Big Sur Bike Trip - Demo

Point Lobos State Natural Reserve

The painter Francis McComas called it "the greatest meeting of land and water in the world," and you'll understand why even if you end up disagreeing. Point Lobos is where the coast stops being scenery and starts being geology. Granite headlands, hidden coves the color of antifreeze, and a stand of Monterey cypress so twisted and lichen-orange it looks diseased until you learn the orange is a harmless algae with the excellent name Trentepohlia. Walk the Cypress Grove Trail — under a mile, and it delivers more coastline per step than anything else in California. Sea otters float in the kelp below, hammering abalone on their chests. Arrive before 3 PM. When the lot fills, they turn you around at the gate.

Bixby Creek Birdge

You know this bridge. It's on the cover of everything. Built in 1932 as one of the longest concrete arch spans on earth, back when Big Sur residents still got their mail by horseback and the road south was a rumor. Here's what nobody tells you: the good view isn't from the bridge. Everyone crowds the north turnout and shoots the identical photograph. Walk a hundred yards up Coast Road instead — the dirt track heading inland from the north end — and the bridge finally sits at an angle that makes sense of it, arcing 260 feet above the creek with nothing behind it but ocean.

McWay Falls

Keyhole Arch at Pfeiffer Beach

Ragged Point

An inn, a gas pump, a restaurant and a coffee bar on a 400-foot bluff, at the exact spot where the mountains give up and the coast flattens into ranchland. After two days without a signal all four felt like arriving in a major city. I checked my phone in the parking lot like an idiot. I hiked down Black Swift Falls, a steep set of switchbacks cut into the cliff face to a waterfall spilling onto the beach — under half a mile, and it humbled me on the way back up. Then I stood at the north end of the lawn and looked back the way I'd come: the whole trip stacked in blue layers, fading into haze. That was the moment it landed.

Piedras Blancas

Fifteen thousand northern elephant seals on a beach, twenty feet from a boardwalk, completely indifferent to me. The colony didn't exist until 1990. The species was hunted down to somewhere between twenty and a hundred surviving animals by the 1880s, all on one island off Baja, and every one alive today descends from that handful. They're back to about 150,000. I was there in summer, which meant a beach of enormous sleeping bodies flipping sand over their own backs and occasionally bellowing in a noise I can only describe as a rusty drainpipe. The bulls hit five thousand pounds. I stayed forty-five minutes longer than I meant to. Free, never closes.

Hearst Castle