BIG SUR, Calif. -- I was driving south on Highway 1 through the heart of Big Sur country and struggling to keep my eyes firmly on the narrow, twisting coastal road.

This wasn't easy because I also desperately wanted to drink in an extravagantly beautiful landscape of cypress and redwood forests, wildflower-speckled meadows, plunging waterfalls and rocky coves favored by sea otters. That's not to mention the shimmering Pacific and the waves thundering and crashing against the sheer cliffs, hurling spray onto the road that hugged their edge.

Then, came the quintessential Big Sur moment. I had slowed to a near crawl to negotiate a patch of mist ahead when suddenly three Buddhist monks in saffron robes emerged from the fog, walking single file along the narrow strip between the road and the cliff edge. The road made a bend and just as suddenly, like a mirage, they vanished.

The hallucination of a tired driver perhaps? No, the monks' robes were too vividly orange for that; and, there had been a tinkle of bells and even a faint whiff of incense. In the end I wrote it off as one of those inexplicable vignettes that might be strange elsewhere but not in Big Sur, where nature is monumental and the semi-mystical commonplace.

Even novelist Henry Miller, a famously wild and irreverent bohemian who did much of his writing in a cabin in Big Sur, was awed by the place. "A region where one is always conscious of an eloquent silence," he wrote, declaring Big Sur to be "The face of the earth as the creator intended it to look."

To the first Spanish settlers, the rugged country below the Franciscan mission at Carmel was El Pais Grande del Sur, "The Big Country of the South. Throughout it's known history, Big Sur has been a place where people came to commune with nature, seek solitude and avoid attention. All are still easy to do: Big Sur encompasses nearly 200,000 acres but has fewer than 2000 year-round residents.

The Name Big Sur originally applied just to the river valley of that name. However, it is now generally used for the spectacularly scenic region between Carmel (a verdant enclave of wealth, celebrity and high end shopping) and San Simeon (where publisher William Randolph Hearst, the model for Orson Welles "Citizen Kane, " built a fantasy castle that is now a state park.) The two are about 90 miles apart via Highway 1, Big Sur's only real road.

Most of Big Sur is mountainous, heavily wooded, and falls within the boundaries of Los Padres National Forest. There are also five state parks and nature reserves, all on the coast and easily reached from the highway. Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park has 200 campsites scattered through a redwood forest as well as an extensive system of back-country hiking trails. At Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, a forest trail leads to a waterfall that drops 50 feet to the sea. When surf splashes again the cliff face, it falls back in an arc giving the impression of a second, smaller waterfall. If sun shines directly on the spray, a rainbow can turn the whole scene into pure magic.

Rainbows are very much part of the Big Sur mystique. For instance, the much-photographed Bixby Creek Bridge on the coastal highway (one of the highest single span bridges in the world) is known as "The Rainbow Bridge" because of its graceful, rainbow-shaped arch.

Roughly equidistant from the urbanized sprawl of Los Angeles and San Francisco, Big Sur is essentially pristine: The Golden West that once was is here still. There are no billboards, tract housing or freeways. Commercial activity is confined to a scattering of restaurants, gas stations, and motels, plus two rustically elegant spa retreats, the Ventana Inn and Post Ranch Inn. Pretty much everything is on or just off Highway 1.

The road itself, a remarkable engineering achievement considering the rocky and serpentine route it follows, was completed in 1937, making it as ancient as a Roman road by California standards. Only two lanes wide, the highway is sometimes reduced to one lane, or even temporarily closed, because of washouts or rockslides. The posted speed limit is 15 or 20 miles an hour, On some stretches in mid-tourist season traffic can be bumper-to-bumper. There are some 30 turnouts along the road, most with great views. But there are no breakdown lanes and the southbound lane (the one I was driving along when I saw the monks) skirts terrifyingly close to the edge of cliffs as high as 120 feet.

The one place along the highway where just about everyone stops is Nepenthe, a restaurant complex sited at one if the highest spots on the Big Sur coast and with a take-your-breath-away 40 mile-long view. Nepenthe, (the name means no sorrow in classical Greek) evolved from a one-room log cabin once owned, but never lived in, by Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth during their brief marriage.

Bill and Lolly Fassett bought Nepenthe in 1949 and It's still in the family. The complex includes a panoramic restaurant (the food isn't bad but not up to the standard of the view) a terrace cafe, crafts shop, and art gallery. The bookstore on the premises specializes in writers who found inspiration in Big Sur, among them Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robinson Jeffers and Richard Brautigan. Also, of course, Henry Miller who lived for a time in the original Nepenthe cabin. A rustic small museum devoted to Miller's life and work is just a quarter of a mile down the road.

Spotted around the Nepenthe grounds are works by local artists. One in particular, a dramatic sculpture depicting the mythical phoenix bird and carved from the trunk of what was a landmark oak tree has become a Big Sur icon.