Yuma Plank Highway

The Old Plank Road is a plank road in Imperial County, California that was built in 1915 as an east–west route over the Algodones Dunes. It effectively connected the extreme lower section of Southern California to Arizona and provided the last link in a commercial route between San Diego and Yuma.

Following Los Angeles' winning the right to be the western terminus of the transcontinental railroad, San Diego's civic leaders proposed the Plank Road to ensure their city became the hub of Southern California's road network rather than Los Angeles.

Among those promoters was businessman and road builder "Colonel" Ed Fletcher who accepted a challenge from the Los Angeles Examinerto run a road race in October 1912 to determine the best route between Southern California and Phoenix. A reporter with the paper was given a 24-hour head start in Los Angeles; Fletcher would proceed from San Diego. Fletcher elected to traverse the constantly shifting sand dunes using a team of horses to pull his automobile through the sand, and won the race in a seemingly impossible 19.5 hours.

Buoyed by the success of the race and with the backing of local newspapers, Fletcher raised the money to pay for 13,000 planks shipped from San Diego to Holtville, California. The first planks were laid on February 14, 1915 with the help of both volunteers and paid labor. The roadbed consisted of two parallel plank tracks, each 25 inches/63.5 cm wide, spiked to wooden crosspieces laid underneath. Total length of the Plank Road was 6.5 miles/10.4 km. Work ended nearly two months later on April 4.

Though traffic and maintenance crews who cleared the wooden road with mule-drawn scrapers soon took its toll on the planking, the road was considered a success. In June that same year, the California State Highway Commission assumed responsibility for the Plank Road as part of the road system linking Southern California with Arizona.