L.A. FIELDTRIP - BIG SUR

Heading towards San Francisco we took in the Big Sur coastline. Although Big Sur has no specific boundaries, many definitions of the area include the 90 miles (145 km) of coastline between the Carmel River and San Carpoforo Creek, and extend about 20 miles (32 km) inland to the eastern foothills of the Santa Lucias.

The northern end of Big Sur is about 120 miles (193 km) south of San Francisco, and the southern end is approximately 245 miles (394 km) north of Los Angeles.

The area has long been associated with artists, and is celebrated in the book ‘Big Sur’ by Jack Kerouac who spent a few days there in early 1960 at fellow poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin in the woods.

In the early to mid-twentieth century, Big Sur’s relative isolation and natural beauty began to attract writers and artists, including Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller, Edward Weston, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson and Emile Norman. Henry Miller lived in Big Sur from 1944 to 1962. His 1957 novel Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch features the beginnings of what would become described as ‘bohemian’ or ‘alternative lifestyles’.

Hunter S. Thompson worked as a security guard and caretaker at Big Sur Hot Springs for eight months in 1961, just before it became the Esalen Institute. While there, he published his first magazine feature in the nationally distributed Rogue magazine, about Big Sur’s artisan and bohemian culture. Big Sur acquired a bohemian reputation with these newcomers.

The area’s increasing popularity and cinematic beauty soon brought the attention of Hollywood. Orson Welles and his wife at the time, Rita Hayworth, bought a Big Sur cabin on impulse during a trip down the coast in 1944. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton starred in the 1965 film The Sandpiper which was one of the very few major studio motion pictures ever filmed in Big Sur, and perhaps the only one to identify real Big Sur locales by name as part of the plot.

Thanks to our travel companions Michael and Andrew for the seal image.