Highway 1 Revisited

Today we drove down Highway 1, the route which mostly follows the Pacific Coast, picking out some famous landmarks on the way.

Highway 1 was only built in the 1930s, and before that, a lot of this stretch of coastline was inaccessible. Highway 1 clings to the cliffs, passing over many 1930s era concrete bridges (including the famous Bixby Bridge), and today it was the site of some tremendous roadworks, requiring us to wait for a pilot car before going through a single track section. This was all pretty cool, and this seems like quite a good time of year to come and do Highway 1 (it can get ridiculously busy in the summer). It's definitely worth doing.

We drove down first of all to the McWay falls, a neat little cascade at the end of a creek, which drops directly into the ocean:

It's on the left

You can see just how green and clear the water is here. It's a beautiful coastline, with the road clinging to the cliffs which plunge down and occasionally terminate in a sandy beach.

From here we sauntered back up Highway 1 to Pfeiffer Beach. This incredible place reminded me a bit of Durdle Door (OK, it's not quite that good actually), as it has many rocky outcrops with holes carved by years of erosion, but one thing it has that Dorset doesn't is purple sand. Yep, some of the sand is a shade of purple, as manganese garnet from the surrounding hills erodes down to the beach.

The sea is pretty fantastic here, buffeting the coastline and carving the sand into intricate patterns:

Our next stop was Point Lobos, a nature reserve quite near to Carmel. There we encountered this fellow having a snooze:

As it common with many sites on the coast here, this is a great place to see pelicans. There's loads of them about, sometimes leading to parking problems:

Done with this, we're now back in Carmel, contemplating what to do this evening. Tomorrow we may well have a go at Hearst Castle, which is a bit of a drive away but should be fun.