Pico Blanco

Pico Blanco is the peak you can't stop looking at from everywhere else in this part of Big Sur — a startlingly white, cone-shaped mountain capped in limestone that stands out against every green ridge around it. I'd seen it from a distance climbing Post Summit and Manuel Peak and wanted to stand on top of it, so this was a long time coming.

The route starts by dropping into the Little Sur River drainage, and the first stretch was the easiest and prettiest part of the day — cool, shaded, walking along a rocky creek under second-growth redwoods, about as far from the exposed chaparral climbing to come as you could imagine.

Once the trail leaves the river, it's a long, steady, sun-exposed grind up onto the ridge system that wraps around the mountain, and with 23 miles round trip and over 6,000 feet of gain, there's a lot of it. The views open up fast, though — at one overlook, a fog bank was pressed right up against the coastline while the canyon below stayed clear, forested green all the way down to a sliver of blue ocean. Wildflowers were everywhere on the upper slopes, yellow and white against the pale rock.

The last push to the summit block is where the trail thins out and mostly disappears into cross-country travel over broken limestone, and I ended up doing more route-finding than I expected for a peak with such a well-known profile. Found the USGS survey marker cemented into the white rock at the top, which felt like the actual proof I'd made it — the same marble-white summit visible for miles in every direction.

On the way down, a gopher snake was stretched out across the trail, in no hurry to move. Like Post Summit and Manuel Peak, this one looked like a straightforward, scenic Big Sur day from a distance and turned into a much bigger effort once I was actually on it — long, exposed, and with just enough loose route-finding near the top to keep me honest.