Limekiln State Park

Big Sur has a way of humbling you-towering redwoods, pounding surf, cliffs that tumble straight into the sea. But Limekiln also humbles you in another way: by reminding us how short-sighted our ancestors could be. In the 1870s, entrepreneurs looked at this lovely coastal canyon and saw not beauty but… building materials.

They quarried the limestone cliffs, chopped down the surrounding redwoods, and stuffed the trees into giant wood-fired kilns to make lime for cement. Entire groves of majestic redwoods-gone up in smoke, literally, to build sidewalks and basements in Monterey and San Francisco. It’s enough to make you wish the conservation movement had shown up fifty years earlier with a few clipboards and petitions.

The operation was short-lived, but not before the canyon took a beating. Then nature, patient as ever, went about the long, slow work of healing. Fast-forward 150 years: today the kilns remain like ghostly chimneys, half-swallowed by forest, and the canyon is once again cool, green, and redwood-shaded. Some of these redwoods, the southernmost in Monterey County, are downright magnificent-healthy, enormous, and maybe, just maybe, a distinct subspecies adapted to these steep coastal canyons.

It almost didn’t turn out this way. In 1984, a private landowner wanted to log the canyon again. Conservationists, the Big Sur Land Trust, and a chorus of locals fought back and saved the place. By 1995, Limekiln State Park was born. The campground is rustic, even funky, with its own Big Sur charm. Showers and clean restrooms, helpful camp hosts, and a sandy beach where Limekiln Creek meets the Pacific-all the ingredients for a mellow stay.

Geographically, the canyon is impressive. Rising from sea level to more than 5,000 feet in less than four miles, it packs a dozen plant communities into a narrow slice of land: redwoods, alder, ferns, chaparral, even high-country flora up near Cone Peak. And though the park is small, the trails show off the essentials: a waterfall hike, a redwood-lined creek path, and of course, the short trek to those infamous kilns.

Walk the trail and you’ll hear the creek tumbling over pools, pass through cathedral groves of redwoods, and arrive at the kilns-four towering, moss-coated cylinders where stone met fire, where industry and wilderness clashed, and where, happily, wilderness is now winning.