Donald Thomas Clark’s encyclopedic Monterey County Place Names: A Geographical Dictionary (1991) contains a listing for a “Nidever Spring” in Big Sur. Eighty-six-year-old Esther Pfeiffer Ewoldsen, who had lived her whole life within a few miles of the spring, remembered that it was situated along the Big Sur River, just downstream from the River Inn. Jeff Norman, the preeminent Big Sur historian of his generation, located Nidever Spring along Brewer Road, up Pfeiffer Ridge, west of the River Inn. In the 21st-century, there’s a scarcity of drinking water in much of Big Sur. But back in 18th and 19th-centuries, coastal California was much wetter than it is now, and the ground water was closer to the surface. Consequently, not many people alive today remember the days when one could stop for a long, cool drink at Nidever Spring. *          *          * Nidever Spring is named for a 19th-century American sea Continue Reading

“Jaime de Angulo was a medical doctor turned anthropologist who bought a ranch in Big Sur [in 1915] … His appearance, in the 1920s when I first saw him, was dramatic in the extreme. He came riding down our hill to Rainbow Lodge [in Bixby Canyon] on a black stallion, wearing black chaps, a black shirt and a black sombrero, along with a huge turquoise studded Indian silver conche belt from New Mexico. His long black hair flowing in the wind, his blue eyes flashing, he was beautiful rather than handsome and was given to passionate gestures, speaking with his hands as well as his tongue. And he talked rapidly, brilliantly, usually about linguistics, the American Indians, or Freud. He tried to make love to my mother and called her bourgeois when she refused.” – A Wild Coast and Lonely – Big Sur Pioneers by Rosalind Sharpe Wall (1989) *          Continue Reading

The redwood tree can grow to be more than 350 feet tall, and as much as 25 feet around at the base. Some redwoods live to be more than 1,000 years old. They’ve proliferated in forests across the globe since prehistoric times. An absence of resin makes them practically fireproof, and a high content of tannin makes them fungi resistant and bad tasting (to insects). By the 18th-century, the habitat of the coast redwood had shrunk to a tiny sliver, extending from present-day Monterey County, California to the Oregon border, in a narrow strip never wider than twenty miles from the coast. The first white men to see a coastal redwood were likely the members of the Portola Expedition. Fray Juan Crespi wrote in his diary on October 10, 1769, of seeing one near present-day Watsonville: “We broke camp in the morning, and after crossing a river named by the Continue Reading