Big Sur Magicks

As a pedigreed Californian, a born and bred Central Coast resident, I can’t overstate the emotional impact of 2020’s Dolan Fire laying waste to the Ventana wilderness and the Los Padres National Forest up in Big Sur.

For those of you not in the know, Big Sur is a rugged region of the Golden State coast stretching between San Simeon and Carmel, a seventy-mile expanse where the Santa Lucia Mountain range meets the Pacific Ocean in dramatic fashion.

It’s often said to be the longest and most beautiful stretch of undeveloped coastline in the United States. Despite my limitations in traveling other portions of this country, I would wager Highway One, better known as the Pacific Coast Highway, and its winding, snaking passage from Cambria on up to Monterey, is certainly the best drive one can take in California, if not the country, even the entire world.

The untamed strata of beaches, redwoods, and mountains, free of urban incursions, make for unparalleled explorations of mind, body, and soul. Home to only about two thousand year-round residents, the region has a handful of roadside villages like Ragged Point, Big Sur Village, Gorda, and Lucia, offering food and arts and crafts, and a couple of world class resorts like the Post Ranch Inn and the Ventana Inn showcasing what’s likely the most impressive hotel views on the North American west coast.

It also hosts the Esalen Institute, a leading peace literacy retreat emphasizing eastern philosophies and counterculture movements, and the Tassajarra Zen Mountain Center, a Buddhist monastery hidden in the foothills of the Santa Lucia range. There are a number of impressive local attractions like the Henry Miller Library, McWay Falls, Limekiln State Park, Pfeiffer Beach, Garrapata State Park, and the Point Sur Lighthouse Station.

I may sound like a tourist guide. It’s only because Big Sur is so near and dear to me, and it was as much a part of that semi-apocalypse befalling all of California that year as any other region of the state, in some ways more so.

I’m a SoCal boy to my core, but I can tell you this much.

Big Sur is California.

It’s steeped in virtually every culture that came to define my homelands, from Native Americans and Mexican colonialists, to the eventual whiteboy takeover, a hodgepodge of Bohemian and New Age and Native counterculture. Its majestic, towering, green cliffs and crooked cypress trees rearing over crystal clear, aquamarine ocean coves full of otters and sea lions and wild surf is truly unimaginable if you haven’t been there.

Big Sur is where, I daresay, Californians, be they NoCal or SoCal, may feel the strongest essences of Californian totality, as it encompasses elements and mystique from all regions within its ecosystem, tended by beatnik poets and forest rangers and soul-searching wanderers.

I’ve explored Big Sur to a wide extent, running my dogs on Pfeiffer Beach’s purple sands, hiking Limekiln redwoods and Silverpeak trails, hunting down back country cabins where Kerouac was rumored to stay.

I even thought I saw a ‘Dark Watcher’ once, in the hills of southern Big Sur near Hearst Castle. They’re rumored to be creepy, impossibly tall shadow figures of mythological Californian folklore, often wearing big hats, sometimes using walking sticks, observing coastal happenings from afar atop the Ventana to the east of Highway One. Might’ve been a tree, but I really did think I glimpsed a wide hat brim on a head and a pole in large dark hands, before the hazy, distant phantom vanished.

Anyhow, if you haven’t figured it out yet, yes, I’m somewhat of a nomad, frequently living out of my truck and finding myself drawn to areas where drifting humans tend to collect, like the Salton Sea or downtown Los Angeles, the Haight in San Francisco, the high deserts and the low deserts. I’m here to tell ya, Big Sur is the king of the hill when it comes to wanderlust California, where Mother Nature’s perfectly seasoned stew of surf and turf matches the grandeur inside our existentially turbulent minds.  

Pro tips…

Tip 1: If you win the lotto, do yourself a solid and stay a weekend at Ventana Inn. Post Ranch has more sweeping Pacific views, and a nightly cost commensurate with the priciest hotel stays in the world, but Ventana has the redwoods peace and quiet, and it’s far more affordable. We squeezed pennies and splurged on my fiftieth birthday, took all the dogs, and it was epic. Four words: forest canopy infinity jacuzzi. Two more words: white privilege. I know.

Tip 2: Garrapata Park is beautiful. Unless you like ticks and lots of them, pass.

Tip 3: The Big Sur Bakery*, located a click down from the road to Pfeiffer Beach, bakes the world’s best rustic bread. No, really. You have never had bread like this. Order a fresh-out-of-the-oven loaf with a side of creamery butter and sea salt. Food of the gods. Thank me later.

*Editor’s Note: Just this week, in early May of 2024, the author discovered the Big Sur Bakery has suffered a fire and burned to the ground. A very sad loss. Hope they rebuild.

Tip 4: Don’t fucking feed the sea lions at the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Rookery. Dunno how many tourists I’ve seen getting chased by bulls, but it’s a fair amount.

Tip 5: If you stop at the Henry Miller Library, and I highly suggest you should, see if you can find your author’s symbol somewhere therein.

The idea of the Dolan fire crisping so much of the Los Padres–Ventana expanse was miserable. While I knew the history of fires in Big Sur and across California and how they’re part of the cycle of nature, that one was suspected to derive from arson and that was supremely disappointing, to think of all that wild country torched by human negligence, or worse, human malice.  

The Los Padres National Forest and I, we have an intimate history, one of blood and tears and heartbreak and glories and joy. In so many ways, the script of my life has, through times and tides, played out in the warrens and woodlands of the Los Padres Forest, mostly in the San Rafael wilderness in Santa Barbara County, but as far north as the Ventana wilds in Monterey County, down south to the Matilija expanse near Ojai and Ventura.

Despite its missionary-colonial moniker, I am as connected to that forest as I am any person or being. I’ve lived and died within its boundaries, created and destroyed, loved and lost, buried untold secret treasures and discovered Native ruins. It’s as much a part of my family as anyone or anything.

I watched huge swaths of the San Rafael wilds burn every other year or so in Santa Barbara, and it pained me each time. It didn’t matter that I knew the chaparral and the dogwood and the oaks and the hillsides would grow anew. It always felt like the end of another era, because that’s what it is, starting fresh, burning the old.

Big Sur is the heart of California. The burn scars from the Dolan fire will be reminders of 2020 and the shit show it was for years to come. The San Luis Obispo Tribune reported that though the Dolan fire was 25% contained in that first week of September, it nonetheless spread about 1,000 acres a day and eventually torched nearly 30,000 acres of Big Sur wilderness. And there was a frightening addition to the fiery carnage, when the Ventana Wildlife Society confirmed the fire completely destroyed its famed California Condor sanctuary, burning their research and release facilities. Two cameras captured the destruction of the nests. The live feeds shorted out as the release pens were engulfed in flames. Specialists in the recovery of the endangered species were hopeful that most of the condors and their chicks survived and took flight before succumbing.

Condors are impressive birds. I was lucky enough to catch sight of one in the wild; well, not quite the wild, we were driving south on PCH headed back from a weekend in Monterey. One of them swooped down from the mountainside and glided right in front of my vehicle, hovering several feet above the pavement, with an easy eight-or-nine-foot wingspan. Then it soared out over the Pacific, an utterly breathtaking ambassador. In terms of good will omens, it honestly doesn’t get more auspiciously Californian.

If there’s one place most resilient to half-measures of Armageddon, it surely must be Big Sur, the closest Californian approximation of heaven on earth, along with Tahoe’s northeast shore.

They may welcome the ends of worlds at Bombay Beach, but the dawn of the Age of Aquarius will go down in Big Sur.

I actually can’t stand that song. Too cheesy. Astrology always bugged me ‘cause it doesn’t line up with the hard science of astronomy. Still, there’s little doubt I have Virgo traits. Must be something to it, I guess, but I wouldn’t say I’m a perfectionist. Pardon, I gotta head back a hundred pages and switch a semi-colon to a colon.

*Compiled from September 1, 2020