Scenic drive landslide of January-March 1998, La Honda, San Mateo County, California

The small rural town of La Honda, Calif., is an unincorporated region of San Mateo County situated in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the western part of the San Francisco peninsula. Much of the town is underlain by a previously recognized ancient landslide complex. The ancient slide complex covers about 1.0 to 1.25 km2, parts of which have been historically active. This report describes a recent landslide involving part of Scenic Drive, La Honda, that became active in January 1998. This report does not describe other currently active landslides in La Honda, such as the January 1998 slide on lower Recreation Drive, or the history of sliding in the area. This report concerns the principal morphological features we observed and mapped between 11 February and 21 March 1998 on an enlargement of a 1:7500-scale air photo acquired 6 March 1998 and prior to that on a town property-line map, and by laser survey carried out between 26 February and 8 March. The principal objective of this report is to make available the detailed photographic and topographic base maps and associated description of surface morphological features.