Pacific Coast Highway: Big Sur Bixby Bridge to Leggett

Scenic road chapters

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Big Sur Bixby Bridge

   Bixby Creek Bridge is the best-known single structure on California's coast, a pale concrete arch spanning a deep canyon where the road crosses from one cliff to another. It was completed in 1932, a graceful open-spandrel arch about seventy-nine metres above the creek, and it was built to end the isolation of Big Sur, a stretch of coast so rugged that until the road came, residents relied on the sea or mule tracks. The whole of Highway 1 through Big Sur was finished in 1937, after years of work, some of it by convict labour, and it remains one of the great engineering achievements of the American West.

   Read the complete Big Sur Bixby Bridge write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Big Sur Bixby Bridge is where the day begins. Next is Monterey.

2. 2. Monterey

   Monterey is a town with a layered past, and the best way to read it is to walk from the old adobe buildings of the first capital of Spanish and Mexican California to the shiny aquarium on the water's edge. Spanish explorers anchored in the bay in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and Monterey served as the capital under Spain, then Mexico, and briefly under the United States. Colton Hall, where California's first constitution was drafted in 1849, still stands in the middle of town.

   Read the complete Monterey write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Monterey comes up about 29 km into the recorded legs. Next is San Francisco.

3. 3. San Francisco

   San Francisco hits you with its hills first. The city sits on the tip of a peninsula between the Pacific and the bay, and the streets climb and drop at angles that make a fully laden motorcycle feel like a mountain goat. The Golden Gate Bridge, completed in 1937, spans the mouth of the bay in International Orange paint, and when the fog rolls in from the Pacific, as it often does in summer, the towers rise out of the white like something from a dream.

   Read the complete San Francisco write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 212 km into the recorded legs you reach San Francisco. Next is Point Reyes Station.

4. 4. Point Reyes Station

   Point Reyes Station is a single street of low wooden buildings in a green valley north of San Francisco, and it has more good food per metre than most cities. It sits on the Pacific side of Marin County, at the southern end of Tomales Bay, beside Highway 1, with dairy farms and cattle ranches stretching away toward the hills. The town has a bakery that draws queues on weekend mornings, a famous creamery that makes cheese from local milk, an old-fashioned feed store and a bookshop, and the pace is slow and friendly.

   Read the complete Point Reyes Station write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Point Reyes Station, about halfway. Next is Mendocino.

5. 5. Mendocino

   Mendocino looks like a New England fishing village that was picked up and dropped on a California headland, and that is more or less what happened. Lumbermen from Maine built the town in the 1850s, shipping redwood from the forests along the coast, and the wooden houses with their water towers and picket fences still stand on the bluff above the Pacific. It was so convincing that television used it as the setting for a fictional Maine town in a long-running detective series. Today it is a haven for artists and weekend visitors from the Bay Area.

   Read the complete Mendocino write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Mendocino sits at 872 km, late in the day. Next is Leggett.

6. 6. Leggett

   Leggett is where Highway 1 gives up. After hundreds of miles of salt air, fog banks and cliffs that fall straight into the Pacific, the road swings inland through the redwoods of Mendocino County and simply ends at a junction with Highway 101, in a clearing among enormous trees. The village is tiny, a scatter of buildings along the Eel River's south fork, and the nearest towns of any size, Laytonville and Redway, are each almost thirty kilometres away. That tells you most of what you need to know about how empty this corner of California is.

   Read the complete Leggett write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   The route ends here after 578 km.