Beale's Cut

A hand-carved mountain pass that opened the San Fernando Valley to stagecoaches

A dramatic 30-foot-deep notch cut through the sandstone ridge at the north end of the San Fernando Valley, Beale's Cut was one of the great engineering feats of early California. Before its excavation in the 1860s, wagons had to haul up a brutally steep grade to cross the Newhall Pass. The cut allowed stagecoaches, ore wagons, and eventually the Butterfield Overland Mail to pass through with far less effort.

The cut fell out of use after the 1910 opening of the nearby Newhall Tunnel, but the carved notch survives intact, a ghost of the old road sitting just steps from the modern freeway. A small park with a historical marker preserves the site. Standing inside it, looking up at the sandstone walls on either side, is a vivid reminder of how much effort nineteenth-century movement through California required.

things to do sight history
A story
Edward Fitzgerald Beale — explorer, California surveyor general, and the man who famously introduced camels to the American Southwest as military pack animals — had this 30-foot pass hacked through the mountain by hand in the 1860s to reduce a punishing grade on the stage road north to the mines. For twenty years it was the main wagon gate from Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley.

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