Skyline Boulevard (Highway 35), located in the Santa Cruz Mountains, is a favorite location for motorcycle riding on the west side of the Bay Area. The road passes by Alice's Restaurant and gets a lot of fast motorcycle traffic on the weekends. Yesterday a contractor working for CalTrans started coating the perfectly good asphalt pavement with a rubberized oil emulsion and pea-sized gravel wearing surface.
They plan on dumping this stuff on the entire length of Skyline, a 21-mile stretch from Highway 92 to Highway 9, during the next month. I ran into loose gravel on an unmarked downhill corner, about a mile north of Alice's and the work looked to be heading south of Alice's later in the morning. The contractor is using the parking lot across from the Restaurant as a construction yard. So if you get your new Empulse RR, I recommend either avoiding riding on Skyline until things settle down, or get to Alice's (so you can show it off) via Woodside and Highway 84. Attached is a photo of one of the mess-making machines and it also shows the new pavement surface in the foreground.
