Hiking Big Sur

After we left the mission in Carmel, we drove down the coast on Highway 1. It is such a beautiful drive! And lucky for us, none of our kids get car sick because it it very windy. I do sometimes, so I drove. We went to the southern end of Big Sur to a place called Limekiln State Park. Dave looked it up ahead of time, and this sounded like a lovely hike. We had already done several of the main hikes in Big Sur, and we wanted to see something different. At first we were a little doubtful because it looked like we had gone too far and left all the redwoods behind. But once we got to the turnoff and drove 100 ft inland, we were surrounded by new growth coastal redwoods.

There were 3 one-mile hikes. First we followed the creek up to a waterfall.

Yay! A banana slug!

There were 5 creek crossings.

Apparently there was extensive damage to the park from fires in 2008. It reopened in 2010.

I was prepared! 

We were happy to see that there was actually some water in the waterfall.

Spencer found several geocaches along the hike, so he was happy.

After we explored around the waterfall for a bit, we headed over to the next hike. That's when it started to rain. The boys LOVED hiking in the rain! Chloe was okay with it, and I was happy to have my umbrella.

The next hike took us to the actual lime kilns.                 Looking rather sneaky there, Tyler!

Seems like a funny place to harvest limestone, but apparently they built these in the late 1800's because there was plenty of redwood to burn (for extracting the lime) and easy access to the coast (to load the lime onto ships). The lime was a key ingredient in cement to build San Francisco and Monterey.

The rain was coming down pretty hard by the time we got back, but there was one more hike and one more geocache. I stayed in the car with Brennan, Levi and Chloe while Dave took the oldest three on the hike. Apparently they ran the whole way and loved it! They were back before I was done making sandwiches for lunch. See what I mean about this hike being completely different from Pinnacles?! We loved them both.