Why It Stayed Like This — a stop on the Tunnel of Trees.
Something worth asking as we run the last few miles: why is this road still like this?
Because by every normal rule it should not be. A scenic shoreline drive an hour from a major resort town, in a state with plenty of money in it, would ordinarily have been widened, straightened, and lined with development decades ago. Beach houses on the bluff, a passing lane, a gas station at the halfway point.
Several things prevented it. The right-of-way is genuinely narrow and hemmed by the bluff on one side and private land on the other, so widening would be expensive and would destroy the exact thing people come for. Much of the shoreline is held in large old family parcels and conservancy land rather than being subdivided. The state designated the route a heritage byway, which constrains what can be done to it. And the local townships have consistently, and sometimes contentiously, chosen to keep it as it is.
It also helps that it goes essentially nowhere. Cross Village is the end. Nobody uses this as a through route because there is no through to get to, which means the only traffic is people who came for the road itself.
That is a fragile set of conditions and everyone up here knows it. So when a sign asks you to slow down or stay off a bluff edge, it is not fussiness — it is a place actively working to stay the way you wanted to find it.