#03 - Big Sur Waterfall

My first visit to the Big Sur coast of California was in 1968 while I was a physics graduate student. Another graduate student and I flew to San Francisco from Wisconsin, rented a U-Haul minivan and picked up at UC Berkeley a table-sized piece of particle physics equipment called a Cherenkov counter. Since it was January we decided on a southern route back to Wisconsin. Thus we set off to the south from the Bay Area and chose the Highway One scenic route along the Pacific Ocean.

Being mid-winter, a typical Pacific storm was dumping huge quantities of rain along our route. As we came around a curve on one headland and headed into the next gullly we saw this waterfall emerge from the fog.

Several years later when I lived at Esalen in Big Sur I realized that in our innocence we had been blithely unaware of the dangers of rockfalls and mudslides along that road during such a storm.

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