Post Summit & Manuel Peak

Big Sur has a reputation for scenery, not suffering, so this one caught me off guard. The route starts at Andrew Molera State Park and climbs the East Molera Trail up onto the Cabezo Prieto Ridge, and the early miles delivered exactly the Big Sur I expected — morning fog pooled in the redwood and fir canyons below, the ridge lit up gold while everything underneath it stayed wrapped in mist, and not long after, the Pacific itself came into view with a marine layer sitting just offshore like a second coastline.

The ridge walk out to Post Summit, at 3,456 feet, is genuinely spectacular — open grassy stretches, wildflowers, ceanothus blooming purple along the trail, and a nearly uninterrupted view down to the ocean the entire way. This section is what people mean when they talk about this hike being one of the best in Big Sur. It did not prepare me for what came after.

Past Post Summit, heading toward Manuel Peak, the maintained trail basically disappears. This stretch of the Cabezo Prieto Ridge is notorious for going unmaintained for years at a time, and I found out why the hard way — long sections where the brush closed in completely overhead, forcing me to push through chest-high and taller chaparral with no visible tread underfoot, just a general sense of the ridgeline and a lot of faith. It was slow, scratchy, and nothing like the wide-open views just a mile or two back.

Eighteen miles and 5,000 feet of gain later, two summits logged, but this was a much harder day than the Big Sur postcard scenery led me to expect. Beautiful hike, brutal brush — worth doing, but go in ready to fight for it.