Big Sur's hazy forecast: Fall is the best time to visit
Scorched by wildfires, the famous Cali. coastline still lures fall visitors.
BIG SUR, Calif. -- Tucked into a steep redwood hollow and cobbled from local lumber by a Norwegian immigrant in the 1930s, Deetjen's Big Sur Inn has welcomed coastal wayfarers from Jack Kerouac to Robert Redford on its own, take-it-or-leave-it terms: No phones, TVs or room keys, and walls so thin "your neighbors can almost hear you breathe."
But two months after a massive Big Sur wildfire closed Highway 1 during the peak of the tourist season and snaked through the Santa Lucia Mountains to within 15 feet of Deetjen's historic cabins, it's clear that nature is calling the shots here.
Peering up at singed hillsides still off-limits to hikers, Deetjen's general manager Torrey Waag points to sandbags, retaining walls and "erosion control blankets" his staff has marshaled to help mitigate damage from winter rains looming on the horizon.
"The worst-case scenario? We get a wall of debris coming down the canyon," says Waag, who will close off at least one cabin this winter as a precaution.
"It's scary … but if it happens, it will happen whether I worry about it or not."
A cycle of disaster and recovery has always defined the staggeringly scenic landscape that bohemian author and frequent Deetjen's patron Henry Miller described as "forbidding to the man of the pavements … inviting, but hard to conquer."
Stretching roughly 90 miles between Carmel and San Simeon, Big Sur's boulder-strewn coastline, operatic winter weather and punishingly steep terrain discouraged all but the hardiest settlers. The area's lifeline, Highway 1, wasn't built until 1937. Electricity didn't arrive until the late 1940s. Telephone party lines lasted into the 1970s, and cellphone coverage is spotty at best.
Traffic along Highway 1, a two-lane roller coaster that draws about 3 million visitors a year, is disrupted by rock and mudslides so regularly during the rainy season that "it's not if the road will close during the winter. It's when, where and for how long," says 25-year resident Kate Novoa. El Niño-related washouts closed the highway for 10 weeks in 1998, and for 14 months in 1983 and 1984.
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