Pacific Coast Highway: Morro Bay to San Francisco

Scenic road chapters

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Morro Bay

   Morro Bay announces itself with a rock. Morro Rock, a smooth, rounded volcanic plug 175 metres high, stands at the mouth of the harbour, guarding the entrance like a stone sentinel. It is the westernmost of a chain of ancient volcanic peaks called the Nine Sisters that march inland toward San Luis Obispo, and Spanish explorers used it as a landmark from the sixteenth century, naming it El Morro, the crown. Peregrine falcons nest on its face, so climbing is banned, but you can walk the sand spit to its base, and the beach is a pleasant place to watch surfers and sea otters.

   Read the complete Morro Bay write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   Morro Bay is where the day begins. Next is Big Sur Bixby Bridge.

2. 2. 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 comes up about 169 km into the recorded legs. Next is Monterey.

3. 3. 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

   about 198 km into the recorded legs you reach Monterey. Next is San Francisco.

4. 4. 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

   San Francisco closes the day.