James Dean’s final route
It's easy to imagine what James Dean’s last hour was like as he speeded toward his fate on a two-lane road in Central California.
Sure, Highway 46 has changed significantly since then, as has the roadside store where he last stopped. But the desolation of the route is the same — leading to the spot between Interstate 5 and Highway 101 in rural San Luis Obispo County, at an oddly shaped intersection near the speck of a town called Cholame, where a Ford coupe smashed into his Porsche 550 Spyder on Sept. 30, 1955. The crash killed the rising Hollywood star and cemented his status as a legend.
It’s also easy to understand why 23-year-old college student Donald Turnupseed, the driver of the 1950 Ford, didn’t see the tiny silver sports car as it approached him at the foot of the Polonio Pass. The road shimmers along this route. At times it’s hard to tell where the road ends and the sky begins. Cars appear and disappear in pools of silver and light blue — a trick of the eye as light reflects off the road surface. Headlight use is mandatory along the 58-mile route, from Lost Hills off Interstate 5 to past Paso Robles to the west.
I traced Dean’s last trip from Los Angeles, about 200 miles to the south, within a couple of weeks of visiting his hometown and grave in Indiana.
There’s not much to see along the route after leaving the big city. Interstate 5 climbs through the Angeles National Forest and winds through the Grapevine Canyon to the Tejon Pass before reaching the San Joaquin Valley — a hot, flat, hazy desert with an economy that relies on agriculture and oil production. The largest city around — Bakersfield — is noted as one of the most air-polluted cities in the United States.
Northeast of Bakersfield is the first stop for this pilgrimage, a few miles past a stretch of run-down homes and a plot of working oil derricks stretching as far as the eye can see: Blackwell’s Corner, a roadside gas station and store. A larger-than-life James Dean points the way to the parking lot. Literally.
This is the last place Dean and his mechanic, Rolf Wütherich, stopped on their way to a car race in Salinas. That building is gone, but in its place is a larger store with Dean memorabilia on the walls and a diner in the back. It’s known today as much for the variety of local nuts for sale. In 1955, though, Dean and Wütherich bought apples and Coke before heading west on what used to be Highway 466. The designation changed to Highway 46 in the 1960s.
Just east of the small town of Cholame (population 116) is the crash site, at the junction of Highways 46 and 41. The design of the junction has changed since that day. I’ve seen the original road described like this: Make a peace sign with the index and middle fingers of your right hand, then hold your arm straight out. The crash happened where your fingers meet, with the Porsche coming toward you on your middle finger and the Ford bearing left, toward your index finger, in the opposite direction. Today, there’s a left-turn lane for drivers to access Highway 41, with a stop and a 90-degree turn required. A road sign rises from the dirt and grass in the middle of the converging lanes: James Dean Memorial Junction. Just walking over to it is a dangerous exercise — the road is surprisingly busy for being so remote, with cars and trucks speeding by in both directions. On a barbed-wire fence off the westbound lane where Highway 41 merges into Highway 46 is a small memorial at about the spot where the ruined Porsche skidded to a stop. It can easily be missed unless you know it’s there; it sort of blends in to the surrounding nothingness. Patches of tan grass are all around, but the actual spot is barren.
The other two men survived the crash. Wütherich died in 1981 in a car crash in Germany. Turnupseed died of cancer in 1995.
About a half-mile to the west is a small diner with a rather elaborate stainless-steel memorial to Dean in the parking lot. It was erected in 1977 by a wealthy Japanese fan. It is showing its age today: two of the numbers noting the dates of Dean’s birth and death are missing, and it’s probably not as shiny as it once was. Wordy plaques at its base need a good power-washing to get rid of the bird poop. It supposedly reflects the crash site, but that’s tough to confirm, even on a close inspection. A sign tacked onto the tree in the center of the memorial ominously warns of rattlesnakes around the base. Luckily, none were around on this day, especially because I stepped inside for a closer look before seeing the sign.
Inside the Jack Ranch Café are more photos of James Dean and a few souvenirs for sale, as well as photos of car shows held on the 50th and 55th anniversaries of the crash. The typical diner food was good, and the service friendly — what you’d expect from a small, rural stop. I picked up a James Dean photo book as my souvenir. The captions are in Japanese, a reflection of the obsession that brought the memorial here. At least the book came with an English translation enclosed.
The stretch of Highway 46 has been called “Blood Alley” for decades, and not just because of Dean’s wreck. Head-on crashes, with multiple deaths, are not uncommon. In the 1990s, two families were wiped out in separate wrecks, and a man died when a semi-truck trailer overturned and lost its load of crated broccoli, crushing his car. They were among 42 deaths in that decade, according to the San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune. Another 38 were killed from 2000 to 2010 — some crashes claiming three or four lives at once. A motorcyclist even died at the James Dean Memorial Junction a couple of months before my visit. The two-lane road is being widened to four lanes to improve safety, but that project will not be completed for a while.
Much of today’s road actually isn’t the one James Dean traveled. The route was reconfigured and upgraded in the 1960s, but parts of the original can still be found. Look off to your left as you drive west on the last mile to the crash site, and you’ll see what’s left of the original two-lane road. It’s still possible to walk on part of the crumbling pavement, with weeds sprouting in the middle. As I did, I imagined a little silver Porsche speeding past…