McWay Falls
— — a thread of water into a turquoise cove.
Not only on a wall.
“Eighty feet of fresh water dropping off a cliff onto a sand cove on the Big Sur coast. The beach itself is closed and has been for decades; the only way to see McWay is from a short overlook trail above the cove, through a pedestrian tunnel under Highway 1. People stop, lean on the rail, and stay longer than they planned. Lathrop and Helen Brown lived in a small white house on the bluff for a quarter of a century. The house came down in 1965, but the cove still looks the way it did from their kitchen window.
McWay Falls, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
McWay Falls drops about eighty feet from McWay Creek over a cliff and onto a small cove inside Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, on the Big Sur coast of California's Highway 1. The park sits roughly thirty-seven miles south of Carmel-by-the-Sea, in Monterey County, on land added to the state system in 1962 by Helen Hooper Brown in memory of her husband Lathrop. The cove the falls land in is sometimes called Saddle Rock Cove, after the offshore rock that shelters it. The viewing point is on the Overlook Trail, a short paved path reached through a pedestrian tunnel beneath Highway 1 from the day-use parking area.
McWay is a tidefall, fresh water dropping straight toward the Pacific. It is one of only two waterfalls in California that meet the ocean, the other being Alamere Falls in Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco. Until early 1983, the falls dropped directly into the sea. That winter a major landslide along the Big Sur coast deposited enough sediment in the cove that the beach built out into a small crescent of sand, and the falls now usually land on the beach, reaching salt water only at the highest tides. The colour of the cove, pale turquoise over white sand, is what most people remember.
The beach beneath the falls is closed to the public and reached only by a long unmaintained cliff descent; the closure has been the rule since the cove became part of Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. Visitors view McWay from the Overlook Trail, a half-mile round-trip path that crosses beneath Highway 1 through a short pedestrian tunnel and runs along the bluff to a railing above the cove. The state park charges a day-use vehicle fee at the trailhead lot; small pull-offs along Highway 1 north and south of the entrance hold a handful of cars. Early morning and the last hour before sunset are the quietest on the rail, and the cove holds its colour best in flat afternoon light.