Travel: The Devil's Slide, California

The road – Highway 1, far north here of the famous Big Sur stretch better known to tourists – weaves through a dense eucalyptus grove, ascends a steep incline, passes through a jagged gap between two steep rock walls, and emerges as a ribbon of cliff-top roadway known locally as Devil's Slide.

As the traveller heads out on to a blustery promontory jutting into the ocean and begins to descend, expanses of ocean – 500ft below – sweep past the car windows, and the road veers impossibly close to the edge.

The stretch lasts only about two miles and takes only five minutes, but it's a spectacular drive. It also defines a clear psychic border between the city and a section of coast so close by that it's almost a suburb, yet remarkably quiet and unspoiled.

Devil's Slide is also an experience that has to be sampled soon. In 2011, two tunnels, currently being bored into the adjacent mountain, will open to traffic, and this section of road will be closed to vehicles. San Mateo County does expect to keep it open as a path for pedestrians and cyclists.

Devil's Slide's days as a heart-stopping gateway to an unusual coastal road trip will be only a memory.

With my children, Timothy, 12, and Eleanor, ten, I started a trip down this coast in the summer in San Francisco, near the landmark called the Cliff House. The Cliff House is a familiar destination for a meal or a drink and souvenir shopping with a view of crashing surf. But we were headed for the Giant Camera, the last vestige of the Victorian seaside amusement park known as Playland.

Shaped like a 35mm camera sitting on its back, lens pointing upward, the Giant Camera contains a large camera obscura. Within the darkened building, a mirror and two lenses project the majestic shoreline view outside down onto a 6ft-wide parabolic table. We saw, sharply defined against a velvety black interior, a cinematic bowl of living seascape, as the table's concave surface roiled with luminous waves, ocean spray, seagulls and seals – seemingly holographic.

This introduction behind us, we set out toward Devil's Slide.

Most drivers heading away from the Bay Area's sprawl use the freeways inland, but for those who use the coast road as a commuter route, the name Devil's Slide is irksomely eloquent, implying unpredictable natural wrath. The erosion that formed the promontory has not stopped, and the road is plagued by rock slides, some of which have caused protracted closures.

Still, Devil's Slide is renowned locally for its stark beauty and treacherous mystique. It played a starring role in the 1960 thriller Portrait in Black, in which Lana Turner and Anthony Quinn shove a car containing her dead husband over the edge.

Toward the southern end, a fair hike down, is Gray Whale Cove Beach, which has a good-sized parking lot on the eastern side of the road. We decided to forgo this to avoid having to dart through moving cars and stopped instead at one of two narrow coast-side pullouts nearby. Standing at the top of the cliffs, we had a clear sense of their imposing height and scale.

From here down to Santa Cruz, the next sizeable city, is only 60 miles, and the drive can easily be done in under two hours. But we took three meandering days, lingering in seaside towns and along the water.

Although most of the shoreline is public in California, state-owned beaches provide ample parking and well-maintained paths. Montara Beach, a well-sheltered and generally peaceful strip of pale gold sand, is the first of these beyond Devil's Slide, and we found it carpeted with delicate sand dollars (sea urchins). From November to April, grey whales pass by on their annual migrations.

In the late 19th century, shipwrecks caused by jagged offshore rocks propelled the construction of the Point Montara Lighthouse, which stands about a half mile south of the beach and is still operated by the Coast Guard. Hostel accommodations are available on the lighthouse grounds.

On day two we stopped at the town of Princeton-by-the-Sea, where expansive tide pools displayed amber sea stars, pearlescent anemones and magenta urchins. Vocal seals, dive-bombing pelicans and scurrying snowy plovers animated the broad expanse. In winter, crowds gather on the cliff-tops above this spot to watch extreme surfers challenge waves up to 70ft high.

Continuing south past the town of Half Moon Bay, known for its autumn pumpkin harvest, we spotted ranches offering horseback riding and "U-pick" farms promising strawberries, cherries, boysenberries, kiwis and olallieberries, depending on the season.

We stopped in tiny Pescadero for dinner at Duarte's Tavern, a fourth-generation family restaurant celebrated for its cream of artichoke soup and cioppino. Frank Duarte set a cask of whisky on his new bar here 115 years ago, charging a dime a shot, and that bar is still in lively use.

The next morning, after a deep, salt-air sleep at the Davenport Roadhouse, named for a whaler whose landing here became a bustling loading zone during Prohibition, we set out for Ano Nuevo State Natural Reserve, where the huge, lumbering creatures known as elephant seals come to mate, birth, nurse, molt and rest.

Tours fill up quickly here in the midwinter mating season, when full-grown male seals – typically about 15ft long and weighing up to two-and-a-half tons – engage in fierce, chest-bumping battles to secure leadership over harems of females. Like rubbery minivans engaged in primal combat, they rear up and lunge into each other. I asked Chris Tomkins, a state park employee, what we could expect to see on our off-season visit. "Right now it's a bunch of young males mock-fighting," he said, "and generally learning to be jerks."

We made the three-mile walk out over rolling dunes to the gusty beach and watched a few entertaining skirmishes. The adolescent males faced off, their mouths gaping and emitting a dull, hammering bark while a hundred or so females lazed around looking unimpressed.

Pelicans briefly escorted us at eye level as we drove to Natural Bridges State Beach, where one massive sea stack boasts a tunnel, the last of three that gave the beach its name.

A mile beyond that, sunlight pierced through the cloud cover, and our last destination, the 102-year-old Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, came into view. It rose up against a vivid blue sky, its multicoloured towers, gondolas, Ferris wheel and tilted rides anchored by the complex, curling armature of an old wooden roller coaster, the Giant Dipper.

The Dipper is celebrating its 85th anniversary this year, and we climbed on for the ride. The sounds of wind and seabirds had given way to clattering tracks and exhilarated shrieks. But at the highest points, we were treated to vertiginous views of the ocean we'd just spent three days savouring.

New York Times

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This article was originally published in The Scotsman on 20 February 2010