Tight Curves and Vast Horizons: The Return of Highway 1

“We got our Big Sur buddies back,” stated Brian Flaten, stirring a Negroni beneath a mounted moose head at Legends Bar in Morro Bay, Calif. At midnight on a current night, the dimly lit bar the place Mr. Flaten is a bartender, beckoned drivers off Highway 1, lengthy after the remainder of the world had gone to mattress on this lonely stretch.

But there was one thing to have a good time. After three years, Highway 1 was open once more. As of Feb. 14, drivers can as soon as once more journey the complete size of the long-lasting street — which was included in The New York Times’s “52 Places to Go in 2026” checklist — after a sequence of landslides that started in 2023 severed the street 110 miles north of right here.

Shawna Hawkins had simply arrived at Legends Bar along with her son and niece after driving south from San Francisco. “I wanted to feel the sand under my feet again,” she stated. “It’s been too long.”

Outside, Morro Rock rose like a large cranium some 600 toes from the Pacific Ocean — a form of bookend to the opposite epic formations alongside the coast that had appeared out of attain, except drivers took lengthy detours across the Santa Lucia Mountains.

Highway 1, which lies between the stressed Pacific and people steep mountains, is much less a street than a story: a sequence of tightening curves, widening horizons and vertiginous reveals that make up one of many world’s best street journeys, rhapsodized about by everybody from John Steinbeck to Jack Kerouac. As you drive north from Morro Bay, it’s possible you’ll get the uneasy sense that the mountains and sea are solely grudgingly permitting a street to pinch between them.

A Castle Above the Sea

On a current morning I discovered the dearth of visitors shocking. The freeway felt virtually personal, one thing longtime drivers right here can hardly keep in mind.

Just half-hour north of Morro Bay, Hearst Castle rose from a mountain: an elaborate association of towers and terraces. Built by the media tycoon William Randolph Hearst over three many years beginning in 1919, the property has all the time felt barely indifferent from its environment — a European fantasia set above a Californian wilderness.

Before Highway 1’s closure, a go to normally required making a reservation days prematurely. On a current morning, walk-in tickets had been available. I joined the “Upstairs Suites Tour” ($35) and located myself alone with a information.

I had been right here many instances earlier than. But this time, with out the standard crowds, particulars emerged with uncommon readability: Hearst’s purple velvet monogrammed slippers ready in his closet; a pair of work of Napoleon Bonaparte by Jean-Léon Gérôme hanging in a distant anteroom; the newspaper hangers within the palatial workplace the place editions from all over the world had been flown in every day so Hearst might information his empire from this wilderness.

Attendance is up solely barely — about 13 % above what it was final yr — however Diana Binnewies, my information, stated she observed the distinction. “Before, it skewed heavily toward Southern California,” she stated. “Now I see a lot more diversity in viewpoints and dress.”

North of Hearst Castle begins one in every of Highway 1’s most distinctive soundtracks: the barking of elephant seals. They flop alongside the shores and outcroppings alongside the freeway, offering a contralto to the fixed roll of the surf. One of the perfect locations to see them is the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Rookery, the place a whole lot of seal elephants sprawl out on the sand like vacationers on a package deal journey.

The soundtrack replaces cellphone service, which vanishes for the following 150 miles, as you head north. It hardly looks like a loss — dialog appears inappropriate within the face of such vastness.

“Big Sur is a place of splendor, a savage beauty beyond words,” wrote Henry Miller, who lived right here for practically 20 years. Farther up the freeway, the Henry Miller Memorial Library echoes the lingering New Age power that hums alongside this stretch of coast with poetry readings, tie-dyed patrons and pathways shaded by low, branch-woven canopies.

After the rookery, the lanes slender and the drop-offs sharpen because the street approaches Big Sur. This is the Highway 1 of one million Instagram posts.

On the curves, the current reopening of the freeway was most evident. There was little or no visitors. For the complete stretch to Carmel, I hardly tailgated anybody, regardless of many years of reminiscences of infinite automotive chains that clogged the street the place passing lanes are nonexistent.

At a Hitchcockian pullout 200 toes above the ocean, a half-dozen college students from Claremont McKenna College parked to gape on the Big Creek Bridge, an Art Deco marvel opened in 1938. With delicately curved trestles in opposition to the tough panorama, the bridge appears to have barely escaped catastrophe. At its southern edge, a three-football-field-wide streak of scraped, rainbow-colored particles rose in opposition to the cliffs all the way in which to the ocean: The Regent’s Slide, which had held the street hostage for 3 years, was now largely cleaned out and tied down, Gulliver-like, by a thick skirt of mesh.

Excavators and bulldozers had been nonetheless at work beneath the slide space after I drove by, and for the primary time on this journey, I used to be compelled to attend behind different autos because the street narrowed to a single lane. Laser tools was being affixed to the cliffs to measure any motion.

Farther north, Nepenthe, Greek for “no sorrow,” is perched on a shelf above the surf. The restaurant has all the time been a compulsory cease. The property had as soon as been owned by Orson Welles and his spouse Rita Hayworth; later the Fassett household constructed a broad orange terrace with a sculptural restaurant designed by Rowan Maiden, a scholar of Frank Lloyd Wright. Ever since, it has been a bohemian gathering spot for drum circles, dances and nice meals. Ordering a beet salad ($26) on the terrace, I requested the waitress if something had altered through the three years the place had been largely out of attain.

“Yeah,” she stated, “we replaced some of the old chairs on the patio.”

A Famous Inn and a Gorgeous Beach

Post Ranch Inn is one other beacon of stability on an unstable street. Originally homesteaded by the Post household within the 1860s, the inn lies about 1,000 or so toes above the waves, throughout 98 acres that at the moment are dotted with tree homes, bungalows and sculptural glass-and-metal cabins. Post Ranch even has a resident shaman. When storms closed the freeway north of the property in 2024, friends had been flown in by helicopter. Now they’re returning in droves and the place was booked strong for the following two weeks.

Although the usually $2,100-to-$3,300-a-night price ticket is daunting, the inn’s restaurant, Sierra Mar (prix fixe lunch, $85), is extra accessible and offers a glimpse beneath the centuries-old redwood bushes into the compound that has been visited by the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal, Taylor Swift and George Clooney.

The restaurant’s kitchen was fully rebuilt through the street closure and the outcomes are paying off. “The giant has awoken,” stated Reylon Agustin, the inn’s culinary director, as he surveyed the sunny terrace the place guests had been tucking into smashburgers with components grown within the inn’s backyard.

Three miles up, on a steep street that descends from the freeway, Paul Amend was directing visitors to Pfeiffer Beach, one of the vital photographed shores in California.

“This might be the most difficult job on Highway 1,” he stated. Before the closure, vacationers would drive two miles down the slender street to 5 dozen parking spots within the beachside parking zone ($15 entry) — or just park illegally, clogging up driveways and creating bottlenecks. Now workers members have been stationed on the high of the street to drive vehicles to attend for spots to open. “Best to get here before 8 a.m.,” Mr. Amend stated.

I got here late within the day and was fortunate sufficient to snag a spot. The cliff formations alongside the vast sand seaside had been riddled with holes and crannies, and some — a lot fewer now that parking is enforced — souls braved the riptides to take a dip. No lifeguards had been on obligation.

As the solar set, I famous a person precariously leaning his iPhone onto one of many cliff’s handholds, after which operating over to his girlfriend to kneel and suggest. It seemed like an enthusiastic “yes.” In this setting, a “no” can be onerous.

By the time Highway 1 reached the bucolic village of Carmel-by-the-Sea, the panorama had softened. Cliffs eased into rolling hills and the ocean retreated behind grassy fields streaked yellow and purple with lupines and poppies within the fading mild.

After three years, I used to be grateful to have carried out in uncommon solitude the ritual of one in every of America’s best street journeys. But it’s unattainable to take something with no consideration on this wild coast, and that’s a part of its attract.

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