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The Precarious Future of Big Sur's Highway 1

• Lammy 2y ago
  > Farr, who lives in Carmel, […] gave me a history of the area. Originally the homeland of the Esselen people, it was mostly avoided by Spanish colonizers because of the steepness with which the mountains descended to the sea. Ranchers and farmers only began settling there in significant numbers in the late nineteenth century. Construction of the highway—which entailed blasting cliffsides, filling canyons, and felling redwoods, along with dumping a massive amount of debris into the ocean, possibly contributing to the extinction of the local abalone population—began in the nineteen-twenties; As usual, the people who want to be like HIGHWAY BAD neglect to mention the railroad which preceded the highway by 40 years and which would have continued further south into Big Sur had it not been stopped by the fine people of Carmel building a giant ecologically-unnatural golf course community (a place which costs money to even drive through on 17 Mile Rd) that capped off its southern end. It used to be possible to take a SP passenger train there directly from SF!: https://www.abandonedrails.com/monterey-branch https://www.abandonedrails.com/monterey-branch