The parks stretch inland to include the steep, rugged redwood-lined creek canyons, the slopes of oak, the open grasslands and the ridges of chaparral. The giant trees can be 350 feet tall, 20 feet in diameter and more than 2,000 years old. The most impressive redwoods are found in the campground. It is also a major trailhead and route to get to the Ventana Wilderness. The Big Sur River tumbles through the park. Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park features 60-foot Pfeiffer Falls, camping and a park lodge on 1,006 acres. You might even find thousands of monarch butterflies wintering en masse in eucalyptus trees along the Big Sur River. It is a great place for Pacific vistas, driftwood-filled beaches, hikes along windswept ocean bluffs and more than 20 miles of trails. The park, a one-time dairy farm where Monterey Jack cheese was first made, is the largest state park along Big Sur, 23 miles south of Carmel. A 19.5-mile stretch of the stream is a designated wild and scenic river. The bubbly Big Sur River flows through the park and empties into the ocean at a remote beach that stretches 3 miles. The 4,766-acre park is largely undeveloped, by design. One of the best ways to see Big Sur is to visit three state parks: Andrew Molera, Pfeiffer Big Sur and Julia Pfeiffer Burns.Īndrew Molera State Park offers easy hiking trails that reach the ocean. But it also has some of the plushest resorts in California: Post Ranch Inn and the Ventana Inn and Spa. There are long stretches with few signs of civilization. There are limited accommodations, food and gasoline along 90 miles. Cellphone service is spotty, at best.īig Sur is surprisingly wild. Telephone party lines survived into the 1970s. Big Sur didn’t get electricity until the late 1940s. The road is surrounded by the 240,026-acre Ventana Wilderness in the canyon-filled Santa Lucia Mountains in Los Padres National Forest. It gets 3 million visitors a year and is especially popular with Europeans. It hugs the coast and is an enchanting place, one of the world’s great scenic highways. The curvy, two-lane highway runs north-south between San Francisco and Los Angeles and it sits 500 to 1,000 feet above the crashing surf. The Spanish called the area El Sur Grande, the Big South. It was Jeffers who said: “Big Sur is the greatest meeting of land and water in the world.”īig Sur stretches from Carmel on the north to San Simeon in the south. Storms add a different mystique.īig Sur is a place of free spirits and American literary giants: Henry Miller, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lillian Bos Ross, Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, Hunter S. The setting sun creates a colourful palette. Fog may blanket the coast at dawn until the sun burns it away. Its mood changes with the weather and the time of day. It is a land of incredible resorts, eye-popping sunsets, redwood groves, cobbled beaches, soaring California condors, Spanish missions, tree-lined hollows, lighthouses, huge elephant seals and migrating gray whales. It is dramatic, enchanting, overwhelming, sublime. It is an appealing place with its own distinctive California flavour, lovely, wild, lonely and rugged. The spot where McWay Creek tumbles into the Pacific Ocean is one of the most-visited spots in Big Sur.īig Sur is a wild and natural 90-mile stretch from Carmel to San Simeon, where the Santa Lucia Mountains meet the ocean. The ocean water at McWay Falls shifts from aquamarine to cobalt to Caribbean blue. It’s a stunning image and geographic feature of Land’s End on America’s Left Coast, tucked off Highway 1 in Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. BIG SUR, CALIFORNIA-McWay Falls drops 80 feet into sandy McWay Cove along California’s Big Sur.
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