#Big sur waterfall mcway falls pfeiffer free

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. Cellphone service is spotty, at best.īig Sur is surprisingly wild with limited accommodations, food and gasoline along 90 miles. 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.

#Big sur waterfall mcway falls pfeiffer free

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 colorful 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 also dramatic, enchanting, overwhelming and sublime. It is an appealing place with its own distinctive California flavor, 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. The waterfall drops 80 feet into sandy McWay Cove along California’s Big Sur. BIG SUR, CALIF.: McWay Falls is picture perfect.