"The beauty that is focused here and indeed visibly and overwhelmingly surrounds us as we look at the mountains and down to the sea below--transcends time. Beauty is always timeless. Beauty is forever." Rosalind Sharpe Wall ~ A Wild Coast and Lonely

Big Sur. This narrow strip of paradise, ninety miles long and twenty wide, holds a romance and fascination in its very name.

It seems impossible to speak of Big Sur without reaching for poetry. Mere prose is helpless to convey its treasures--the jewel-blue sea, the hushed twilight of the redwood groves, the visions of buttressed cliffs rising up like hallucinations out of the mist. Such imagery can only remind us of glories glimpsed. If you haven't seen the Big Sur, no one can explain it to you. If you have, no one needs to.

It has an ineffable quality. Once you pass from its environs, the memory instantly begins to vanish, and you find that snapshots are no help at all in reviving the exhilaration. There is nothing for it but to return.

It is a place of undeniable power, a forbidding place to those accustomed to control. The Spanish, beholding the cliffs from their ships offshore, felt a nameless dread emanate from the rocky coastline south of Monterey. El Sur Grande, they called it, the Big South. Their dominion over it was strictly on paper. But only a self-protecting kind of landscape could possibly have carried so much purity intact into our compromised times.

Wilderness is still the essence of the place. Offshore, the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary guards against oil-drilling platforms and other trespasses. On land, the huge Ventana Wilderness protects ninety-five percent of the land. The few humans who dwell in the Big Sur seem to be here on sufferance, welcome so long as they live quietly and with respect.

There have inevitably been inroads, but the coast has had time and quiet to begin healing the insults of those who came only with profit in mind.

The visitor today is free to enjoy it simply as a scenic movie unrolling upon the windshield of his car, or he can choose to enter more deeply into the soul of this wild place.

A fierce conspiracy of love can best protect the future of the Big Sur. As the poet Robinson Jeffers said, "May its beauty be imperishable"!