A road trip through California's Big Sur is a visual feast as the Pacific Ocean crashes into the coastline's cliffs. Watch out for the zebras, though
A hundred-and-thirty-six kilometres isn’t too daunting. It’s just a little less than the distance between Mumbai and Pune and, on most days, driving 136 km would not take more than a couple of hours, especially on a highway. On the Autobahn in Germany, you could do that distance many times over in a single day. But the 136 km between the Californian towns of Carmel and San Simeon, via State Highway 1 could (and should) take more than that—at minimum, a couple of days. The region, called Big Sur, is famous for its rugged coastlines, scenic drives and incredible wildlife and ecology. You wouldn’t want to rush this.
Despite the multitude of tourists I saw on my way through Big Sur (I drove the length of it last December), its popularity is fairly recent, relative to similar stretches like, say, the Amalfi Coast in Italy. That’s because until the 1930s, the area was inaccessible, its sights and sounds locked away from the world. A need for coastal safety was to change that.
The Californian coast, with its rocky shores and strong currents, has always been prone to shipwrecks. The toll was particularly high during the California Gold Rush (from 1848), when the volume of sea traffic increased as San Francisco became the gateway to the gold towns where miners lived and worked. After a ship called the Ventura ran aground in 1874, a lighthouse at a promontory called Point Sur was built in 1889. It was the start of human development of the area that would come to be known as Big Sur, culminating in the current route of California State Highway 1, which was completed in 1937.
Until then, very few settlers lived in the area; those who did were all hardy families who would battle the elements and the remoteness to raise livestock, grow food and marvel at the glorious surroundings, but always with respect for the raw force of nature that could easily turn their fortunes. Most of the landmarks in and around Big Sur such as Mount Manuel, Pfeiffer Ridge, Post Summit, Cooper Point, Dani Ridge, Partington Cove and others bear the names of these early settlers. Some of their descendants still live in the region.
The easiest way to reach Big Sur is to plan a road trip from San Francisco, where car rentals are cheap and plentiful. The road doesn’t have any gradients or switchbacks worth speaking of, so even a hatchback will do. The drive down from San Francisco to the town of Monterey is scenic, but it’s after you complete the 17-Mile Drive, a stretch of road between Monterey and Carmel, that you actually enter Big Sur. In one direction, stretching as far as the eye can see, you have the deep blue of the Pacific, flecked with foam and green where rocks and seaweed interrupt the waves. In stark contrast to this is a dun-coloured bluff—the cliff face, scraped bare by the wind. A ribbon of tarmac runs along the cliff and below it till the water’s edge is the green of vegetation and shrubbery, populated by birds and flowers and bees. It is almost a Biblical revelation, a glimpse into the Garden of Eden. Don’t take my word for it: Playwright and author Henry Miller, who lived here periodically from 1944 until 1963, called it “the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look”.
Miller wasn’t the only famous author to call Big Sur home, at least for a bit. Hunter S Thompson and Jack Kerouac both lived there for a while, as did the poet, Robinson Jeffers, and photographer Edward Weston. As you drive through the region, you can see many relics of their time here—the Henry Miller Memorial Library is the largest of these, but you can visit significant places from the lives of all of the region’s celebrities.
That said, the main reason to go to Big Sur isn’t cultural or literary. It is to witness the greatest meeting of land and sea, where the Pacific Ocean crashes into the cliffs that lead into the Santa Lucia Mountains. For kilometre after kilometre along the winding highway, each turn brings a new view that demands a halt and a deep intake of breath. Only after that does presence of mind kick in and one reaches for a camera.
The rest of the day followed a similar pattern. I paused with the other tourists to take pictures at Limekiln State Park where limestone was quarried and put into kilns to create quicklime, a vital ingredient of concrete. I also saw the last of the Santa Lucia Mountains behind me as the landscape turned from cliff-side driving to a more sedate coastal road. But the ruggedness of the terrain was still apparent at every metre of the highway.
Also more perceptible was the local wildlife. A little further on from the whales, I came to Piedras Blancas, an area of Big Sur where elephant seals have formed a rookery. These giant creatures are protected by the law now, but until 1972, which is when the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) came into effect, they were hunted almost into extinction for their blubber (fat), which is second only to sperm whale blubber. In fact, the elephant seal was long believed to be extinct even before the MMPA, until a small colony of seals was found on an island off Baja California in Mexico. From this colony, the seals have managed to repopulate and are now back in growing numbers each year.
The giant creatures, some of them over 2,000 kg, were sunning themselves. They could well be building up the motivation to head out to sea. Most of them were noisy, especially the pups, who were born a few months ago and were not weaned from their mothers.
Further on, I encountered the strangest sight yet. I spotted an animal that had no natural reason to be found in California. As I rounded a curve, I had to brake and look back—zebras, four of them. What was an animal that ought to have been in Africa doing on the posh West Coast of the US? The answer was a few miles away, on the outskirts of San Simeon, where the Hearst Castle is located.
(This story appears in the Sept-Oct 2015 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)