Big Sur by Air and Sea

From the air I can see down along the Big Sur coast. Fresh brown dirt is visible from Paul’s Slide. Further south Kirk Creek Campground and across the highway the narrow road over the Santa Lucia Mountains where if you drive far enough you’ll wind up in King City.

Further north another slide out has forced 1500 to evacuate to Monterey. If you need groceries, medicines, to see a doctor, get to work, stop to visit friends, get propane or fuel for you car, if you need services you’ll need to get north beyond where the road has washed out.

Highway Patrol had been convoying cars north while CalTrans officials keep a watchful eye on what remains of the now one lane wide roadway.

There are some discussions underway about whether the road is repairable. In the last years there have been 50 slides in the area that have shutdown Highway 1. The thought of the Coast Highway closing and Big Sur being permanently cut off by automobile from the rest of California remains in the minds of many inconceivable. It is all these more frequent powerful winter storms and the damage the atmospheric rivers are causing that have spurred officials to begin publicly airing the coming changes to this stretch of coastline.

Big Sur is but one location in California that is being forced to reconsider how to manage the swelling numbers of visitors to their regions. Napa Valley, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe and now Big Sur are all confronting this ever increasing pressure on their environments.

Job one is coming up with a non-automobile-centric transportation system. Shuttles are used in Yosemite and in Napa County there is the wine train. Lake Tahoe and Big Sur have a different set of problems to confront while the United States Geological Survey, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other local and state agencies begin to grapple with these all but inevitable changes.

It is one thing to gridlock our cosmopolitan freeways during rush hour it is an entirely different order of cultural crisis to find that all our weekend getaway’s are threatened by too many visitors.

California’s population is big and some of our most iconic tourist destinations are too small. Mendocino is so far from the maddening crowd and so difficult to get to that it remains safe for now. But, Big Sur is adjacent to the Monterey Peninsula and attracts millions of visitors, and many of those who come to Monterey want to go that short drive further south to get a look at one of the most scenic chunks of coastline in all of the United States.

Paul’s Slide has been under repair since the storms in 2023 and the state has poured some $100 million in repairs with no date yet announced for the slide’s reopening. The recent slip out on the coast highway north nearer to Carmel is estimated to cost $25 million to fix, but nobody is sure how long the repairs will hold given the new more powerful storms that have been lashing the region in the last decade.

Spending these astounding sized funds to keep a road open temporarily has seized the bean counters attention. Options are limited. One idea is to build tunnels. Another is to shutdown the road and transport people by shuttles, but engineers are not sure that such a system would still be safe enough or reliable enough.

As America confronts a veritable political caseload of reactionary political forces we are left to consider how to do the much more mundane but practical work of keeping open access to regions of our country getting hammered by Mother Nature.

Mitigating the impacts of all these new more powerful weather events is going to bankrupt us all. Home insurance is through the roof, and discontentment flows from regions of the state that had once depended on the old ways of doing things. Farmers want more water, fisherman dependent on salmon want more water, and our growing urban populations want more water too. All of these frustrations come to a head in Sacramento bringing the careers of many to a quick end.

It isn’t as if Big Sur is going to go anywhere, but how we get there is definitely going to change. Some combination of ferries and shuttles will do the trick, but it will require our car culture addicted populace to adapt to this new way of travel. While we wait the old businesses built on the old way of doing things will be forced to close. Residents living in the remote rural mountains of Big Sur will have to adapt too. For some living this far off the grid may mean moving closer to Monterey or San Luis Obispo.

What we are grappling with is that the cost of keeping some our most iconic destinations open for business to be a losing proposition. It costs too much and in return we get back too little.