Place Name Guide · Big Sur
How busy this road is, how that changes through the year, and how often the mountain takes it away.
A year counts as cut on any day the coast road was shut to through traffic somewhere between Carmel and San Simeon. Overlapping closures are not double counted — in 2017 there were three at once.
Caltrans gives two honest numbers for this coast: the annual average, and the busiest month, which runs about 17% above it. There is no permanent counter on Big Sur, so there is no published month-by-month profile. This curve is anchored on those two points and shaped by the season — treat it as the pattern, not as measurements.
peak shoulder quiet
Annual average daily traffic at each Caltrans count location on the coast road, listed north to south so it reads the same way as the map. These are two-way totals: there is no published northbound/southbound split for Highway 1 through Big Sur.
Where the counters are
Everything on the coast road between Carmel Highlands and San Simeon. On this stretch that is not a convenience question: running dry between Big Sur village and Gorda means a tow over a mountain road, from a place with no signal to call for one.
Day-use sites, campgrounds and lodging are listed separately on what is open on the coast — none of them sell fuel.
| Where | Type | Position | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carmel Highlandslocal report, not in OpenStreetMap | fuel, store | 36.5053, -121.9362 | GAS AVAILABLE, beside the general store. Listed on Yelp and GasBuddy, read 8 September 2026; the stop has no website of its own. |
| Big Sur River Inn fuellocal report, not in OpenStreetMap | fuel | 36.2710, -121.8087 | FUEL at the Big Sur River Inn, beside its General Store. The Inn's own site, read in a browser on 6 October 2026, says it is open and the General Store open daily; it does not list fuel hours, so ring 831-667-2700 if you are counting on a fill. |
| Ripplewoodlocal report, not in OpenStreetMap | food, fuel, lodging, store | 36.2647, -121.8013 | OPEN, read in a browser at about 9:25pm PDT on 5 October 2026: their post of 15 September, 'Big Sur is open. Ripplewood is here.', with the café and store 'here through it all'; the booking calendar is taking dates this week. Reservation desk daily 8:00am to 7:00pm. |
| Tesla Superchargerlocal report, not in OpenStreetMap | charging | 36.2269, -121.7615 | OPEN: the Big Sur Supercharger at Ventana Big Sur is listed as open, 8 stalls, on supercharge.info, read 6 October 2026. Check the Tesla app for stalls in use. |
| Gordalocal report, not in OpenStreetMap | charging, food, fuel, lodging, restrooms, store | 35.8764, -121.4461 | OPEN: their own site, read 6 October 2026, carries no closure notice and shows the store 'Open today 10:00 am – 07:30 pm'. Rooms by telephone, (805) 924-1825; the store on (805) 927-3918. |
| Ragged Pointlocal report, not in OpenStreetMap | food, fuel, lodging, restrooms | 35.7811, -121.3300 | OPEN, on Ragged Point Inn's own posted hours, read in a browser at 5:20am PDT on 6 October 2026: 'The Ragged Point Restaurant is open for breakfast from 8 to 11 am, lunch from noon to 4 pm, and dinner from 5 to 8 pm, Monday through Saturday'; the coffee bar 8am to 3pm daily. San Luis Obispo County, and no evacuation zone in that county is in force on the Cal OES layer read the same morning. They suggest ringing 805-927-5708 before you go. |
Where they are
OpenStreetMap is volunteered and incomplete, and distances here are straight-line, so the real drive between two stops is always further than the number given. Treat every figure as a floor and fill up before you think you need to.
The same closures twice: drawn against time, then written out. Each bar is one event, coloured by what caused it, and the table below gives it a place, a date and an account.
Slide or slip-outBridge failure or replacementWildfireStorm damage or debris flow
| Closure | Cause | From | Until | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Timber Fireinland above the coast, mid-Big Sur | Wildfire | 2026-08-08 | open-ended | Burning since 8 August 2026. The coast road is cut mid-coast and both ends remain open. Seven months after Regent's Slide reopened. |
| Regent's Slideat Big Creek Bridge, post mile 27.8, between Lucia and Esalen | Slide or slip-out | 2024-02 | 2026-01-14 | The longest recent closure. Slid on 9 February 2024 at PM 27.8, 45 miles south of Carmel; the turnarounds were PM 25.3, two miles north of Lucia, and Lime Creek at PM 32.1 below Esalen. Reopened on 14 January 2026, about ninety days ahead of the estimate, restoring the whole coast route for the first time in nearly two years. Corrected 6 September 2026: an earlier entry placed it at Rocky Creek, which was a different 2024 failure. |
| Paul's Slidejust south of Lucia, about 2 miles north of Limekiln | Slide or slip-out | 2023-01 | 2024-06 | The same slide as 2017, moving again. Seventeen months. |
| Colorado FirePalo Colorado Canyon, north of Bixby | Wildfire | 2022-01 | 2022-01 | A January wildfire, which is its own kind of warning. |
| Rat Creekjust north of Kirk Creek, near Limekiln | Storm damage or debris flow | 2021-01-29 | 2021-04 | A storm on the Dolan Fire burn scar sent debris through a culvert and took 150 feet of highway into the sea. The bare ground left by the fire five months earlier is the reason. |
| Dolan Fireinland above the coast, behind Lucia and Limekiln | Wildfire | 2020-08 | 2020-09 | Burned about 125,000 acres. It also stripped the slopes above Rat Creek, which is why the following winter did what it did. |
| Mud Creek4 miles south of Gorda, 5 miles south of Plaskett Creek | Slide or slip-out | 2017-05 | 2018-07 | Six million cubic yards of mountain came down and buried a quarter mile of highway under dozens of feet of rock — the largest slide ever recorded on this coast. Caltrans rebuilt the road across the top of it rather than clearing it. Fourteen months. Worth knowing that “Mud Creek” is the name on the quad sheet rather than anything people said locally: it is a small drainage four miles south of Gorda, and the name only entered general use because the slide made it famous. |
| Pfeiffer Canyon Bridgein Big Sur village, at the Pfeiffer Canyon crossing | Bridge failure or replacement | 2017-02 | 2017-10 | The ground under the bridge supports moved and the bridge had to be demolished. A steel replacement was fabricated in the Bay Area and dropped in that October. For eight months the village was split in two and children were walking a trail to get to school. |
| Paul's Slidejust south of Lucia, about 2 miles north of Limekiln | Slide or slip-out | 2017-01 | 2017-07 | One of several slides in the wet winter of 2017, the year the coast road was cut in three places at once. |
Major through-closures of Highway 1 on the Big Sur coast. A closure is listed when the coast road was cut to through traffic between Carmel and San Simeon. Assembled from Caltrans District 5 releases, Governor's office announcements and contemporary reporting; every entry carries its confidence. Dates given as month precision unless a specific day was announced. Locations are given by the landmarks people on this coast actually use, because the name a slide gets in the press is often a quad-sheet creek nobody local ever mentioned.
Journalists, businesses and residents are welcome to use this work. It exists so the people who depend on this road can plan around it. One condition: say where it came from.
Charts, analysis, closure compilation and written material © 2026 Bill Alderson, Place Name Guide. Free to reproduce and republish with attribution to Place Name Guide and a link to this page. Reproduction without attribution is not permitted.
Cite it like this
“Highway 1 by the numbers”, Place Name Guide
(Bill Alderson), 8 October 2026.
https://placenameguide.com/highway-1-statistics.html
The underlying facts are public record and nobody owns them — Caltrans count figures and the dates a road shut belong to everyone. What is claimed here is the work done on top of them: which closures were gathered and judged worth listing, how the years were computed, the charts, the analysis and the writing. That is a real and defensible claim, and stating it precisely is what makes it one.