After a much needed lunch, we continued on the remaining journey towards Big Sur. Our goal now was to find the elephant seals that are famous for inhabiting this stretch of coastline. Some of our friends had told us of this spot off the 1 Highway in San Simeon, so we decided to try there first. Alas, no seals, but my sister and I did have a great time splashing in the waves! While the water was cold as ice, it felt almost healing to be out in the salty air with water climbing up our legs as we stood in the surf.
Continuing on for the elephant seals, we found a spot with huge groups of people looking over a bluff. Could there be seals? We decided it wasn’t worth the crowd. Thinking we may have missed the creatures, we continued on. Suddenly, my mom shouts: “Elephant seals!!” We pull over where a good handful of people were looking at the behemoths. It was so rewarding to finally meet a species I had been dying to see my whole life!
A short trail led us to an area where folks had a great view of the seals while still remaining a very safe distance away from them. As we got closer to the rope that marked the end of where humans could go, we were finally able to fully take in the massive sizes of the Northern Elephant Seals (Mirounga angustirostris)! The males can grow to be 13-16 feet long and weigh between 3,300-5,100 pounds (though some may reach up to 8,200 pounds). The females are about 1/3 the weight, ranging from 880-1,980 pounds and growing between 8.2-11.8 feet in length. Gray colored seal pups laid in the sand, so small you could hardly imagine some of them becoming so large one day.
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