McWay Falls and the View That Belongs to No One

Eighty feet below the trail, a waterfall drops from a granite lip directly onto a cove that no one is permitted to reach. You are looking down from above, and that is all you are going to get. The cove was once accessible on foot. Erosion and conservation policy closed the path decades ago. The falls now perform for the trail and the cameras, and the beach below exists in a permanent state of being observed but not visited.

This is Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, named in the early nineteen sixties for a woman who was neither a senator nor a celebrity but a rancher. Julia Pfeiffer Burns was the daughter of Michael Pfeiffer, one of the first Euro-American homesteaders in the Big Sur valley. She managed this stretch of coastline through the nineteen thirties with the competence and physical confidence the landscape required. She was known as a skilled horsewoman in country that demanded it. The park that carries her name is one of the few California state parks named for a woman, and one of the fewer still named for a woman who actually worked the land it commemorates.

The falls run year-round, fed by McWay Creek from the Santa Lucia range above. The turquoise of the cove below comes from the sand composition and the angle of the light; it is real, not a filter. There is no path the park service currently permits. The falls go on regardless.