Monterey to Big Sur – 31 miles
“Very well,” says The Road. “Up to this point we’ve just been playing parlor games. Now we shall see what we shall see.”
Fair enough. I know from occasional glances at the elevation profiles in my cycling map that a number of sharp, steep climbs await me and my thighs in the coming days. Preferring real-time exhaustion to forward-looking dread, I have avoided studying those profiles too closely.
And in fact, it turns out that the first punishing hill starts just outside my hotel and rises 500 feet in less than a mile, up Munras, Soledad and Viejo Roads to a dizzying traffic circle that leads to Highway 1 southbound. Panting madly along Viejo, I encounter a road crew setting up for the day. The flagman sees me crawling along at 3 miles a damn’ hour and, in a moment of start-the-shift-with-a-smile good humor, raises his SLOW sign and gestures at it in mock warning. He and his colleagues chatter briefly in Spanish then laugh, which makes me laugh. Eventually, I reach the crest.
Carmel-by-the-Sea has the reputation for being beautiful, but I’m too busy careening down the other side of the hill at 30 miles a damn’ hour in the morning commute to notice. Past the Carmel River and into Carmel Highlands, fewer cars are on the highway.
Mostly, vehicles respect me on this stretch, even more than I would were I the one behind the wheel. In some kind of tacit deference to cyclists, the drivers give me noticeably wide berth, crossing the median stripe with their left-side tires—I can plainly hear the center rumble strip at work—and often crossing entirely into the oncoming lane. I appreciate that, for there is no bike lane and rarely more than a foot of shoulder for me to occupy.
The skies are cloudy but still dry, and the air is cool. No wind. Fog shrouds the hills behind Garrapata State Park, where I stop for a mid-morning bite and, like Huck Finn gratefully returning to the Mississippi, celebrate my return from urban Monterey to the genuine Cabrillo Highway ride.
While sitting by the road, I hear a couple speaking French as they hike back up the path from the beach to their car. We exchange nods when they pass me.
“Did you enjoy the view?” I ask, resisting the temptation to chat with them in their language.
“Yes,” replies the woman, “it’s quite a show, isn’t it?”
I’ve found that the beauty of places like Utah and the California coast resonates differently with French-speaking people than with, say, German or Spanish speakers. Or maybe French speakers have a way of expressing awe that is just closer to the surface. The couple return to their car and drive on.
It’s hard to overstate the significance of traveling by bike—or by any conveyance with wheels, for that matter—in this part of the world. Following disastrous rains several years ago, parts of Highway 1 between Carmel and San Simeon have been closed due to landslides, and the stretch has been open to through traffic for only the past few months. The killer hills, the microscopic shoulder and the years-long closure are all facets of a single reality: Highway 1 is a road where Nature does not want one, especially not on this leg. Like any forbidden fruit, it’s all the more appealing, and riding here feels all the more rewarding.
Later in the morning I reach Bixby Bridge, where northbound and southbound tourists converge for photo opps. I’m a tourist, so why should I be any different from them?
South of the Little Sur River, Point Sur juts into the ocean. The volcanic rock now anchors a California state park that features a 130-year-old lighthouse.
Apart from the toxic shock of the morning’s initial climb, it’s not a tough day on the bike. I coast on the downhills, take breaks for food, water and selfies, stop for road work, watch the river flow alongside the highway and finally hem and haw for twenty minutes over the kind of sandwich to buy at the General Store in the town of Big Sur.
At Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, the unoccupied hike-and-bike is ensconced in a grove of towering redwoods.
The sun peeks only intermittently through the coastal fog, but even if there were more sunlight, little of it would make it to ground through the thick boughs, foliage and tree trunks. I sit at a picnic table, dawdling the afternoon away, when another cyclist walks his bike onto the site.
“Can you find a spot?” I call jokingly.
“Hope so,” he replies. “Not really mobbed, is it?”
Once he has settled in, we have a meal together. Gil starts a new job as a sales engineer for a technology company next week and is savoring the break with a four-day cycling loop starting and ending in Monterey. Like me, he has weathered the bruising climb earlier in the day; unlike me, he has the advantages of youth, low gears, strong legs and mountain-biking experience to fend off exhaustion.
“How far south are you going?” I ask.
“Tomorrow I’ll go to Limekiln,” he says.
“Me too.”
“Yeah. That’s mostly downhill. Then the next day I’ll cut inland, up over the hills—about four or five thousand feet high—then back north through King City, Greenfield and Carmel Valley Road. Eventually, to Monterey.”
I blanch. There’s no disgrace in a ride like mine, but other people’s extremes certainly put it in perspective.
“Have you ridden Highway 1 much?” he asks.
I tell him about my crash-and-burn a couple of years ago coming out of Muir Beach.
“Oh, you mean on Shoreline Highway? I used to ride that on weekends when I lived in The City, but always downhill. I wouldn’t climb that on a bet. It’s a beast. I can see why you bonked. I’ve bonked like that plenty of times, mostly on mountain trails.”
I feel the color come back into my cheeks, and a frisson of confraternity with dedicated cyclists like Gil. I guess bonk happens to us all.