entirely safe and fun

Last weekend, our friend Taz mooted to Punam and I that we should go camping in Big Sur. Since our move had been delayed a week, we had the weekend free, and it’s always a pleasure to hang out with Taz. Besides, there’s no place you can go on the Big Sur coast of which you couldn’t say “well, gee, that’s as beautiful a place as I’ve ever been!” I apologize in advance for possible repetitive gushing in this post.

So Saturday morning we took off down 101, crossed the Hunter Liggett Army Reservation on Nacimiento-Ferguson Road, continued along that intensely windy and steep road to the coast, and then briefly went up highway 1 to the USFS’s Kirk Creek campground, where we claimed the high ground with site 26. Kirk Creek is slightly improved - there are toilets but not showers, and there are established firepits. It is certainly the very best campsite I’ve ever been in of any kind, mostly due to the view, as shown below. We set up Taz’s tent and decided to hike down to the beach while the sun was still high in the sky. We also realized that my phone was the only camera we had, so apologies in advance for picture quality issues (actually, the camera on my Sony-Ericsson w600i is good as phonecams go). It was a short hike, but we got our first taste of the place right off the bat. The trail was lined with flowers taller than most hikers:

And then, of course, we found ourselves on one of the beaches for which the Big Sur coast is famous: rugged and rocky, lined with pebbly gravel rather than sand, and dotted with large rocks on which the surf crashes dramatically. After watching an otter, climbing around on the boulders, and braving the waters of the creek and the Pacific, we cooked a dinner of lemon-dill salmon, steamed squash, and yams Japanese style on the campfire, drank some fine wine, and enjoyed the spectacle of the sun going down over the ocean. The stars were many and bright, and we slept well as the wind and fog erased them.

The next morning we cooked a breakfast of sausage, eggs, and coffee on the fire, packed up, and said goodbye to Kirk Creek. Our initial thought was to head to Pfeiffer, but instead we wound up exploring “that campsite under the bridge” that Punam remembered from our earlier visits: Limekiln State Park. It was compelling enough that we spent the whole day there. Most of the park consists of a redwood-lined canyon with a peculiar sort of creek running through it - it’s made entirely of pools and steep drops, tiny but violent. The trails all cross the stream repeatedly, and some of the trip is fairly technical. One branch of the trail leads to a waterfall about a hundred feet tall, and as you can imagine, there was simply no way to photograph it with my phone’s optics. That didn’t stop me from trying, though, and I hope Taz would drink to that. We squeezed up a narrow, slippery, steep segment of trail to reach the pool at the bottom of the falls, which was ice-cold and misty from the constant impact of water on water. My knee was a little sore, so I was happy to jump right in for therapeutic benefits. Punam had to be convinced, but the perfect, clear pool was hard to resist, and Taz took this picture of us right near the point where the largest streams make their last drops.

After we had been hanging out at the pool for a while, a few other parties arrived and it got crowded, so we headed out to the titular limekilns deep among the redwood groves. They were in an advanced state of ruin, of course, since everything that isn’t alive (and can’t defend itself) in this part of California is eaten by something that is, sooner rather than later. The land is impossibly fertile. And why anyone would put a limekiln way the hell out in the inaccessible middle of nowhere, I have no idea.

We then headed home, stopping in Carmel for dinner at the Forge in the Forest. It’s a fine restaurant with an exemplary all-California wine list. I won’t link to their awful, all-Flash website, though. Punam wanted me to match the Kalanchoe at our table, and made it so.

We made the mistake of coming home on Route 1 to Route 17; the main problem was construction on the notoriously unstable 17 which slowed us to about 5 MPH for two full hours. We’d have been better off cutting over to 101 via 156, and that’s what we’ll do next time for sure.

Any rate, there’s a Flickr set here for your viewing pleasure, and another, larger set (a proper superset, in fact) here with many pictures attempting to capture the scale of that waterfall at Limekiln SP. Punam and I had gotten into a rut at Molera and Pfeiffer on our Big Sur trips, so discovering Limekiln - for visits with a crew willing to make a tough, short hike - was the best part of the trip for us.