THE DEFIANT CALIFORNIA 1; SCENIC COASTAL HIGHWAY SHOWS A FEW BRUISES, BUT IT HAS MADE A MIRACULOUS RECOVERY FROM THE DEVASTATION OF LAST WINTER'S STORMS.

Byline: Story and photos by Eric Noland Travel Editor

Tough little ribbon of asphalt, that Highway 1.

Subjected to a savage beating by the torrential storms of last winter, it barely flinched. The winding coastal route, though exhibiting scars of abuse here and there, is as spectacular as ever as it picks its way through canyons and along cliffsides on its way north from San Luis Obispo to Carmel.

And the fact that it is still standing - still open - has to rank as something of a miracle in light of what the little highway has been through.

By this date last year, Highway 1 had been effectively closed for business for two weeks, destined not to reopen until the end of May. El Nino's fury - and the slides of mud and debris it unleashed - had seen to that. There were numerous washouts along the route, including some locations where vast stretches of roadway simply plunged down hillsides toward the sea.

The community of Big Sur, for years a magnet for society's escapees (both short term and long), was utterly stranded, its residents forced to live on stored supplies, its businesses denied their lifeblood of tourism.

Against this backdrop, a journey up Highway 1 was undertaken last month with a degree of trepidation. Would there be rickety suspension bridges thrown up by the Army Corps of Engineers? Would there be boarded-up businesses in Big Sur and in the tiny settlements of Gorda and Lucia to the south?

The concern proved to be wholly unwarranted: The route was found to be flourishing, perhaps because it has had so much practice weathering natural disasters during its 62-year existence.

``This was the 19th major closure we've had in the last 27 years,'' said Ken Wright, who settled in Big Sur nearly 30 years ago after falling in love with the place while patrolling Highway 1 as a California Highway Patrol officer. ``The road is built on the edge of a continent. The continent moves. There are fault lines. Construction methods in the 1930s were not as wonderful as they are now.''

Because of the frequency of natural havoc - the gamut includes fire, rain, earthquake, landslide, flood - ``the people who choose to live in this community know the potential of adversity facing them,'' added Wright, who today owns the Glen Oaks Motel. ``And it brings them together.''

Still, Big Sur was sorely tested by this last incident.

The glib reaction from Los Angeles might be that the road closures resulted in perilous shortages of psyllium husks, Spa Therapy Dead Sea Mud & Mineral Care ginger-thyme bath gel and replacement parts for ancient Volkswagen camper buses (unofficial count over two days of travel between Cayucos and Carmel: 27 buses).

But this was serious stuff. Several elderly residents had to be evacuated in National Guard helicopters. Some schoolkids had to be quartered in Carmel, away from their parents. Replacement supplies were obtained only with interminable convoys that were escorted through construction sites and along treacherous stretches of road.

And all the while, for 16 solid weeks of winter, there was not a single tourist dollar to be had.

``I think everybody went through a tight squeeze, and I think everybody is still scrambling,'' said Laura Moran, manager of Deetjen's Big Sur Inn and president of the local Chamber of Commerce. ``One of the things we were a little afraid of was that the negative publicity was going to be out there and people would change their plans, (that) even when the highway opened up, they would say, `Forget it, we're not going there.' However, the people came. Lots of people came.''

They're still coming. The route experienced a boom summer in 1998 and thus far is experiencing a strong winter, according to several local leaders. Moran said she knew of only one business closure. And a survey of lodging establishments revealed that there has been no compulsion to discount accommodations to spark tourism.

Travelers seem to be naturally lured to this coastal route. For good reason: It has undergone little change in appearance during its lifetime.

Disdaining the current interstate preference for plotting the straightest distance between two points, this road instead follows every contour of the terrain, tucking inland to negotiate a canyon thick with Monterey cypress and redwood, then bending back to hug the edge of a coastal precipice. Rising here, plunging there.

The infrequent dwellings are positioned discreetly out of view, just below the lip of a cliff, or high up the mountainside, camouflaged in stands of trees.

Despite the obvious marketability of this scenery, the land has remained sparsely settled. Blissfully so. The coastal vistas are nearly identical to the ones encountered by the first travelers of the road in the '30s.

In summer, Highway 1 is aswarm with cars, but the drive might be even more appealing in the quiet of winter, when the air is chilly and damp and the Pacific Ocean particularly tempestuous, frothing over the jagged rock gardens below.

For the traveler from the Los Angeles area, perhaps the best way to approach a short getaway along Highway 1 is to overnight in one of the communities 200-plus miles north of L.A.: San Luis Obispo, Morro Bay, Cayucos, Cambria. This allows an entire day to proceed on to Big Sur or Carmel.

It's not a drive that should ever be rushed.

Many visitors seem to regard this journey as if they were aboard a train, content to keep moving and take in the views from their car windows.

A preferable course is to drive it slowly, yielding often to the northbound speed demons who forgot to leave their wristwatches at home. It is also advisable to pull off the highway and park often, even when there is not something specific to take in.

On the trip last month, the rewards in such instances were numerous. Sea lions assembled on a rocky beach below, sending up such a cacophonous bark, you'd have thought the Alpo delivery had been delayed to the kennel. A red-tailed hawk glided in the updrafts just below the cliff edge. An otter floated on his back and fussed with some shellfish morsel he'd plucked from the kelp. Monarch butterflies created a bright-orange flurry as they took flight in a grove of eucalyptus.

This time of year, if you're really lucky, you might even catch sight of a migrating whale offshore. (Binoculars should be at the very top of your packing list.)

There also is no shortage of opportunity to stretch the legs on a short hiking trail. Partington Cove is an excellent example.

You'll find it 1.8 miles north of the entrance to Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. On the northwest corner of the highway bridge over Partington Creek, a fire road descends the canyon to a rocky beach below. At one point, a trail fork to the left crosses the creek via footbridge and then traverses a 100-foot tunnel to a sheltered cove, where entrepreneurs in the late-1880s loaded redwood and tanbark into ships moored below. Remnants of the crane they used still stand.

The entire round-trip walk, including a side trip to the beach, is less than a mile.

But this drive is rewarding even for those not inclined to wander. All that's needed to appreciate its unique beauty is to pull over at one of the many turnouts along the road and simply linger over the sights directly below or in either direction along the coast.

Longtime travelers of Highway 1 will continue to delight in such diversions, but the scenes of devastation and the ongoing repairs to the road are likely to be jarring to the eye. There are disfiguring scars on hillsides above the road, heaps of rubble beneath it.

And traffic lights. Honest. As it turns out, the highway's bridges were ticketed for seismic retrofit in the wake of the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, and the work, launched immediately after the storm repairs of '98 were completed, has reduced the passage to one lane at several spots.

But given what Highway 1 endured last winter, it's probably remarkable that the road is passable at all.

``It was the most widespread damage to Highway 1 since it was opened in 1937,'' said Val Houdyshell, a Caltrans spokeswoman based in San Luis Obispo. ``There were over 40 major damage sites and many more smaller damage sites.''

Confronted with El Nino's onslaught, the 1930s construction, weakened by the years, didn't stand a chance.

The sites of the worst trouble bear names right out of the apocalypse: Hurricane Point, Double Gulch, the Bull Pen and the aptly named Duck Pond. The details of the ravages are sobering:

At the Duck Pond, 27 miles north of San Simeon, a hillside saturated by rain broke loose and slid toward the ocean. The massive slide extended 345 vertical feet and took out nearly 500 feet of highway.

At the Bull Pen, 13-1/2 miles south of Carmel, two 36-inch culverts made of corrugated tin - 1932 vintage - became clogged with hillside runoff, creating a 15-foot-deep lake on the east side of the roadway. When Caltrans cleared the blockages, the force of 20,000 gallons of water ripped the culverts apart as if they were soup cans. Some 10,000 cubic yards of road bed - and a good chunk of the southbound lane - tumbled away in the gush.

Slightly farther south, at Hurricane Point, the road bed also gave out in a mudslide. Twice during the repair operation, subsequent slides tumbled into the construction site. Twice the highway had to be rerouted, and it now lies 60 feet east of its original course.

By the time all the repair work was completed, $32 million had been spent on the 70-mile damaged stretch, according to Houdyshell, and the equivalent of 130,000 truckloads of dirt, rocks and debris had been removed or shoved aside.

Big Sur and the other stranded highway communities felt a severe pinch with the loss of business to the road closures, and at least one proprietor was squeezed right out.

Joan Sunquest, who operated an American Indian art gallery at the north end of Big Sur, spent a recent January afternoon loading her inventory into cardboard boxes. Wiped out by the revenue losses of '98, she said she is moving inland - far inland, to northern New Mexico.

After the road opened in May, she said, there was a drastic drop in the number of day-trippers from the north traveling the highway. ``There was a perception that waits (at the seismic retrofit sites) were long, when in reality they were not that long,'' Sunquest said. ``Unfortunately, perception became reality.''

Sunquest, her voice cracking with emotion, added, ``I'm the one affected now, but I don't know how many others will be affected by another hard winter.''

Thus far, however, the winter has been delightfully mild, business has been steady and strong, and the distressing memories of the winter of '98 fade by the day.

It undoubtedly helps that Big Sur pulled through its ordeal with a tenacity and community spirit that has become well-honed.

Sal Abaunza ran a San Francisco hotel before taking over as general manager of Big Sur's upscale Ventana Inn last March. He got a jolting introduction to the realities of life in the region: Abaunza required a helicopter for his first day's commute, and he met his neighbors over potluck dinners of emergency provisions.

``I was very awed by the community, how it rallied,'' Abaunza said. ``It's close-knit. Having grown up in San Francisco, and having seen this camaraderie . . . it was like `The Waltons'; everyone knows everyone by their first name.''

Chris Sutton arrived in the area 25 years ago and scraped out a living until he could find gainful employment - first as a state park ranger, later as a motel manager. He said, ``You can be incredibly poor, really on the fringe, and not feel like you're homeless. Nobody looks down on anybody. The community extends a little farther here.''

It's an element of the indomitable spirit of Big Sur, and currently it seems to be shared by travelers on the highway.

At Hurricane Point, where it looks as if the entire hillside above the road were scraped clean and then spray-painted green by an unseen hand, an older man pulled into a turnout, completely ignored this desecration to the east and fixed his gaze on a vast sweep of ocean and an imminent sunset.

Much farther down the highway, at the site of the massive Duck Pond slide, a couple was spotted near a giant pile of asphalt and two Caltrans bulldozers. They, too, seemed oblivious to the wasteland behind them as they peered down at the surf pounding the rocks, and hugged.

Ignore the unpleasant. Concentrate on the beauty. Weather the worst.

The highway, which has gotten a lot of practice at this, would be proud.

CAPTION(S):

5 Photos, Map

Photo: (1--3--Color) Road repairs have left their mark on Highway 1, above, but the coastal views, top left, are still spectacular.

(4) Joan Sunquest and her gallery of American Indian art were casualties of last winter's storm in Big Sur. Devastated by a tourism drought that resulted from Highway 1 road closures, she closed up shop in January and moved to New Mexico.

(5) As Highway 1 recovers from last winter's storm damage, travelers have to get used to some startling realities - like traffic lights. At this construction zone, just south of Big Sur, the road is reduced to one lane because of retrofit work on a bridge.

Eric Noland

Map: Highway 1

Bradford Mar