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Tectonic activity created the prominent peaks and ridges of the Santa Lucia Range.

CHAPTER two

Natural History

Geology

BIG SUR’S RUGGED LANDSCAPE speaks to a tumultuous past, when ocean and rock collided in a dramatic convergence. It is a geologically youthful region. In just 5 million years, Big Sur has been smashed between colliding tectonic plates, compressed by massive faults, and rammed upward to form the jagged peaks, steep ridges, and deep gorges of the Santa Lucia Range.

While the mountains themselves may be relative toddlers, many of the rocks bear ancient origins, tens of millions of years old. The convoluted topography means that rock types formed under radically different conditions lie confusingly side by side. Ancient mountain ranges, seafloors, stream sediments, and molten rock form a jumbled matrix that continues to baffle geologists.

The story for most of these rocks begins 130 million years ago, amid sediments from an ancient mountain range 1800 miles southeast in present-day Mexico. In that era, North America’s western shoreline lay about where the Sierra Nevada stands today, everything west was submerged beneath the ocean, and the Santa Lucia Range did not exist. In the following millennia, westbound rivers deposited the sediments along the coast, where these layers eventually solidified into sandstone, siltstone, and limestone.