Kim Alwyn's Page

This is the coast at Monterey, where we spent our first night.

Our first main stop along Big Sur was Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park. Behind us you can see Pfeiffer Falls, which is at the end of a beautiful shady walk through massive redwood trees.

The second park we stopped at was Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. Here you can see McWay Falls, an 80ft waterfall which falls straight onto the beach.

This is the view north along Big Sur from Ragged Point, which marks the southern end of Big Sur. The cloud rolling in is very typical, in fact, most of the year it's hard to see more than 10ft out to sea!

South of Big Sur lives a colony of Elephant Seals! With miles of remote coast to choose from, they decided to form a colony on a beach right next to the road! There were more than 100 massive elephant seals lying on the beach. You just park the car on the side of the road and walk over to them. The young seal in the photo pulled itself up the path towards us, until it was only a few feet away. It had freaky staring eyes!

This tree is the Lone Cypress, apparently the most photographed tree in the world! It's on the coast by Monterey. While we were here we saw 2 whales swimming past - or at least we saw the water they blew in the air.

This is a typical view along the Big Sur coastline, from Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park.

Here's mum and dad at the overlook.

The elephant seals were surprisingly alarming. It's amazing how sanitizing seeing something on TV is - in reality, up close, those cute and cuddly seals are scruffy, dirty and really rather scary! They smelt terrible and made a loud noise. Here are 2 seals fighting - they were all in a big pile, each trying to get on top.