Big Sur place names · stop 39 of 43, going north

Bixby Bridge

Bixby Bridge
Wikimedia Commons
Highway 1 was open along this coast when it was last checked. Caltrans' own Lane Closure System, as verified 2026-10-06. Today’s road status.

Bixby Creek Bridge, finished in 1932. Three hundred and sixty feet of concrete arch across a canyon that had no crossing at all. Before this bridge the south coast was reached by trail, and I remember when the road opened in 1937 and everything changed at once.

This single span is the reason the road exists. Pull into the turnout at the north end and look back at it. This is the picture everyone takes, and nobody is wrong to.

The dirt road climbing the hill from the turnout is the Old Coast Road, the wagon road that went inland around the canyon before the bridge, ten miles over the ridges to Andrew Molera, and in dry weather a car can still take it. The men who built this highway were convicts from San Quentin, camped along the coast, and they earned time off their sentences with every mile.

Told by Mabel Plaskett, whose column Coast Trails ran in the King City Rustler’s monthly supplement from 1959 to 1964, and who was in print as early as 1941 under the pen name Belinda Brown. Her family has been on this coast since 1869. Her writing.

Bixby Bridge
Floyd Risvold, United States Coast & Geodetic Survey, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain — the bridge in 1932
Bixby Bridge
Astronautilus, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 — from the turnout
Bixby Bridge
King of Hearts, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 — the canyon and the arch

Where it is

36.3720, -121.9020 — Highway 1, Big Sur coast, California.

The whole drive, spoken as you go.
Forty-three places between Carmel and San Simeon, free, and it works with no signal once it is loaded — which most of this coast has none of. Open the Big Sur guide.
← South: Point SurNorth: Rocky Creek →

All forty-three places →