Stormy Big Sur Beauty

For the last leg of the trip home from Las Vegas, I bypassed highway 101 and came up the coast after hearing that there was a high surf advisory in effect. It wasn't top down weather like I enjoyed when outbound 10 days earlier, but it was at least as beautiful.

A wider view of the misty mountains shows a waterfall descending to the sea. This is near Lucia. I had never seen this particular fall...blow the picture up for a better view. Below the cliffs at the lower right corner of the picture is a hidden beach that I'd never seen before...you have to get out of the car and peer over the edge to view it. There is a private road leading down to the beach, which, oddly enough, has a row of palm trees growing out of the sand. Wonder how they got there? There's no house or any other structure by the beach...maybe there used to be. Big Sur has a lot of hidden spots like this, many of them on private land.

Massive surf was indeed crashing onto the shore, and washing over rocks about 30 feet high near Garrapata State Park. Quite a spectacle.