Vertigo One-hundred and fifty miles south of San Francisco, Partington Ridge, in the western Santa Lucia Mountains of California, sits 1,600-feet almost directly above the Pacific Ocean, ten miles south of the Big Sur Valley and just north of Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. The old trail up to Partington Ridge went “straight up the mountainside.” It was so precipitous some people experienced vertigo or acrophobia ascending the narrow, nearly vertical path. Dr. Jaime de Angulo made his first visit to Partington Ridge in 1915. “I must confess,” he remembered, “I got dizzy and had to get off my horse and lead him…”[1] Partington Ridge is named for John and Laura Partington, the first Anglo homesteaders who settled there in 1874. The Liberty Island Light Laura Stone Harmon (later Partington) was born in 1840, in the seaside hamlet of East Machais, Maine, 30 miles from the Canadian border and 3,500 Continue Reading