Among its victims was Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, a popular destination 26 miles south of Monterey that is visited by 440,000 campers, hikers and families a year. It burned 162,000 acres through the Ventana Wilderness and several state parks - charring an area five times the size of the city of San Francisco. The Basin Complex Fire began with a lightning strike two weeks before the Fourth of July, 2008.
There have been three major wildfires in Big Sur in the past 12 years. Highway 1, which runs in a hair-raising, two-lane ribbon from Carmel to Hearst Castle, has been closed more than 60 times due to slides and other disasters since it first opened in 1937. Green sorrel and sword ferns carpeted the landscape, giving the entire area the look of a Sierra Club calendar page.īut the rugged landscape where the North American continent crashes head-long into the Pacific Ocean is in a near-constant state of natural upheaval and calamity. The silence was broken only by the babbling of Pfeiffer Redwood Creek and the lyrical song of a diminutive chestnut-backed chickadee nearby.
That was evident last week as sunlight dappled through the towering redwoods. With its stunning rocky coastline, majestic mountains and deep redwood-shrouded valleys, Big Sur, the writer Henry Miller once said, is “the face of the earth as the creator intended it to look.”
Following a $2 million renovation, the new Pfeiffer Falls Trail will reopen to the public on Friday.
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