A woman named Phoenix delivers the pitch-perfect West Coast koan in Big Sur, California, at the bar in the Fernwood Motel & Campground. She’s travelled up from Los Angeles, where she works as an architect, model, and psychedelic therapist. Phoenix has been visiting Big Sur regularly for five years, making the journey north when she needs to find headspace. As I get up from dinner to drive back to Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn, she lays a hand on my arm and says, “Big Sur is a place where you find yourself after you take the wrong turn.”
This feels apropos. The journey has been a series of mishaps from the outset: there’s the three-hour delay at Heathrow and mislaid luggage upon arrival at San Francisco International Airport; there’s the burgeoning head cold; there’s the fact that my British postal code doesn’t comply with the credit card registration system at Hertz, and a woman behind the desk named Jana demurs when I attempt to hire a car. After 20 minutes, she consents. With the keys in the ignition, I roll out of the parking garage and onto the broad highways of California.
The Santa Cruz Wharf
Ben Ingram
Headlights bloom through the windscreen like smeary haloes on the six damp lanes of the 101 South. I stop off in Palo Alto and say hello to my sister Anna, six months pregnant. She appears mildly concerned as she provisions me with a can of seltzer water and sufficient toothpaste to see me through Santa Cruz. There’s a car accident on Route 19 near Los Gatos, so I’m detoured up a series of hairpin turns on a backroad across the spine of the peninsula, where rainwater sluices off the peeling bark of eucalyptus trees, enormous ferns descend over the verges, and cars swerve to avoid deadfall on the tarmac. “This is valet parking,” a man named Jim tells me as I arrive at the Dream Inn in Santa Cruz with red eyes and an itchy saddle. “But it’s pretty cool that you reversed in, so I’ll let it slide.”
Cars swerve to avoid deadfall on the tarmac
I awake before dawn, sneeze, and watch the morning sun illuminate the beach and boardwalk, fortifying myself with black coffee and huevos rancheros. A weighty blue Pacific fog has settled along the shoreline. The break is big, mushy, and formidable, and the pier is motorised with pickup trucks on the dawn patrol. Sleepy in December, the town is a chilled place to pitch up, largely characterised by its surf and university communities. However, it’s arguably best known for its connection with mountain biking, and widely recognised as the mountain biking capital of the United States.
The suspension fork was invented by Rock Shox here in the 1990s, followed by the first full-suspension mountain bike from a company named, well, Santa Cruz. I drive a few miles north to meet Dave Robinson, a Connecticut transplant, sailor and self-proclaimed waterdog who has been living in Santa Cruz since 1992 and co-founded the tour group The Ride Guides. We had made plans to mountain bike, but the weather isn’t participating, so we tramp through Wilder State Park, bothering flocks of wild turkeys sheltering under the low-lying branches of tan oaks, until we arrive in a grove of redwoods where a ring of suckers from 350-foot trees forms a fairy circle.
“There’s a redwood tree over 2,300 years old in Big Basin,” says Robinson. “Most of the state park burned in a wildfire last year, but the tree still stands.” Robinson has been cutting mountain biking trails through the park for years, filing an environmental impact report for every trail cut. It’s habitat to mountain lions, bobcats, boar, and, if you take a little swim, white sharks in the cold Pacific. As we walk through the dunes, Robinson thumbs a branch of a small evergreen shrub. “This is coyote brush. It’s an exotic species, but it helps stabilise sand dunes and is fire-resistant.” Rollers unfurl onto the beach, and we look back eastwards beyond the road, where shelves of limestone mount one another in a god-sized staircase. “Each terrace represents 100,000 years of seismic activity,” he says. That’s relatively swift in geological terms. As I ogle the hills with a slack jaw, Robinson notes, “If it weren’t for the hard work of conservationists, you’d probably see a Best Buy and an Orange Julius here.”
Wilder Ranch Forest in Santa Cruz, California
Ben Ingram
On Route 1 to Big Sur, I happen to drive past both a Best Buy and an Orange Julius – two outlets that the novelist and essayist Henry Miller probably would have bemoaned in his concept of America as the ‘air-conditioned nightmare’. He had returned to the United States after spending a number of formative years abroad, but something about Big Sur stopped him in his tracks. “My only faith in this country is rooted in such places as Colorado and Idaho and maybe Big Sur,” he wrote. “The cities are greasepits and not worth blowing off the map.”
The narrow band of black highway threads the cleft between wide plains and gentle sand dunes. Passing thick groves of tan oak and eucalyptus around Monterey and Carmel Highlands, Spanish moss clings to the powerlines like electric facial hair. A sign cautions that Route 1 will close at the town of Lucia with no detour. A landslide wiped it out the year before and cut off the direct roadway to Big Sur from Los Angeles and SoCal. This becomes a facet of most conversations I have while in the area. The fact of a dead end heightens a sense of pilgrimage. The road swells and subsides as it skirts slopes that drop thousands of feet from uplands to ocean, where bright blond sand sizzles underneath energetic breakers. Driving across Bixby Bridge, recently made famous by the opening title sequence of the television series Big Little Lies, author Jack Kerouac’s description springs to mind: “This awful thin white line of bridge a thousand unbridgeable sighs of height above the little woods I’m walking in, you just can’t believe it…”
The road swells and subsides as it skirts slopes that drop thousands of feet from uplands to ocean
The landscape’s enormous scale does indeed boggle the mind. Basalt sea stacks thrust hundreds of feet from a maelstrom of jet-blue water. Route 1 continues south past a naval station on a big seaside mesa and beyond Andrew Molera Park, where decay-leafed sugar maples are cloaked in fog and redwoods evanesce upwards into mist like leviathan legs. Finally, I arrive at the Heny Miller Memorial Library. I sit on a pistachio-upholstered sofa with a honey-hued mutt named Brandy and chat with her owner, Mike, who came to the library from Berkeley when touring as a musician. He was in good company.
Brandy, at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur
Nick Savage
The nonprofit arts centre, bookstore, and performance venue has hosted famous acts over the years, drawn by its bohemian cache, including Patti Smith, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Arcade Fire, Philip Glass and Joanna Newsom. Emil White built the structure for Henry Miller in the 1960s. When Miller died in 1980, with the help of the Big Sur Land Trust, White established it as a space where local artists could show their works in memoriam to the writer, who has left a lasting legacy on the community.
Miller wrote about arriving in Big Sur after a few peripatetic years wandering Europe and the ‘nightmarish’ United States. He had always planned on returning to the former but changed his mind when he found this community nestled on the shoulder of the Santa Lucia Mountains and the ocean. Miller believed that America was split between people who valued comfort and conformity as opposed to those who espoused wildness, self-sufficiency and liberty. In Big Sur, which leans heavily into the latter, not fitting in with the rest of the country is worn as a badge of honour.
“I lived in Honduras, Costa Rica; I never thought that I’d move back to the United States,” says Joseph Bradford, the bartender at the Fernwood Motel & Campground. “But then I found Big Sur, and I’ve been here for ten years.” I’m sporadically checking mysuitcase.com to see whether my truant luggage will arrive tonight. Joseph suggests that I head to Nepenthe, a renowned restaurant nearby, as there’s a free box there with spare clothes.
“We catch on fire, we have floods, landslides, our roads close down…” says Bradford. “There’s not a lot of room for conflict here. We rely on each other.” Phoenix (the architect/model/psychedelic therapist) leans over to whisper that Bradford had created The Big Share, a nonprofit organisation and free farmers’ market that aims to help ease the difficulty locals have in getting the fresh produce that they require, as Big Sur is, strictly speaking, located in a food desert.
Big Sur Pfeiffer Beach
DM Troutman
Phoenix and Bradford make me feel at home, offering pointers on where to hike, what to eat, and which kind of festivities to pursue. I could sit there chatting with them for the rest of the evening, but the call of fresh underwear and toiletries is too strong to resist. Given spiritual instruction by Phoenix on the nature of wrong turns in California, I drive with a smile back to Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn, where there’s no wi-fi or phone reception, and wait. The suitcase arrives at 2am, driven three hours down the coast by a swarthy man named Andy.
Reunited with my waterproof shells and wicking layers, I’m ready for the mountains, gassing up with multiple mugs of black coffee and a stack of pancakes sufficiently tall to give Paul Bunyan indigestion. From Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, I take off at an easy lope through an old-growth forest of redwoods, bay laurel and live oak, then turn back on myself to ascend steep cutbacks up the southern hip of the prominence. Angry white freshets spatter through deep gorges, fed by heavy rainfall. At three miles in, it’s clear that the trail is no longer maintained. I slide on a pair of waterproof trousers, then push through damp black sage and brickle brush.
In Californian folklore, there are entities known as Dark Watchers, who are said to motionlessly observe hikers and travellers on the peaks of the Santa Lucia Mountains. Often attired with a brimmed hat or a walking stick, legend has it that if you approach the shadowy silhouettes you might disappear into thin air with them. In John Steinbeck’s short story Flight he writes, “No one knew who the watchers were, nor where they lived, but it was better to ignore them and never to show interest in them. They did not bother one who stayed on the trail and minded his own business.”
In Californian folklore, Dark Watchers are said to motionlessly observe hikers on the peaks of the Santa Lucia Mountains
I don’t encounter any Dark Watchers, but my attention is torqued in three directions as I top out next to a radio tower on the 3,524ft crest of Mount Manuel. The untracked Santa Lucia range ripples to the east like big battered knuckles, the glacier-blue Pacific broadens into view to the west, but I’m mainly preoccupied with a northerly squall eating up the landscape like The Nothing from The Never Ending Story. I try to outrun it along the ridgeline, laughing and cursing, but by the time I hit the next peak, Cabezo Prieto, the storm overtakes me, and I’m strafed by sideways rain and gale-force winds. I continue, embattled, sporadically nudged off-balance by forceful gusts. Beyond Post Summit, it’s a different story. The lee-side of the ridge is surprisingly tranquil. Kestrels and golden eagles wheel above meadows of clover, sage and Indian paintbrush. Rich, riparian air licks kittenishly at exposed skin. Shivering with the fullness of it all, I run five miles south along Route 1 back to the rental car and find that my appetite has returned.
The view from Nepenthe in Big Sur
Nick Savage
I order a ribeye steak with vine-ripened tomatoes, chimichurri and a pyramid of melting mousseline mash potato at Nepenthe, a restaurant and art gallery once owned by Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth and designed by Rowan Maiden, a protegee of Frank Lloyd Wright. Not much has changed since Jack Kerouac visited in the 1950s when he wrote, “We go to Nepenthe which is a beautiful cliff top restaurant with vast outdoor patio, with excellent food, excellent waiters and management, good drinks, chess tables, chairs and tables to just sit in the sun and look at the grand coast…”
Situated 800 feet above sea level, but only a quarter of a mile or so as the crow flies from the crashing surf, the view is very much the set piece. While sipping a glass of Spottswoode cabernet sauvignon, a once-in-a-lifetime sunset is etched across my retinas, a masterpiece of burnt sienna and lemon yellow that first washes the mountains magenta and then a deep violet. Walt Whitman said it best: “The flashing and golden pageant of California, the sudden and gorgeous drama, the sunny and ample lands.” I’m a convert – sign me up. I’ll happily join the ranks of Michael at the bookshop and Joseph Bradford and Henry Miller and never leave.
A once-in-a-lifetime sunset is etched across my retinas, a masterpiece of burnt sienna and lemon yellow
But, the following day, I wake at 4am in the pitch black and start the engine before dawn breaks across big elbows of rock and glimmering sea. Driving toward Salinas, where moisture rises from vast rows of crops in a silver gauze, there’s an uncanny sense of ‘I’ve been here before’. This is John Steinbeck country, where the writer lived and set his novels Of Mice and Men and East of Eden. “The Salinas Valley is in Northern California,” he writes in the latter. “It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the centre until it falls at last into Monterey Bay.” In Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck reports on the plight of Oklahoma sharecroppers fleeing the Dust Bowl for California, where they were often exploited by greedy landowners looking to capitalise on devalued labour.
Condor Gulch in Pinnacles National Park
Sarah Marquez
Now, the area is mainly Latin, as I find when visiting the Steinbeck Museum in Salinas and on the drive through farmland southeast on Route 101. Turning at Soledad, I trundle past taquerias and begin to gain elevation. Pinnacles National Park was given its status in 2012 under the Obama administration but traces its origins back 23 million years before, when multiple volcanoes erupted, slid and flowed across the region. Hewn down by aeons of erosion, the park’s namesake rock formations, dominated by granite, quartz and feldspar, loom and curl like spooky red sentinels more than 3,000 feet above sea level. I continue through broad expanses of chaparral scrubland and thickets of woodland, through plains and canyon bottoms, to reach the trailhead, where vapour atomises off the branches of blue and valley oak.
The head cold that’s been brewing since Santa Cruz is now firing on all cylinders, and I’m sore from the ridge run, but thirsty to see as much of this landscape as possible. I jog between cactus and California buckeye on the Juniper Canyon Trail. The monolithic crag of Resurrection Wall, a popular climbing destination, protrudes upwards to the west, its face a uniform 400ft plane of exposed granite.
From here, the trail steepens precipitously into the High Peaks. The eponymous pinnacles are uniquely formed; some resemble mushrooms, others giant fins, and a few can best be described as Freudian. The San Andreas Rift and the Salinas Valley stretch out below like picnic blankets, and hikers share airspace with eagles and falcons. I keep my eyes peeled for the California condor. They favour these spires, but unfortunately, not me today.
The High Peaks Trail in Pinnacles National Park
The High Peaks Trail hurtles up and down carrot-coloured blockfields and along narrow ledges with guardrails and then declines gently toward the Chalone Creek Road through fields flecked with brilliant yellow wildflowers. I startle a group of black-tailed deer in a riverbed as I’m running west toward Machete Ridge, then a pair of French women as they approach Balcony Cave. We switch on the torches of our phones together and head into the blackness. The talus cave was formed by rockfall when a section of the hillside collapsed. It’s a test of agility to negotiate the cavern’s caries, scrambling over slick slabs and contorting oneself to fit through narrow slots. I remove my footwear for a long, flooded section; my feet are aching and blue by the end of it. Replacing my shoes, I run out the rest of the trail and then point the car north towards San Francisco, where I’m due a night out.
After a four-hour drive through rush-hour traffic, I drop the rental car off in Berkeley and taxi across the Bay Bridge. By the time we reach Yerba Buena and Treasure Island, the city has gone indigo in another mind-bending West Coast sunset; the skyscrapers of the Embarcadero light up like glass bonfires. At Union Square, in the heart of downtown San Francisco, they’ve poured a temporary ice skating rink next to an enormous Christmas tree. It’s Friday 22 December and the reception area at The Westin St Francis Hotel is fizzing with families and couples heading out for one final evening on the town before the holiday.
The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco
Jaredd Craig
It’s a surprisingly steep walk up Stockton Street to the Tunnel Top Lounge and Bar, where I meet my friend Sam Fechheimer for a beer before traversing Chinatown to have another at Vesuvio Cafe, one of the favoured haunts of the Beat Poets, just across the street from the City Lights Book Store. Kerouac sang his love for North Beach and San Francisco in almost everything he wrote. It’s a common trope, whether in On The Road or Big Sur, for him to head out drunk into North Beach searching for pals like Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. And the Italianness of the area hasn’t changed much from Desolation Angels, in which he writes, “It’s the wind, the cleanness, great stores like Buon Gusto’s with all the hanging salamis and provelones [sic] and assortments of wine.”
I sit on a red leather banquette at Tosca Cafe, a local icon since 1919, glugging pinot noir from Sonoma and dismantling meatballs the size of pomeranians. Sam and I attended high school together in New Hampshire. I shed tears when he was expelled (for making an omelette in the cafeteria in the middle of the night and inadvertently stumbling into a teacher’s apartment on the way out). After enrolling in the Cordon Bleu in Paris and working in institutions like Le Taillevent, he began a successful career in kitchens. Now, he is chef-proprietor of the popular Palmer’s Tavern in the Fillmore District, with his own vineyard, Fechheimer Brothers, producing heady cabernet sauvignon from an acreage in Alexander Valley. Life is funny that way. I suppose you could say that he found himself after taking the wrong turn.
