More than a century on the Big Sur coast
True stories of the Plasketts and their neighbors — bears and gold, shipwrecks and weddings — drawn from letters, newspapers, and family memory.
place history
Fifteen years before Pacific Valley, William Lucas Plaskett rehearsed his dream in Anderson Valley — where the family named a daughter Mendocina, left their name on a mountain meadow that still carries it, and stopped twelve feet short of a different life.
place history
The county kept sending young women to teach the coast's children — and the Plaskett boys kept marrying them. How two brothers married two sisters, and the schoolhouse became the town.
place history
Off Sand Dollar Beach a white-crowned sea stack carries the family's name on every chart of the coast. Bill and Kim photographed it from ridge, point, and sand.
place history
Sixty-some years after Mabel sent her readers to Jade Cove, her great-grandson climbed down the rope to the same tideline — and the green stone is still there.
place history
A hike up the Mill Creek Trail toward the old Sans sawmill site — the canyon where Mabel Sans Plaskett grew up.
place history
place history
place history
place history
place history
place history
place history
The earliest published account of Pacific Valley — a full-page 1897 San Francisco Call feature on 'the Marvelous Shut-In Valley,' the unexplored pocket of the Coast Range that William Lucas Plaskett found, settled, and never left.
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