made a meaningful difference in road safety. But the cliffs south of Devil’s Slide, near Gray Whale Cove, are still the site of off-the-road incidents and deaths.
Glenda Cota thinks the safety measures haven't been enough.
Dan Moss with his son Richard and his wife Kathleen Penfold. Richard Moss died May 25, 2017, after his car went off the road on Highway 1 near Devil's Slide in San Mateo County.
Richard Moss, 22, died on May 25, 2017, after his car went off a cliff near Devil's Slide on Highway 1 in San Mateo County.
“I was a child when there were talks about creating a tunnel for the parts that were thought to be more dangerous. And then it was built and just left at that,” Cota said. “People thought that sufficed, even though there were still multiple and constant deaths.”
Four years after the Tom Lantos Tunnels opened, Richard Moss drove through the southbound corridor and disappeared.
Two days after they learned their son was missing, Dan Moss and Richard’s stepmother, Kathleen Penfold, flew from their home in Hawaii to look for him. Dan Moss circulated fliers, recruited volunteers at town halls and created the “Finding Richard Moss” Facebook page, which grew into a community of about 1,500 people offering tips and support in the search for his 22-year-old son.
Desperate, Dan Moss rented a helicopter and flew up and down the coast. The sheriff’s department deployed drones, boats and divers to search the ocean for Richard or his vehicle, and local fishermen used sonar to scan for remains. Richard’s friends, a tight-knit group of skateboarders in El Granada, also joined the effort.
In July 2017, about a month after Richard Moss went missing, his AAA card washed up on Montara State Beach. Soon after, searchers found his car’s wheel with the brake still attached at the north end of the beach. His vertebra washed up about a year later.
In July 2017, about a month after Richard Moss went missing, his AAA card washed up on Montara State Beach. Soon after, searchers found his car’s wheel with the brake still attached at the north end of the beach. His vertebra washed up about a year later.
But for weeks there was no trace of Richard.
In early July, more than a month after he had vanished, Richard’s AAA card washed up on Montara State Beach. Soon after, searchers found his car’s wheel with the brake still attached at the north end of the beach. Then the vehicle’s front bumper.
“It was pretty evident that Richard died in the crash going over Devil's Slide,” Dan Moss said. “So we turned our energy towards Caltrans.”
Dan Moss connected with a group of people who had lost loved ones on Highway 1 near Devil’s Slide, and together they protested at the suspected site of the accident, demanding that Caltrans make the road safer.
“It wasn't until meeting Dan that we really felt like we could have our voices heard and show up in numbers, making it hard to ignore the effects of the losses caused by the unsafe part of Highway 1 at Devil’s Slide,” Cota said.
Following the demonstrations, Caltrans installed 36-inch-high temporary concrete barriers to replace the shorter stone wall where Richard and several others had gone off the road.
Dan Moss believes the barriers have prevented other people from going over the cliffs where Richard likely died, but accidents are still happening nearby.
After the deaths of Kim and Bolea at Gray Whale Cove in quick succession in 2020, concerned residents began advocating more fiercely for additional safety measures.
That year, Caltrans installed an additional 140 feet of temporary barriers along the bluffs at Gray Whale Cove as a “safety enhancement” measure, and the agency said it would develop a long-term plan to address the persistent problems.
People at Gray Whale Cove State Beach. Two people were killed in separate incidents when their vehicles went off the roadway at Gray Whale Cove in 2020.
Late last year, as the tunnels approached their 10th anniversary, Caltrans unveiled a new safety project on Highway 1 to replace or install 11 taller and bulkier “see-through” barriers along the road between Devil’s Slide and Montara. The proposed barriers, which will replace temporary k-rail barriers and metal beam guardrails, include an updated guardrail system and two kinds of concrete blockades — all with gaps that allow for scenic views.
As of June this year, the project was in the planning and estimates phase. Final designs and permissions are expected to be completed in August 2023, with construction beginning in winter 2024.
“It's finally happening,” Dan Moss said of the project. “What happened to Richard can happen to anybody. I would rather have (drivers) hit the barrier and crash the car in the roadway. Yeah, you got to get a new car, but that's easy, right? You can't get a new life.”
Caltrans project manager Kerry Morgan said officials expect the project to prevent at least 13 off-the-road incidents over 10 years.
“I'm incredibly grateful to Caltrans for making it happen. But for me, ultimately, the question will always be, what took so long for it to happen?” Cota asked. “This has been an issue since way before me and long before all these other deaths that could have been avoided.”
Glenda Cota and her son Jason, who turned 18 in June, now live in Arizona, but they occasionally return to Half Moon Bay.
“It's hard to hate such a beautiful place,” Cota said. “I grew up there thinking it was the most beautiful part of California, with the sunset and endless ocean by the gorgeous cliffside. You're literally at the end of California — that’s what you're seeing on that road.”
Cota told her son early on about his father and the accident at Devil’s Slide that “took him away.”
“It’s really hard raising a son as a single parent,” Cota said. “Regardless of how much time goes by, you'll be left with a certain amount of ‘what-ifs’ and ‘should've, could've.’ I can't help thinking about how things would be now if they panned out differently, but we continue to move on and live our lives.”
Jason, who’s named for his father, has been learning to drive, but he has some anxiety, especially about the idea of driving Highway 1 around Devil’s Slide.
“He hopes that he gets closure the first time that he drives on that road and finishes what his dad didn't,” Cota said. “As a mother, knowing that the road is safer than it has ever been gives me a lot of comfort.”
After several unsuccessful searches in 2017, Dan Moss gave up on finding Richard.
“I'm not interested in taking him out of the water anymore,” he told volunteers then. “All I would probably end up doing is cremating him and then putting him back in the same place. So let’s just let him rest in peace.”
More than 200 people attended Richard Moss’s memorial in Half Moon Bay on Aug. 27, 2017. A second service was held a few weeks later in Waialua, Hawaii, where Richard attended his last three years of high school. In lieu of flowers, the family asked that donations be made in Richard’s name to the Tony Hawk Foundation.
A memorial for Richard Moss on a skate ramp in El Granada.
Dan Moss now lives on Oahu, more than 2,000 miles from Devil’s Slide. The last time he was in San Mateo County was four years ago, when he collected his son’s ashes and closed his bank accounts. But he returned to California this June to visit family, friends and Richard at his resting place — marking the fifth anniversary of his son’s death.
He drove along Highway 1 and paused at a turnout north of Montara State Beach — where steep bluffs lead down to a sandy beach shore — the same spot where he had protested for a safer road years ago. This time, he threw flowers into the Pacific.
Though he doesn’t regularly drive the road anymore, he’s still concerned about the risk to those who travel it during their daily commutes and continues to champion more safety measures.
“I'm pretty strong about this stuff. I'm not going to let it go,” he said.
Two skateboards shaped like a cross adorn the side of a skate ramp in a beachside parking lot in El Granada, a village about 7 miles south of Devil’s Slide, where Richard and his friends often skated. The memorial is dedicated to Richard, his name written in large letters surrounded by heartfelt messages from loved ones: “Skate in paradise.” “We love you!”
If you approach the memorial on a sunny weekend afternoon, someone might walk up and ask, “Did you know Richard?”
Signs at the Devil’s Slide Trail warn hikers to stay off the cliffs.
Vanessa Arredondo is a Hearst fellow at The San Francisco Chronicle. Before joining The Chronicle, she interned at CalMatters as part of the College Journalism Network's first class. She is a proud product of community college and learned the fundamentals of journalism while on staff at the Pierce College Roundup. Her work also appears in NBCLA, Telemundo 52, and the Daily Californian.