A Carmel Highlands Summer, With the Road South Finally Whole
July 23, 2026
July 23, 2026
For almost three years, driving south out of the Highlands meant a hard stop somewhere between Rocky Creek and Ragged Point. Residents learned the closures by name. Paul's Slide. Regent's Slide. The nightly Caltrans updates that became a kind of weather report. This is the first summer since 2023 where the answer to "can we drive down to Cambria for the weekend" is simply yes.
That single change reshapes more of daily Highlands life than the headline suggests. The road is open, but it is not settled. Rocky Creek Bridge is still under active repair. Rocky Point sits dark on the cliff. Garrapata's inland trails are partially closed. Car Week is two and a half weeks out. What follows is the honest state of the corridor as your neighbors are actually using it in late July.
Governor Newsom announced on January 14, 2026 that Caltrans would reopen the portion of Highway 1 closed by Regent's Slide starting at noon that day, nearly 90 days earlier than the estimated reopening date of March 30, restoring uninterrupted travel between Carmel and Cambria after a landslide had damaged the roadway. The repairs used remotely controlled heavy equipment and thousands of steel reinforcements drilled up to 60 feet deep to stabilize the slope.
That is the closure headline. The one worth internalizing, if you live here, is the historical baseline. Highway 1 has been closed at this stretch more than 55 times since opening in 1937, and the current reopening does not alter that structural reality; it works within it. The USGS has mapped more than 1,500 landslides along 75 miles of Big Sur coastline, and the steep topography of the Santa Lucia Range, its active fault systems, and its position in the path of Pacific storm systems make this one of the most landslide-prone stretches of coastline in North America.
So the road is open. It has also been closed 55 times before. That is the frame residents are quietly holding as they plan August and September trips.
End-to-end travel is restored, but the corridor is not restriction-free. Anyone heading south from the Highlands right now should know four active items from Caltrans and See Monterey:
The Rocky Creek control is the one that matters most for daily Highlands life. It sits within the first ten minutes of your drive south, and 15-minute delays turn a spontaneous dinner run into a planned outing. Locals have adjusted by leaving earlier, or by treating southbound trips as day plans rather than evening ones.
Just past the Rocky Creek work zone, Garrapata is closer to a backyard than a destination for anyone living in the Highlands. Its current state is worth knowing before you wave a houseguest toward the trailhead.
On the east side of Highway 1, the Soberanes Canyon Trail is currently open. The Rocky Ridge Trail is closed due to hazardous conditions. The Soberanes Trail is open exclusively from the main gated trailhead on the east side of Highway 1, across from Gate 8 of the Garrapata Coastal Trail, along a 1.25 mile length to the back of the canyon, as an out-and-back. On the west side of the highway, the coastal bluffs and Soberanes Point are as they have been.
Dog rules are the piece most Highlands hosts get wrong. Dogs on leash are only allowed on the beach at Gate 19 at the south end of the park and on the trails leading to it. Dogs are not allowed in all other areas, including across Highway 1 in the Soberanes Canyon Trail area. If you want to walk the dog south of the Highlands this summer, Gate 19 is the only right answer inside Garrapata.
One more note that only really lands if you live here: unlike most other California state parks, Garrapata has no visitor booth or formal entrance, and rangers are rarely seen on site. That absence is why the parking on the highway shoulder feels informal in a way visitors find charming and residents find nerve-wracking on July weekends.
Every Highlands resident with out-of-town guests eventually gets asked about Rocky Point. The answer this summer is more interesting than "still closed."
The restaurant itself remains dark. The property was purchased by Patrice Pastor's Esperanza Carmel LLC, is undergoing renovations complicated by issues with previous modifications, and is intended to reopen under Michelin-starred chef Justin Cogley of Aubergine at L'Auberge Carmel, which Esperanza Carmel also now owns. Timing has not been announced. Esperanza's own posture, in its brief public statement, is that it hopes to share plans and the development team's vision for the property later this year, and that although the restaurant is not currently operational, the property remains open to the public to enjoy the trails and spectacular views.
That last piece is the useful fact. The parking area and the bluff walk above the arch are accessible. It is one of the shortest scenic stops from a Highlands address, and it is the only pullout of its scale on the immediate corridor south. Until a Cogley-led kitchen opens, the site is functioning as a semi-private overlook that any resident can walk in on. Enjoy it in that form while it lasts.
Monterey Car Week 2026 runs August 5–17. For Highlands residents, the run-up matters more than the week itself. The corridor between Carmel and the Highlands quietly firms up in the last ten days of July as vendors move into place and hospitality staff shift schedules. The two large hotels at your doorstep, Tickle Pink Inn and Hyatt Carmel Highlands, both cliffside and both a century of history apart, tip into full occupancy first.
A workable resident calendar for the next three weeks looks something like this:
If there is a weekend to drive south to Ragged Point and back, it is the one before August. The Rocky Creek delay will still be there. Everything else will be moving.
The reason to think of summer 2026 as a distinct chapter, and not simply another Big Sur season, is what comes after it. Climate forecasters give a 63 percent probability to a very strong El Niño event developing in winter 2026–27, the same meteorological pattern responsible for what was called the most extensive highway destruction in Big Sur's history during the 1998 storm season. Nobody sensible predicts a specific slide. But residents who have watched Paul's Slide and Regent's Slide close the road for a combined three years understand what the forecast is telling them. Use the road while it is whole.
That is the quiet argument shaping how longtime Highlands neighbors are treating July and August: not as recovery from the closures, but as a window. Weekend drives to Sand Dollar Beach. A dinner at Big Sur Bakery on a Wednesday. The long loop down and back on a single day, which was impossible for most of 2024 and half of 2025. These are ordinary Highlands pleasures that stopped being ordinary for a while, and they are ordinary again for now.
If you own here and are thinking about what the reopened corridor, the winter forecast, or the shifting rhythm of the south coast means for your own plans, that is a conversation worth having in person. Scherling Properties works across the Highlands and the wider peninsula, and lives the same weekly calendar you do. Reach out when the timing feels right.
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