22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY OCTOBER 29-NOVEMBER 4, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com governments, out of a total of $346 million split with the state. Despite international travel remaining lower than usual, their study still found record-breaking gains. But the same rugged terrain that draws visitors (and visitor spending) to Big Sur also poses a challenge: Its protected status limits housing development of the community that sustains tourism, while the mountainous topography leaves the region vulnerable to disasters. “These two fires are a great example. Both of them, by all indications, are human caused,” says Martha Diehl, a Monterey County planning commissioner and Big Sur resident. “Human caused: related to the increase of visitor traffic, related to the pressures pushing the visitors ever further out to get the values that they value, and the lack of resources to manage that visitation,” she says. Many people interviewed for this story who moved to the region decades ago remember their first encounters with a rugged Big Sur, infused with artists, artisans and people who were finding creative ways to live off-grid in the folds of the coastal mountains. Life was solitary then, and in many ways, still is. “A community of hermits” is how Carnazzo describes it. With the exception of a stint in her 20s sailing and working at sea, Carnazzo has spent most of her life living in the area of Bixby Bridge. She describes her upbringing to be a wonderful, “sort of feral” childhood, drinking powdered milk, playing around outside and finding secret places in the woods. “I’ve got some great stories about hanging out with Jack Kerouac early in the morning when he was writing the book Big Sur,” she says. “I had a donkey named Alf, a scruffy little donkey that I rode around everywhere, and Jack thought my donkey looked like a sacred Buddhist spirit animal, and so he put him in his book as Alf the Sacred Burro.” The burro, in Kerouac’s book, was symbolic—intended as a representation of the remoteness and spirituality found in the Big Sur wilderness. That wilderness and scenic splendor has long been considered something special, fragile and worthy of being protected and maintained. The creation of the highway, completed on June 27, 1937 at a cost of approximately $8 million, ushered in a whole new era of change, which was not wholly accepted even then. The Big Sur Land Use Plan, drafted and adopted by the County in 1986 and widely regarded as the community’s most important safeguard, states that “many of the original settlers were enraged by the devastation resulting from the highway construction.” Carnazzo adds her father left in the 1970s, feeling Big Sur was too crowded. (He eventually returned.) Former congressman and Big Sur advocate Sam Farr says his father, Fred Farr, who was an attorney and state senator representing the Central Coast from 1955 to 1966, worried that commercial signs and development would obstruct views along the highway. Eventually, those concerns led to the development of California’s scenic highway program. The legally binding land use plan, certified by the California Coastal Commission, baked in an enduring framework for managing development, preventing coastal sprawl and protecting Big Sur’s character. Now, undergoing revisions, it remains central to decisions about the region’s future. The plan limits subdivisions and ties development to the capacity of Highway 1, prioritizing much of the highway’s capacity for the traveling public, and focusing on viewshed protection as an integral component of future plans. “It’s not that the viewshed is important; it’s that the viewshed is sacrosanct,” Diehl says. “Viewshed means anything you can see from Highway 1 and other designated public viewing areas for any length of time at any distance at any speed.” The updates to the land use plan have been plagued with disagreement, beginning back in 2003. The tension typically laid in the pressure to open up the area to more housing, the redefining of what constitutes a “visitor-serving unit” and what these changes might mean for the viewshed. Diehl notes the updates are still underway with no set completion date; the draft still needs to go back to public review, likely through more workshops, then eventually to the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors for approval. The current effort, she adds, is intended to clarify definitions within the plan without recommending any change to its overall direction, with the goal to make as few changes as possible. “The County’s primary land use planning objective is to minimize development of the Big Sur coast in order to preserve the coast as a scenic rural area where residents’ individual lifestyles can flourish, traditional ranching uses can continue, and the public can come to enjoy nature and find refuge from the pace of urban life,” the document states. Today, as in many communities across California and the country, Big Sur faces the challenge of supporting the people who sustain its tourism economy. Yet, as visitor numbers have grown, many longtime residents say the local community has shrunk. “We’re losing younger generations and people with children at a great rate because they can’t afford to be there,” Diehl says. “And working people who want to work in Big Sur, by and large, can’t live in Big Sur.” Connie McCoy remembers when her car broke down at Lucia in the early 1970s. She fell in love with the Tourism is an economic lifeline in Big Sur just as much as a danger to the community. Many locals cite the rise in use of social media as a main influence of not just where people travel, but how. People regularly gather on the back patio of Nepenthe at sunset (shown above). Nepenthe is a popular stop for travelers looking to enjoy lunch or dinner while taking in the beautiful vistas of the Big Sur coast. “It becomes part of your algorithm on social media, and then you get flooded with ideas like this.” DANIEL DREIFUSS KAREN LOUTZENHEISER
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