Big Sur In The Sixties?

There are plenty of threads about Woodstock around, let's stick to Big Sur here.

 

I think the reason you hear so little is there were few big Sur hippies who actually lived there. I counted up fifteen family and another twenty associates. There were also three forest rangers, the Esallen group and a few artists. It was such a small community after a couple of winters everyone knew you. Ed the mailman knew where you were, I got letters from home in England addressed to Marian, Big sur CA. We heard about Haight Ashbury, we heard about Vietnam, it was all outside our world. Our own Shetwood Forest.

 

The risky side of Big Sur life.
Every year the highway got blocked with a landslide at Limekiln Creek. In 69 when I was the art teacher at Pacific Valley school the only other teacher and I were stranded with the school bus and half the kids on one side of the slide. The school bus driver, charismatic Rodney , had the school room and the other half of the kids, which was good because he probably had the highest IQ in Big Sur. So he taught school and we took our half of the kids to Berkley and camped in the bus. It was really educational, two hippie but legitimate teachers with a real school bus and everyone's hippy kids who had never lived with electricity or seen tv, on an overnight in a school bus in the weird wired city. We didn't loose any kids, it was an amazing light show and they wanted to go home after a day.
When we got back the road crew opened the road for the school bus and the mail man once a day. We would all get under the seats and the crew radioed all clear as our fearless bus driver gunned through. We survived, now the sheer insanity of the risk of all that loose rock on top of us makes me wonder what collective idealistic hallucination we were into.

 

I love hearing your guys stories I always wondered what it would have been like to live during the hippie movement. Please tell more stories!!!

 

We had a pretty good Hippie commune at Salmon Creek in 1969.
Amazing days they were.

 

I grew up in San Jose (Cupertino), and when '68 '69 came around and I was 16-17, I became a hippie. A friend and I hitched to Big Sur and dropped some acid. We trekked up a trail that led to a water fall. We decided to climb up the trail on the side of the falls. At the very top was a guy who was clinging to the grass in the water and suddenly he fell, all the way down to the bottom. I swear I started leaping down the trail at top speed to get to him. It was a miraculous accent, still don't know how I did it. He broke some bones but was alive. Absolutely surreal. I love/d the huge redwoods there and the scent of pine and the soft forest floor. We also camped and dropped at Big Basin National Park, in the Santa Cruz mountains for about a week....it is very similar. Those were very magical times for me and many others.

 

Yeah u can't get that on Facebook!!

 

The Hippie was a great Evolution away from the common Colonial mind set brought here to our shores.
And was seen as threat, by all Euro Centric that were pushing all old ideals. That's why it took the Nixon years, two Reagan terms to put a dent the Hippie Evolution .

I was born in 1964; I remember my old brothers and sisters bringing , Pet Sounds, SGT Pepper, Are You Experienced ?, Martin Luther King murder, JFK murder, Apollo 11 and my sister's cring over the Beatles breaking up.

To be a Hippie in that area during 1960 , must have been magical .

When I listen to the original Hippies living the, I feel like my Grand Parent listening to their stories of hunting Buffalo or any details of the " Original Life " .

 

Ever been back to see if the waterfall and the fauna are still prestine ?