People in the area of what is now Monterey used to call the wild and mountainous region to the south the “big south country.” Sur means south in Spanish, and the growling, alien-sounding syllable seems to me to encapsulate in a way the mystery, the loneliness, the separateness of this place. Once it was a remote spirit-infested woodland almost beyond communication, reachable only on horseback, where in the late nineteenth century hardy pioneers led lives unencumbered by law or clergy. Before them, the obscure local Indian tribes, the Esselen and Rumsien, had dwelt there since who knows when.

Somehow the area’s noble and resonant official appellation—El País Grande del Sur—became plain Big Sur and a household name. Now a highway runs through it, along which, during the summer months, tourists’ cars flow in an unbroken stream.

But despite everything, Big Sur manages to preserve its mystery and magic, simply because there are few public roads into the backcountry. Most of it remains as inaccessible as it was a century ago, and principally peopled by wild beasts. What is accessible—the redwood-darkened canyons, the vast panoramas of kelp-garlanded ocean, the serried black ridges and obstinate rock towers thrusting out like the knuckles of a titanic fist to meet attacking waves—remains for visitors the shared experience of Big Sur.

It’s nearly dark when my companion and I rumble into Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn in our thirty-fifth anniversary Chevy Camaro, the top down and the heat on. Deetjen’s is one of the area’s older and less pretentious resorts. It nestles in a canyon among towering redwoods; sunlight is scarce and fleeting. What we find particularly noteworthy about Deetjen’s, however, are the guest books in our room—three of them, in fact—in which uninhibited visitors, many of them honeymooning, have supplied (among other more conventional things) long and graphic accounts of their sexual activities. The sheets, we are relieved to find, are pristine.

Day One: 34 miles

The Old Coast Road

In the morning, after the inn’s specialty, eggs Benedict, which comes in as many versions as a Hindu deity, we drive north on the highway a couple of miles, pick up a New York Times—this is in some ways a highly civilized wilderness—and continue into the not-quite-village of Big Sur, where we fill up. “Now that’s a real car,” says the attendant, evidently up to here with BMWs.

Opposite the entrance to Andrew Molera State Park is the Old Coast Road, and we follow it up the steep shoulder of the bare hill. The Old Coast Road, a stretch of the main highway before the reinforced concrete bridge across Bixby Creek opened in 1932, is ten miles of dirt in ever-changing states of repair. It’s impassable in wet weather but is fine now, in November, when the season’s first light rains have damped down the summer dust but not yet gouged deep channels into the old road’s surface.

We climb hundreds of feet up the shoulder of the mountain until miles of coastline lie spread out below us. Then the road turns suddenly inland and swoops down into a deep, silent canyon where, in the shade of tall redwoods, shafts of sunlight on fallen trunks awaken here and there an eerie velvet brilliance of green moss. All ten miles of the Old Coast Road are like a bird’s flight, an unpredictable alternation of forest and meadow, of imprisonment in deep somber redwood groves and release onto sunny windswept hilltops. It gives you the sense that however much convenience was gained for millions of visitors each year when the bridge opened, something else of great beauty, richness, and remoteness was lost. But not for those who know that the Old Coast Road is still there, and who can spare an hour to negotiate its slow, twisting length.

This is the rhythm of Big Sur: driving, pulling over and walking, driving a little farther, walking again. Since there are so few roads, there’s a lot of backtracking, but the point is not how much ground you cover, it’s how fully you take in the spectacle and immerse yourself in the region’s changing moods.

It’s just noon—checkout time—when we get back to Deetjen’s. I had wanted to make an entry in the journal—something along the lines of . . .

Our middle-aged libidos were so inspired by these randy meanderings that we were looking forward to a wild romp in the hay ourselves. Unfortunately, we nodded off before we had a chance. [signed] B. Lingam and T. Yoni

. . . but the maid is just starting the room, and it’s too late.

Day Two: 92 miles

South on Highway 1

We stay the second night at the Ventana Inn. Just a couple of miles north of Deetjen’s but worlds away in character, Ventana and its across-the-street neighbor, the Post Ranch Inn, are as luxurious and self-indulgent as Deetjen’s is funky and spare. In the morning, my companion decides to enjoy for as long as possible our balcony, which overlooks a meadow with two nibbling deer and, in the distance, the Pacific. I put the Camaro’s top down, slide in a CD, and set out for a place defined by only a single coordinate: 6.8 miles south of Ventana. It’s a pleasure to drive this winding well-banked road on a sunny morning in a car that tracks as perfectly as this one does, whose stereo sounds this good, and whose powerful, torquey engine makes shifting, at a steady 45 miles per hour, quite unnecessary.

I leave the Camaro on the shoulder and walk around the locked gate and down the steep path into Partington Cove. The trail forks; to the left is a wooden footbridge and a tunnel, and beyond that an inlet ringed by cliffs. At one end is a stony beach on which surf booms like distant artillery; at the other, a gallowslike structure that was once used to load locally gathered tanbark into boats, then a rocky promontory, and then the open sea. Swells thrust themselves into clefts and spew up gasping jets of foam. Perched on a rock just above the spray, sun-dazzled and solitary, I watch the ocean for half an hour, awaiting a whale. It’s the right time; they’re headed for Baja now, and you might expect to see them often, smooth heaving backs flagged with plumes of vapor—if you’re lucky. I’m not; none appears. As a consolation, a dozen northbound porpoises pass in a series of arcing leaps.

Less than two miles farther south along the highway is Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, where a short walk brings me to an overlook. Below is a perfect crescent of beach framed between rock outcrops, one of which incorporates a natural bridge. Waves break rhythmically in the cove; foam swirls, here milky, there marmoreal; a black bird swoops past. A waterfall, emerging horizontally from a densely wooded cliff, arcs downward and falls onto the sand. It’s a perfect little scene, like one of those imaginary landscapes of romantic painters in which crag, torrent, lightning, and wayfarer are brought together into an improbably compact space. But this is not imaginary. It’s real, and several photographers have set up their tripods to capture it: Big Sur in a nutshell.

Pit Stops

The walls of the rooms at Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn are simple time-darkened redwood boards, the ceilings are low, a woodburning stove supplies heat, and a stream gurgles in a deep canyon beneath the windows (831-667-2377; doubles, $165).

Japanese baths, massages, clothing-optional sunning spots, and hammocks hidden in twittering glades—Ventana Inn is all about epicurean self-obsession amid a natural paradise (831-667-2331; ventanainn.com; doubles, $340–$850).

A restaurant perched high on a bluff, Nepenthe surveys windswept mountains over the Pacific. It is the one place you must stop in Big Sur (831-667-2345; nepenthebigsur.com; entrées, $12–$27).