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Corridors · Vol. 005Byway

On Big Sur, the bridges are the landmarks

An All-American Road along the California coast, one of nine scenic routes mapped in the state, with twelve overlooks and four units of public land.

A coast road has one view and it lasts for a hundred miles, which creates a problem: what do you stop at? Big Sur answers it with engineering. Three bridges are surfaced as places along Route 1 — Bixby Creek Bridge, Rocky Creek Bridge, Granite Canyon Bridge — and Bixby Creek appears twice over, once as a historic site and once as a viewpoint of its own.

A bridge is the only place on a cliff road where you are far enough out to see the cliff.

Why the crossings win

Every other landmark on this coast is the coast. A bridge is different: it carries you away from the wall of rock you have been driving along and holds you out over the gap, which is the one position from which the shape of the land is visible. The road builders were solving a drainage problem. What they produced was the only vantage point the road has.

The twelve surfaced overlooks agree. Hurricane View Point, Kasler Point, Rumsien Overlook, China Lookout, Sea Otter Refuge View Point, Julia Pfeiffer Burns Vista Point. They are named for headlands and for what lives off them, because a headland is the other place the road lets you see sideways.

What is on the other side of the guardrail

The beaches carry the surprise: Monastery Beach, Gibson Beach, Sand Dollar Beach, Hidden Beach. So does the California Sea Otter State Game Refuge, and Landels Hill Big Creek Nature Reserve, and Calla Lily Valley. This is a road with a nature reserve named after the animal you are meant to be watching from the pull-off above it.

Against the committed boundaries the corridor comes within reach of four units of public land: Los Padres National Forest, Fort Ord National Monument, the California Coastal National Monument, and the Piedras Blancas Outstanding Natural Area.

The song

Volume 005 of the byway series is Come Back When It Opens. Anyone who has planned a drive down this coast knows why a title like that exists for this road and no other.

The song · Vol. 005

Come Back When It Opens

On Byway
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