Full transcript
The Road You Have to Pay For
17-Mile Drive is not a public road. It is a private toll road through Pebble Beach, a gated community in the Del Monte Forest, and Pebble Beach Company owns and maintains almost all of it. Residents drive it for nothing; everyone else pays a per-vehicle charge collected at the gates, with a cheaper per-passenger rate for tour buses. Spend enough at a Pebble Beach Resorts restaurant inside the forest and the company refunds the gate charge against your bill, which makes the receipt worth more than the ticket. Motorcycles are prohibited outright — not restricted, not discouraged, banned. Bicycles and pedestrians pay nothing at all. Five gates feed the loop, the route still measures exactly 17 miles, and more than 1.5 million people come through every year. Ask for the paper map at the gate and follow the red dashed line.
An 1881 Sales Tour
The route was never built for the view alone. The Pacific Improvement Company — the railroad Big Four of Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington and Leland Stanford — opened it in 1881 as a horse-carriage excursion for guests of their Hotel Del Monte in Monterey, and the excursion existed to sell those guests coastal building lots. The loop left the hotel, traced Pacific Grove, Pebble Beach and Carmel, and came back the same day. Its length gave it a name; hotel operators first called it the 18-Mile Drive. Horses gave way to cars, and by 1907 the road carried only automobiles. Samuel F.B. Morse bought the whole holding in 1919 and turned it into the company that still charges at the gate. Stop at Shepherd's Knoll and read the sign: an early mapmaker's typo turned Shepard into Shepherd, illustrated sheep and all.
Soot on the Granite
Before the estates, this coast was a workplace. The turnout at China Rock marks a Chinese fishing village that stood here in the late 1800s, and the black staining on the granite is cooking smoke baked into the stone more than a century ago. Bird Rock, further on, lay under 4 to 5 feet of pelican and cormorant guano until 1930, when the deposit was scraped off and sold as fertilizer; the sea lions that bark from it now moved in after the cleanup. Point Joe was mistaken for the mouth of Monterey Bay by enough captains to litter its rocks with wrecks, and in the early 1900s a man called Joe lived there in a driftwood hut, tending goats and selling trinkets to tourists. Nobody has settled whether Joe was named for the point or the point for Joe. Find the dark patches low on the rocks at China Rock.
The Tree Is Held Up
The Lone Cypress does not stand alone unaided. The Monterey cypress on the granite outcrop at Midway Point is thought to have seeded around 1750, making it roughly 275 years old, and the oldest Monterey cypress ever aged from physical evidence lived to 284. Pebble Beach has been propping this one up for most of a century: a stone retaining wall around the roots in 1941, steel cables anchoring the trunk in 1948, a fence in 1969 to stop visitors trampling the root plate. An arsonist tried to burn it in 1984 and left scorch marks behind. On February 16, 2019, a Pineapple Express storm tore off a limb and permanently changed the outline that had sold a century of postcards. Look for the cables running from the trunk down into the rock; they have been carrying the tree since 1948.
Who Owns a Picture of a Tree
Pebble Beach Company claims the tree itself, not just its logo. Images of the Lone Cypress have appeared on company documents since 1919, the company registered the mark in May 1990, and signs at the turnout have told visitors that photographs or art renderings of the tree for commercial or promotional purposes cannot be taken or created without written permission. The company's own trademark attorney has said it holds the living tree itself, not merely the drawing of it. It has sent cease-and-desist letters to painters and photographers, and pressed at least one Carmel artist into signing away the rights to a painting a week before his show opened. A First Amendment attorney in Sacramento called that arrogating to a corporation what only God can do. The company's attorney draws the line at money: hang a photograph in your living room and nobody minds, sell it and you have a problem. Photograph it, then keep the file to yourself.
Eight Courses, Seventeen Miles
Eight golf courses sit along these 17 miles: seven championship layouts and the nine-hole Peter Hay. Pebble Beach Golf Links opened on February 22, 1919, routed by two amateurs, Jack Neville and Douglas Grant, into a figure eight built to put as many holes as possible on the cliff edge; H. Chandler Egan rebuilt much of it in 1928. It became the first public course to host a U.S. Open in 1972, took its sixth in 2019, and gets a seventh in 2027. Cypress Point Club, Alister MacKenzie's 1929 design next door, has about 250 members and hosted the Pro-Am from 1947 through 1990 — then walked away from the PGA Tour rather than admit a non-white member under the Tour's new anti-discrimination rules. Poppy Hills replaced it in 1991. Stop on the lawn behind the 18th green and watch strangers finish the round of their lives.
The Houses the View Sold
The mansions on the cliffs are the reason the road exists. The coastline southeast of Cypress Point Lookout is Sunset Point, a neighborhood of Roaring Twenties estates, and The Lodge at Pebble Beach has anchored the middle of the loop since 1919. Crocker Grove, a 13-acre preserve named for Charles Crocker, holds the largest and oldest Monterey cypresses in existence; this forest and Point Lobos across Carmel Bay are the only two places on earth the species grows wild. A quarter of Pebble Beach is permanent open space today, laced with more than 25 miles of public trails. At Pescadero Point the sun-bleached Ghost Trees mark a big-wave surf break that can run to 50 feet in a winter swell. Walk the trail into Crocker Grove instead of driving past it.