Pacific Coast Highway

Scenic road chapters

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Dana Point

   Dana Point has a better claim to literary fame than most harbour towns in Orange County. In 1835 a young Harvard dropout named Richard Henry Dana Jr. spent months hauling cow hides on this stretch of the California coast as a common sailor, and he later wrote it up as Two Years Before the Mast. He described the bluff here as the only romantic spot on the coast, and the town took his name. Today the bluff holds a headland park and a harbour full of yachts, and a replica tall ship sits at the dock as a reminder of the age of hide and tallow.

   Read the complete Dana Point write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   Dana Point is where the day begins. Next is Malibu.

2. 2. Malibu

   Twenty-one miles of the Pacific Coast Highway pass through Malibu, and most of them are within sight of the sea. The road squeezes between the steep brown slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains and a narrow ribbon of sand, a mix of beach houses, small plazas, surf breaks and sudden gaps with a view over the water. The town itself has about thirteen thousand people, a city of film stars and surfers, and a strong feeling of being at the edge of something. It was once a ranch owned by the Rindge family, who held off development for decades, and the land was divided only in the 1920s, after the state forced a public road through it.

   Read the complete Malibu write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   Malibu comes up about 144 km into the recorded legs. Next is Santa Barbara.

3. 3. Santa Barbara

   The Pacific Coast Highway has a way of ending in places that look like film sets, and Santa Barbara is the best of them. The city sits on a narrow shelf of land between the Santa Ynez Mountains and the ocean, facing south, which is unusual on the Californian coast, so the sun seems to hang over the water in the afternoon. The red tile roofs, white stucco walls and arched arcades are not an accident. After an earthquake in 1925 destroyed much of downtown, the city rebuilt in a unified Spanish Colonial Revival style, and the result is a place that feels more like Andalusia than Los Angeles.

   Read the complete Santa Barbara write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   about 252 km into the recorded legs you reach Santa Barbara. Next is Morro Bay.

4. 4. 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, about halfway. Next is Big Sur Bixby Bridge.

5. 5. 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 sits at 934 km, about halfway. Next is Monterey.

6. 6. 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 623 km into the recorded legs. Next is San Francisco.

7. 7. 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 806 km into the recorded legs you reach San Francisco. Next is Point Reyes Station.

8. 8. 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, late in the day. Next is Mendocino.

9. 9. 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 1868 km, late in the day. Next is Leggett.

10. 10. 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

    Leggett closes the day.