The goal for the day was to bike from Santa Cruz to the town of Big Sur to camp at Andrew Molera Campground. I had driven from Santa Cruz to Monterey before but I was not looking forward to biking that stretch. I took San Andreas road which passes tons of farmland with these big beautiful mansions overlooking everything. The farms were being worked in the heat of the day but the site didn’t look great for me. I think seeing tons of lower class workers doing hard labor during a hot summer day underneath a massive mansion sitting on a hill overlooking the beach just wasn’t great. I then hopped on some rougher gravel road where I decided to clean my chain for the first time and drink a ton of water.
As I was cleaning my chain, some other bikepacker pulled up and asked if I was stuck or needed help. Their name was Kass and after some back and forth conversation, we learned that we had the same goals for the day to camp at Andrew Molera. Kass was riding a gravel bike with fat tires which I found surprising since their route was gonna be all pavement but Kass said that they only like riding one bike and this bike was their baby! Makes sense to me! We began rolling, rode for a bit together, then they dropped me.
I eventually hit moss landing where I picked up some sandos and some sunblock, since I hadn’t been wearing any for the last day. Moss landing smelled like rotting fish all around. Kinda reminded me of the smells of going fishing on a charter boat off of Long Beach, just very fishy and gross. I know that you who are reading this, probably have a soft spot for this place but I rate is 1/10, mostly because it smells like ass and fish.
In Castroville, I hopped on a bike path and decided to test out how much power my dynamo will generate when charging this voltaic trickle charge battery pack. I plugged in the usb-c in Castroville where the battery was totally dead and by the time I hit Sand City, it was half full! I hit some other beach walk path that was sandy and before I knew it, I was in Monterey!
In general, this whole day was cloudy and muggy. I was feeling kinda weird about it and not super excited. It was about 4pm at that point and I didn’t think I could make it to Big Sur in the daylight, which would have been fine since I had lights. This was a weird feeling which I hadn’t had before. A few weeks prior, I biked from home to Dawson with Ali and Taco and I planned on doing the full circle of doom ride. On the descent towards Newcombs, I had an anxiety attack which stemmed from the thoughts of having work early in the morning and other shit I’ve been feeling in life. Regardless of the pushing and encouragement from Ali and Taco, I decided to get picked up by some family at Newcombs. I didn’t have the same feelings in Monterey, but I had this mental block preventing me from being excited to continue.
After a few phone calls, google searches for motels, and a bunch of food and coffee from a Starbucks, I made my plan. I decided to push to Carmel and camp somewhere off the road, maybe in the mountains for the night and push to Big Sur in the morning. I did some searching and mapped a spot in the forest area above Carmel that could be accessed by a dirt road that gave access to some homes up the mountain. From my research, the road looked like a forest road that had a gate just up from the highway a hundred yards or so. And just like that, I got excited again to continue!
I started a pretty steep climb from the Starbucks, followed by a steep descent into the town of Carmel which I hadn’t really explored before since I, Matthew Jackson, am no rich ho. Eventually I made it to my road and of course there were private road signs everywhere. This pissed me off a lot since I was getting excited for my pine tree getaway but of course there’s no easement on the forest road. The road intersected with another road that passes a forest service barrack filled with trucks and cars. Now I was getting very frustrated since Carmel is too expensive for a damn hotel and I didn’t want to bike down to Monterey and pay the same for a motel and there's no damn camp grounds in Carmel so yeah.
I biked down the highway some more and noticed a rusted gate that connected to the road with the barracks at the other end. It looked promising and there was a small path to bring my bike around the gate where I found myself on the road looking at the barracks at the end. Lucky for me, there was a power line pole with a clearing where I could set up the bivy and be low enough to not be seen from the barracks. I ended up being 300 feet from a home and 100 feet from the highway. I think the setup blended in pretty well, especially when I removed the reflectors on my bike. 10/10 stealth spot! I felt very stoked for the day to come and was satisfied with the short-ish 58 mile day!
