As Nacimiento-Fergusson Road nears the crest of the Santa Lucia Range, you get your first taste of what’s coming in Big Sur.
Almost imperceptibly, wisps of cool air and moisture mix with the dry heat of Big Sur’s interior. Ferns and patches of moss appear along the road and beyond the crest, the view opens to Mill Creek Canyon and the Pacific. The best days, oddly enough, are not the clearest. What you want here is fog.
From nearly 3,000 feet, the road looks down on a blanket of white that covers the ocean to the horizon. Within the canyon, fog advances and retreats, reaching into gaps and reducing huge redwoods to silhouettes before the trees vanish entirely.
If you’ve been wondering why you came into Big Sur—not via world-famous Highway 1, but along a twisting road through Los Padres National Forest that begins more than 20 miles inland on an Army base—the view of the fog moving into the canyon is the answer. It’s a remarkable atmospheric dance, as the hot air of the Salinas Valley draws the fog in. And the fog is both vast and vulnerable. It creeps in cautiously, with tendril-like wisps testing to see if it is safe to continue farther up canyon. There are other dances too. Turkey vultures wheel against the grasslands, then let thermals carry them skyward before the birds disappear into the fog, only to reappear above it. There’s virtually no wind, just the steady sound of Mill Creek and the occasional insistent calls of jays to break an eerie quiet.
At a pullout looking down into the canyon, photographer Tom Gamache and I noticed a Polaroid picture that someone had left behind on a boulder.
While I know a number of photographers are using Polaroid cameras as an artistic tool, I can’t remember the last time I actually saw anyone else using one of the cameras out in the field—certainly not in this era when we’re all tricked out with digital cameras, and caught up in a mine-is-bigger-than-yours arms race of megapixels and features. Whoever took the picture seemed to have realized that there’s really no way to bring home this scene, except maybe somewhere in your soul.
In a reversal of the vultures’ flight, as Nacimiento-Fergusson nears the ocean, you descend into the fog, then come out again from underneath it. Driving north along the coast, the views of mountains plunging to the sea change around every bend, and with the fog’s ebb and flow.
It’s a play of landscape, ocean, and sky like nowhere else in the world. Yes, it’s impossible to capture: the sound, the wind, and that sweet kiss of mist. The fog forever reconjures Big Sur and every moment and view seem remarkably new. So we ignored the lesson of that Polaroid. And for three days, up and down this coast in Monterey County, we kept trying to bring Big Sur home with us.
