Big Creek Bridge

Big Creek Bridge, opened in 1938, the year after the road: two open arches of concrete, nearly six hundred feet across the canyon, sixty-five feet above the creek, built with Depression money by Christian Gutleben, who built half the arches on this coast. There is a place to pull off at both ends, and people do. This is also where the coast was cut for nearly two years.

On the ninth of February 2024 the mountain let go just here, at post mile twenty-seven point eight, and they called it Regent's Slide. The road was closed from two miles north of Lucia to Lime Creek below Esalen while they took the whole hillside down and rebuilt the road through it, and it opened again on the fourteenth of January 2026, three months ahead of the promise. The canyon behind the bridge is the University's Big Creek Reserve, wild by intent and closed to the public, so the creek you cross runs clean from the ridge to the sea.

The next creek north is Dolan's, and when the road opened in 1937 its bridge was the only single-arch wooden bridge in the country, copied from an old one in Germany. Phillip Dolan, who homesteaded there, trusted no bank, carried large sums on him, and drove his cattle to Monterey alone on foot. One day he stopped to eat his lunch near the Cooper ranch and left his coat by the roadside, and a few miles on remembered what was sewn into it: a thousand dollars.

It was still there when he went back, which tells you what kind of coast this was.