The Swing on Plaskett Ridge

Written 31 August 2026, while the fire was still burning. Distances are measured against the infrared perimeter flown on the afternoon of 30 August. For the current position see the live map — this is an essay, not a status page.

A few weeks ago I turned seventy at our family cabin at Plaskett.

My wife arranged it. All three of my children came, and the grandchildren, and the point of it — the actual point, more than the birthday — was that I wanted to show them the place. Sand Dollar Beach. Jade Cove. Gorda. Plaskett Creek and the campground. Plaskett Ridge.

We drove up Plaskett Ridge Road and near the top somebody had hung a swing. We all took turns on it. You push off and you are out over the ocean, and the whole South Coast is underneath you, and then you come back. Everybody had a go. There are a lot of photographs.

A month later it burned.

What burned, exactly

I have spent this week measuring this fire, so I know the answer more precisely than I would like to.

The place the swing hangs is 875 feet inside the fire perimeter. Our cabin is 820 feet outside it. Something like sixteen hundred feet between the two, and the fire came up and the line went between them. The cabin was saved. The view my grandchildren had was not.

I also checked when that ridge last burned, sampling the ground against every mapped fire back to 1912. The top of Plaskett Ridge Road last burned in the Buckeye Fire of September 1970 — the fire that destroyed nearly all the miners’ cabins still standing at Los Burros. Fifty-six years.

So the brush my grandchildren swung out over had been growing since before their parents were born. Half a century of it, on a slope that had been left alone. That is a hard thing to hold in your head at once: it is exactly what made it beautiful, and exactly why it went the way it did.

I slept on that same ridge on my own when I was about twelve, at a drive-up camp with a spring beside it, in 1967. Three years before Buckeye. That camp is on no map I can find. It probably burned in 1970 and was never rebuilt.

One of ours is on it

A Plaskett cousin is working the Timber Fire, the northern one, bringing water to the fight with tenders. I spoke to him the night before last. He had had a short respite and was going back.

There are a lot of ways to be in a fire. You can be measuring it from a distance, the way I am. You can be reading about it from three states away and recognising the place names. Or you can be hauling water up a road in the dark so somebody else can hold a line. He is doing the last one, on ground our family has been on since 1869.

Where the family actually went

Almost nobody lives on the South Coast, and that is the usual reason it gets covered thinly. It misses the thing entirely.

My family settled that coast — William Lucas Plaskett homesteaded at Gorda in 1869 — and then over the last century we did what nearly everyone did. We moved inland, to the San Antonio Valley where Fort Hunter Liggett is now, and then to King City, and then further. My great-grandfather E. R. Sans, “the Coyote Man”, was born at Soledad and buried at King City. Most of the family sold out and went somewhere easier to live.

That is the ordinary history of hard country. What is not ordinary is how completely the place stays with the people who left it. Not the acreage. A grandmother’s house. A swimming hole. A one-room school. A mine a great-grandfather worked. The smell of sage after fog.

And some of us did not sell. One of my cousins carried the cabin — the cost of it, the work of it, the trouble of it — for years, which is the only reason there was anywhere for my grandchildren to stand this summer. I do not think he did that so a seventh generation could see the coast with foliage on it a month before it burned. But that is what it bought, and I am not going to forget it.

Seven generations: William Lucas, Byron, my grandfather Ed, my mother Marianne, me, my children, their children. Standing on the ground the first of them homesteaded.

Mabel

My grandmother Mabel Sans Plaskett — Ed’s wife — wrote this coast into the newspapers between 1959 and 1964. Sixty-six articles and poems: the Cruikshanks, the Krenkels, the Mansfields, Henry Melville, the schoolteacher brides of Pacific Valley, her own father at the Mill Creek sawmill.

In one of them she describes driving the whole California and Oregon coastline with a friend, both of them “Coast natives with a deep inherent love for our Monterey County coast homeland.” She says plainly why they went: “to see for ourselves if there were places more beautiful.”

She came home and kept writing about here.

She understood that if somebody did not write it down it would simply go. She was right, and this week is the demonstration. All of her work is transcribed and public at plaskett.family, and it will stay there.

What comes next

I have watched this happen before. The coast burns, and then it comes back, and it comes back fast. The chaparral is built for it. In a year there will be green on those slopes, and in five you will not believe how much, and the views that open up in the meantime are ones nobody alive has seen — the ridge lines, the drainages, the shape of the country underneath the brush.

My grandchildren hold something now that they did not ask for and cannot lose: they saw it the way it was. And they are going to watch it come back. That is a different inheritance from the one I planned to give them at a birthday party, and it may be the better one.

I am not sure their generation is inclined to think about any of this. They are scrolling. But at some point people put the phone down and want the real thing — the sage, the forest, the sea, the little drainages running down to the water. That coast has always kept itself for whoever was willing to make the trip, and only the people who persevere ever see it.

It will be there. It has burned before.

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The live map of both fires, with the old mines and townsites drawn on it, is at placenameguide.com. The numbers behind this piece, with every source named, are in Fifty-Six Years of Fuel.

Nothing here is an authority on the fire. For road, evacuation and fire status, Caltrans, the CHP, the Monterey County Sheriff and CAL FIRE are the sources.