Is Nacimiento-Fergusson Road open?

The only road across the Santa Lucia Range between Monterey and Cambria. 24.5 miles, 2,780 feet at the summit, Highway 1 at Kirk Creek Bridge to Mission Road at Jolon. Said nah-see-mee-EN-toh FER-gus-son.

It is two roads, under two authorities

Bill, 17 September 2026: 'the West part where it goes up the hill and then comes down the hill — Fort Hunter Liggett is on the other side, and if Fort Hunter Liggett doesn't open the access it's essentially closed at that point. However even if Fort Hunter Liggett closes their access, the US Forest Service and possibly the county can open the part that's on the Forest Service and the county side of the road.' This road has never been one status and we have been publishing it as though it were. It is two pieces under two different authorities, and each can be opened or shut without the other. The THROUGH route needs both; either half can be usable on its own from its own end. Saying only 'CLOSED' threw away the half of the answer that tells somebody at Jolon, or somebody at Kirk Creek, what they can actually drive.

MEASURED AT MILE 15.69, not the twelve miles we had been inferring. The road crosses onto Fort Hunter Liggett at 35.98070, -121.34748 — 15.69 miles from Highway 1 — and does not leave the installation again before Jolon, so 15.7 miles are Forest Service and county ground and 8.5 are the Army's. The twelve miles in the Forest Service's roadside camping prohibition is the extent of THAT ORDER, which describes 'Nacimiento-Fergusson Road (Forest Road No. 22S01), from its intersection with State Highway 1 then east for 12 miles' — an order's reach, never a property line, and we had been reading it as one. Ponderosa Campground, a Los Padres site at mile 13.16, agrees: still forest at thirteen miles. The boundary here is OpenStreetMap's, read 17 September 2026 and good enough to say which half of the road you are on; it is not a survey and no gate position should be inferred from it. Neither the Army nor the county publishes where its closure begins or ends.

DERIVED, never stored: the crossing is open end to end only when every segment is open. One half being open is not a way over the range, and the map draws the closed half rather than the whole road.

The roads that join it, and who decides them

if there are other little tributary roads that are open to the public when hazards are not present please place them on the map too

Bill Alderson, 17 September 2026. His instruction, not a statement about the state of any road. As of 17 September 2026 every one of these is shut with the rest of the fire area; what follows is which body decides each of them when it is not.

Every named road that JOINS Nacimiento-Fergusson is on the map, and they are the tributaries: Cone Peak Road and South Coast Ridge Road at the summit, Mill Creek Trail near the coast, and San Miguelito Loop Road and River Road on the installation. They were found by asking which named ways share a node with the roadway, so the list is what you can actually turn onto rather than what passes nearby, and it is complete for named roads as OpenStreetMap carries them.

A tributary west of mile 15.69 leaves Forest Service ground and one east of it leaves the installation, so the body that decides its access follows from where it joins rather than from anything we assert. Whether the public may use it when no hazard is present is a separate question, said in that road's own words where we know and left unsaid where we do not — the two on the installation are the garrison's to answer and we have not asked them yet.

Beyond Jolon, on the installation

Bill, 17 September 2026: 'carry the road all the way to St Luke's Jolon church, the San Antonio mission, the Indians, Escondido camp, and through Squirrel Spring Road and the slab and bridge over the river near Fort Hunter Liggett main gate.' East of Mission Road the journey stops being one road and becomes a network on the installation, so it is listed rather than drawn on the mileage strip: a straight line would put distances on it that nobody has measured.

DEL VENTURI IS THE OTHER ROAD IN THE GARRISON'S OWN NOTICE. Fort Hunter Liggett publishes these two together, and Del Venturi is the road up to The Indians and Escondido. So the notice we photograph on the crossing's page is also the notice for this country: one sentence at the garrison governs both.

Nacimiento-Ferguson and Del Venturi Roads are now open, however, the FHL Hunting & Fishing Program remains suspended until further notice.

Their own words, read 17 September 2026, and not ours to publish as the state of either road. Fort Hunter Liggett speaks for the installation and not for the Forest Service ground west of it, their roads line said the opposite on 15 September, and none of this country is reachable from the coast while the western half is shut. Settle it on 831-386-2513.

Asked for, and not yet placed

These three are recorded as NOT FOUND rather than left off, because a feature quietly missing from a map is indistinguishable from one nobody ever asked about. Any of them can be placed the moment somebody who knows the ground gives a coordinate or a name the map carries.

Escondido Camp — No feature of that name in OpenStreetMap inside this country. It is a Los Padres campground at The Indians, reached by Del Venturi and Indians Roads, so it sits near Indians Ranch above — but near is not a coordinate and it is not placed.

Squirrel Spring Road — No road of that name in OpenStreetMap between the coast and US-101. It may be an installation road not mapped publicly, which would be unsurprising.

The slab and bridge near the main gate — Not found as a named crossing. North Del Venturi Ford is the only ford mapped on this network and it is eight miles from the main gate, so it is probably not the one. A coordinate, or the name the Army uses for it, would settle it.

Said of the whole road, by a body that holds half of it

Not an accusation and not an error — it is the specific, fixable thing. A body that names where its own half begins and ends can be quoted safely; one that says ‘the road is open’ flat will be read as speaking for the crossing, which it cannot.

Fort Hunter Liggett holds only east-installation, and says:

Nacimiento-Ferguson and Del Venturi Roads are now open, as well as the FHL Hunting & Fishing Program.

Who can close this road

Four separate bodies can shut this road and they do not publish in the same place, in the same form, or on the same clock. Asking 'is it open' of any one of them answers only their own segment.

Who cannot: Caltrans

Nacimiento-Fergusson is not a state highway, and Caltrans' remit is the state highway system and nothing else. Streets and Highways Code § 90: "The department shall have full possession and control of all state highways and all property and rights in property acquired for state highway purposes." That sentence is the entirety of what Caltrans possesses and controls. The state highway routes are the ones the Legislature enumerates in the Streets and Highways Code; this road is not among them and carries no route number. It is a county highway maintained by Monterey County — under § 941 a road is a county highway once the board of supervisors accepts it into the county road system, and boards "shall, by proper order, cause those highways which are necessary to public convenience to be established, recorded, constructed, and maintained". Caltrans therefore has neither possession nor control of this road.

Caltrans' own systems have never heard of it. The District 5 Lane Closure System feed — the authoritative machine-readable record of what Caltrans has shut — was read again on 15 September 2026, 1.5 MB, and contains no occurrence of 'Nacimiento', 'Fergusson' or 'Ferguson' anywhere in it. Caltrans does not own this road and does not report it, which is why their silence about it means nothing either way.

Fort Hunter Liggett's own public page refers callers to Caltrans for this road. One of the four closing authorities is pointing the public at an agency that neither owns it, controls it, nor carries it in any of its data. That is a broken referral, not a source — and it sends people to a dead end during a fire.

Cal. Streets & Highways Code § 90 — Caltrans has full possession and control of all state highways

Cal. Streets & Highways Code § 941 — county boards of supervisors establish and maintain county highways, and a road becomes a county highway on acceptance into the county road system

Caltrans District 5 Lane Closure System, cwwp2.dot.ca.gov/data/d5/lcs/lcsStatusD05.json — read 15 September 2026; the road does not appear

What the garrison publishes

https://home.army.mil/liggett/ — 'Alerts & Emergencies' block on the front page

Nacimiento-Ferguson and Del Venturi Roads are now open, however, the FHL Hunting & Fishing Program remains suspended until further notice.

Read 17 September 2026 at 19:20 UTC, page last modified 2026-09-16T15:36:00-07:00.

The same block, at the previous reading:

TIMBER & PLASKETT FIRES: Due to ongoing Timber and Plaskett fires, Nacimiento-Ferguson Road going to the coast is closed, as well as Del Venturi Road.

THE BANNER HAS FLIPPED. Read 13 September it said this road was closed; read 17 September it says both it and Del Venturi are now open. Same block, same heading, same second road — a person at the garrison retyped it, and the page carries 16 September 2026, 3:36 PM. This is the one thing the note below said the banner could not do.

NOT ACTED ON, AND NOT BY OVERSIGHT. Fort Hunter Liggett is authoritative for its own gates and the eastern descent across the installation — not for the western twelve miles, which are Forest Road 22S01 under Los Padres order 05-07-51-26-10, closing the fire area until BOTH fires are declared out. Both were still burning on 17 September. Monterey County Public Works still carries the entire road closed since 30 August, though its layer has not been edited since 31 August 15:48 UTC, so that is a record standing rather than anybody confirming it on 17 September. One authority reopening its own end is not the through route opening. Settle it on 831-386-2513 before any of this moves.

No, and that is now a fact with a date on both sides of it. It is a hand-typed banner with no date of its own, no open/closed field and no history; it bundles the road, the hunting and fishing suspension and a wildlife warning into one paragraph; and it gives Caltrans' numbers for road status, for a road Caltrans does not own. It said CLOSED unchanged from 31 August to at least 13 September while the coast moved underneath it, and then said OPEN. It will not announce a change on time — but when the words do change, a person changed them, which is why it is now read every hour rather than quoted once.

What each of them says, photographed

Taken automatically from the live pages twice a day, so you can see all of them at once instead of visiting four sites and holding them in your head. Each picture is the block on that agency’s own page where the answer lives, and the link beside it goes straight there — check any of them in a click. When a page is rewritten, the change is reported and a person reads it.

Every exhibit below is captioned with the publishing body, the exact address it came from, that page’s own title as it read at the time, where on the page the block sits, and the moment it was photographed — so there is nothing to argue about. The clips are unretouched.

Fort Hunter Liggett

speaks for east-installation · The eastern descent across the installation, and its own gates.

Hand-typed and carries no date of its own. It said CLOSED unchanged from 31 August to at least 13 September, then OPEN. Their 24-hour roads line, 831-386-2513, has given a different answer as recently as 15 September.

Go and check it yourself →

Los Padres National Forest

speaks for west-forest · Forest orders and forest roads — the western twelve miles, Forest Road 22S01.

Authoritative for its orders and for nothing else. On 28 August 2026 this forest's Current Conditions page still read 'Highway 1 is now open from Cambria to Carmel', four days after Caltrans shut forty miles of it.

Go and check it yourself →

Caltrans — SR 1 report

NOT an authority on this road · State highways only. NOT this road.

This page has been rewritten since the previous reading. A person should look at it.

Photographed to show what it does NOT say. Fort Hunter Liggett's own page sends Nacimiento-Fergusson callers here, and Caltrans has never carried this road under any spelling. A reader sent here finds nothing about it, which looks like an answer and is not one.

Go and check it yourself →

How to settle it today

• Caltrans District 5 — 805-549-3138 or 805-549-3318
  A staffed line. This is the one that answers what the recording cannot.
• Fort Hunter Liggett — 831-386-2513
  Their own line for the status of public roads on post, which is the eastern half of this road. They also close it at short notice for Army exercises, and that never appears on any website.
• Watch Duty and alertmry.org/Map — in a browser
  To see whether evacuation zone MRY-F036 covers the road corridor. An order area is lawfully closed to public access, which would shut the road whatever any road notice says.

One thing you will find, that is not true

A Fort Hunter Liggett post saying Nacimiento-Fergusson is closed to all traffic, public and residential, from Highway 1 to the base boundary sixteen miles inland, circulates in search results with no date on it. It is the January 2021 Dolan Fire washout closure, which held until the road reopened on 15 November 2024. Confirmed as the 2021 closure on 28 August 2026. Do not publish it against a current fire.

Why this page prints the disagreement

Bill, 17 September 2026: 'with the N-F page status it will become obvious of incongruence when it exists, and organisations will figure out how to bring it into congruence.' Publishing which body says what, side by side and dated, is not just a hedge for the reader — it is the thing that gets the sources fixed. Nobody at the county can see the Army's banner and nobody at the garrison reads the county's ArcGIS layer. A page that shows both, twice a day, is the only place the two are ever in the same frame.

Print this page (PDF) — the whole of it, with the map, the mileages and every exhibit, for the glovebox where there is no signal.

Our status was last stood behind by a person on 15 September 2026. The agency readings above are taken automatically twice a day and were last taken 1 October 2026 at 14:00 UTC. The operators map · Is Highway 1 open?