Big Sur place names · stop 35 of 43, going north

Post Ranch Inn

Post Ranch Inn
Post Ranch Inn, from its website — a tub on the ridge above the fog
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.

William Brainard Post came from Connecticut in 1850, and his first job on this coast was at a whaling station. The family homesteaded this ridge in the 1860s, and Post's hill may well be called the very heart of the Big Sur country. What sits on the ridge now is one of the most expensive hotels in California.

The Post Ranch Inn opened in 1992 on the Post land: thirty-nine rooms scattered along the cliff and up the ridge, sod-roofed houses and tree houses on stilts, twelve hundred feet above the sea, with a pool that hangs off the edge into the sky, and Sierra Mar, a glass restaurant over the ocean that holds a Michelin Green Star. You do not have to stay to eat; Sierra Mar takes travelers who book ahead. A grand hotel on a ridge where the Posts kept cattle, which is its own kind of coast history, and not the strangest turn this land has taken.

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.

Post Ranch Inn
Post Ranch Inn, from its website — Sierra Mar at night
Post Ranch Inn
Post Ranch Inn, from its website — sunset at Sierra Mar
Post Ranch Inn
Post Ranch Inn, from its website — the dining room

Where it is

36.2303, -121.7717 — 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: Ventana Big SurNorth: Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park →

All forty-three places →