[Leonie will be writing some posts about our shared adventures, including this one. They will include her byline. — ed.]
In 1986, Martin Luther King Jr became the first modern private citizen to be honored with a federal holiday. Though it was created in 1986, several southern states promptly combined it with a holiday commemorating Robert E. Lee and Arizona even rescinded it! In 2000 all 50 states finally observed the third Monday in January as MLK Day.
A panorama of wild surf stretched before us when we stopped for snacks before the descent. The heaving glittering ocean beckoned so we paused only briefly before starting down the steep eroded trail. Yucca, Yerba Santa, and Indian paintbrush grew on the trail margins; biological diversity is astounding where Southern and Northern California meet. Beyond the trail lay a dense snarl of prickly impenetrable brush: cross-country travel leads to blood and frustration in the Santa Lucia Mountains.
We crossed a mosaic of driftwood to arrive at a remote beach, where we found crashing surf and a gauntlet of swirling white water. We settled for standing ankle deep on the edge of the sea, watching waves crash, seagulls whirl, and sand erode from under our feet.
During the hike we talked about returning to the enchanted meadow one day to camp; when we returned to our rig at 3:30 PM to find the place abandoned we thought: why not tonight? The third day of a tour isn’t the usual time to take a mellow hike, but we were delighted to laze in the sun, read books, and drink tea while deer browsed on the edge of the clearing. Though our campsite wasn’t technically legal, the ranger who drove by twice the next morning gave us no trouble. Either we cast a cloak of invisibility or they just didn’t care. We packed, refilled our water bottles, and continued south.
We passed the trailheads for Pico Blanco and Cone Peak without pausing, our climbing lust tempered by the atmospheric river of moisture predicted to hose California’s central coast in a week, and the hundreds of miles we’d need to cover to get home dry. Between a paper map and downloaded Caltopo we couldn’t quite figure out how to access some of the trailheads anyway. “No Trespassing” signs bristled at infrequent driveways and barbed wire lined long stretches of highway. Over 500,000 acres of Big Sur are protected by various state and federal agencies; they receive millions of visitors a year. The 1500 people lucky enough to own land along what painter Francis McComas called the “greatest meeting of land and water in the world” guard their privacy.
To our left rose steep chaparral cloaked hills and valleys, to the right were cliffs hundreds of feet tall dropping towards crashing waves and the vast placid expanse of the Pacific. Between these geographical barriers, the indigenous people of the Big Sur Coast, the Esselen, developed distinct cultural and linguistic patterns. One of the least numerous bands of California Natives, in close proximity to two missions, they retreated to the rugged interior when confronted by the advance of Spanish colonization, only filtering down to ranches and towns in the 1840s.
Almost 200 years later, they are finally stewards of their homeland again. In 2020, the Esselen tribe closed escrow on 1200 acres along the Little Sur River, where they hope to tend the majestic redwoods and enormous condors that call this land home. “It is with great honor that our tribe has been called by our Ancestors to become stewards of these sacred indigenous lands once again,” Tribal Commissioner Tom Little Bear Nason told CNN.
In the afternoon, winds shifted and we found ourselves battling a fierce south west wind. The famed Santa Ana winds impeded cheerful progress and we labored up each climb, desperately scanning the roadside for any feasible camping. Barbed wire and dense chaparral returned our gaze.
We wrestled the bike a short ways off the road and carried the rest of our gear across a dry creek bed to a flat tent platform sheltered by towering trees where the Santa Ana winds became a distant memory. A spring fed creek burbled up canyon. We set up camp and performed our evening chores in hushed awe before settling into dreamless sleep beneath the ancient giants.