The trail continues inland for miles and is a popular backpackers' gateway to the Ventana wilderness, but that's more than we are biting off today. The walk down, dare I say, is worth the poison oak exposure. The coast unfurls to the south, pockets of mist lingering among the rocks, as wildflowers give way to brief, cool redwood groves that hug the hillsides, concealing the micro-ecosystems of a deeper forest.
Take Your Minerals
"You can't use your massage as an excuse to hang out here all day," a reservationist admonishes when I call to book sessions at the Esalen Institute.
Perhaps the most venerable of Big Sur establishments, Esalen offers day guests a great deal: Sign up for a 75-minute, $150 massage and you can show up one hour early to soak in the institute's famous mineral springs and stay an hour late for more soaking or lunch (a $10 vegetarian buffet) -- or, as we did, both. "That's one hour on either end," the clerk emphasizes (apparently, day guests have a habit of lingering at Esalen).
Founded as the Big Sur Hot Springs in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Richard Price, buddies from Stanford University's graduate psychology program, the retreat became known first for the mineral springs that gurgled from the cliffs and, soon thereafter, for the drug-addled, free-love behavior of the hippies who streamed down from the Bay Area to soak by the sea.
But Murphy and Price had higher ambitions. They drew leading thinkers to conduct seminars at Esalen -- historian Arnold Toynbee, theologian Paul Tillich, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling, psychologist Carl Rogers, behaviorist B.F. Skinner -- and the institute soon built an erudite following.
Esalen held experimental workshops in what Aldous Huxley called "the non-verbal humanities," focusing on the body, senses and emotions. Today the institute hosts colloquia on topics as varied as sports psychology, shamanism, economics, race relations, African dance and couples therapy. More importantly to the average Big Sur vacationer, Esalen still opens its baths to the public, for free, from midnight to 3 a.m. nightly.
We arrive at the clothing-optional baths at 10 a.m., undress in the coed changing room, rinse in the coed shower and sink into one of seven communal concrete-and-stone baths that occupy a terrace 50 feet above the ocean. (These replaced baths that were destroyed in the El Niño storms of 1998.) A handful of individual claw-foot tubs also share the terrace.
To the south, in a cove carved from the muscular coastal mountains, sea otters and birds fish the kelp beds. To the north, a verdant hillside rises abruptly toward Esalen's wooden lodge.
My wife's masseuse arrives first, a woman named Brita who has worked at Esalen since the 1960s. "You'll be looking for Eileen," she tells me. "Dark hair, strong . . . she's from New York. She's still got a little of that in her walk." Something about the setting, Esalen's vibes and marinating in minerals makes me totally at ease standing around naked chatting with complete strangers.
Eileen appears, Manhattan strut and all, and leads me to a massage room built like a high-ceilinged concrete bunker, except for the entire wall of thick, sliding glass panels that opens to the Pacific.
I lie there, listening to the waves as Eileen turns my muscles into pudding, and think, "I have to get out camping more often."
John Briley last wrote for Travel about surfing in Panama.
