Big Sur inspires reverence. When the explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo became the first to sail along the Alta California coastline during the fall of 1542, he was transfixed as oak-laden hills turned mountainous and studded with plentiful conifers, which rose abruptly from the turquoise water like enormous terrestrial swells. “There are mountains which seem to reach the heavens, and the sea beats on them… It appears as though they would fall on the ships,” he wrote aboard his flagship, the San Salvador. Entranced as he was, Cabrillo dared not seek harbor beneath these newfound peaks and instead continued to ride the wind northward. 

Later generations of seafaring explorers also tried and failed to penetrate this stretch of coastline — home to a range so rugged, isolated, and unnavigable that the native Esselen people who inhabited these mountains spoke a language uninfluenced by any other tribe. The first Europeans to successfully step foot on Alta California arrived more than 200 years after Cabrillo, with Spain’s Portolá expedition making landfall near Ragged Point in 1769. After reaching the shore, the Portolá explorers found the coastline to both the north and south impassable, and were instead forced east, over the mountains and toward the Salinas River. They followed it to present-day Monterey Bay, where they spoke in awe of el país grande del sur. “Big” Sur itself remained otherwise undisturbed, save for these few foreign footprints.

Eventually, though, by the late 1800s, a handful of the most hardcore Manifest-Destiny types found themselves undaunted by the severity of the terrain; in fact, they were attracted to it — hacking through the chaparral and poison oak, up the ridges and into the valleys to claim and build their homesteads in sublime solitude. It became one of the least accessible yet still inhabited regions of the country, and remained so even after the Carmel–San Simeon Highway was completed in 1937. This most fabled stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway connected Monterey County to San Luis Obispo County with 100 miles of switchbacks etched precariously into the mountainsides that hung hundreds of feet above the churning Pacific. Explorer Sebastian Vizcaíno had named Big Sur’s coastal mountain range, which is never more than eleven miles from the sea, the Sierra de Santa Lucia — after the patroness of the blind, of martyrs, and of authors. In a case of nominal determinism, a deluge of bohemians flooded the new highway to absorb inspiration from Big Sur’s mysticism and distinct loneliness, hoping, as John Steinbeck would note, to “either find themselves or lose themselves forever.” During the 1940s, Henry Miller grandfathered a legacy of writers who staked their own spiritual claims in the area — Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, and Richard Brautigan to name a few. And just over the mountains in the Salinas Valley, Steinbeck wrote about a different side of Monterey County, barely east of this coastal Eden.

One unassuming afternoon, as Miller settled into his joyous ridgeline hermitude, a nameless beachcomber down below discovered several pieces of nephrite jade peppered along the shore, thus identifying the region as one of the few places in North America with a deposit. Jade already held significance for both the Chinese and the Maori, who coveted the stone for its spiritual properties of longevity and toughness. Big Sur is unique, however, in that it’s the only documented place on Earth where it can be found under the ocean’s surface, giving it a definitively darker, cloudier nimbus. For the visionaries that constituted Big Sur’s early community, seaborne jade became a talisman for the land they loved and stewarded, a piece of home that harnessed the serenity and balance of the Santa Lucias; others came to believe that the stones possessed the spirit of the Pacific itself.

Diving at Jade Cove is as treacherous as infiltrating a dragon’s lair. To get down to the beach, which is mostly heaps of jagged black boulders, you must first cross a meadow before skirting 180 feet down a deliriously steep marine terrace, a descent that is all the more treacherous with 100 pounds of diving equipment strapped to your frame. Once in the water, you’re at the mercy of Big Sur’s violent swells, while you struggle to first identify and then extract hidden mineral riches. Don Wobber made it past the dragon and into its grotto of verdant treasure for fifty years, where he retrieved untold quantities of the desirable stone, for which he came to be known as King of Jade Cove. 

I choose to believe that Wobber’s advantage in this pursuit derived from his mysticism; he likened his underwater adventures to “diving into his own subconscious and plucking jewels from its depths” in an article that appeared in Monterey County NOW. His veneration of jade freed him from the fatal missteps that would befall greedier divers. “This is one of the big adventures we can have these days,” Wobber once told a San Francisco news anchor, after making a name for himself jade diving. “You know, there aren’t too many things you can do like this.” 

It was in this spirit that Wobber and his crew wrestled a 9,000-pound jade boulder to the shore — one they dubbed “the Nephripod” — a feat that assured his place in the annals of California folklore. It took ten months to salvage the Nephripod, which involved extracting, lifting, and delivering the mineral leviathan to a more accessible beach in June of 1971, travails that Wobber later chronicled in his memoir Jade Beneath the Sea. In the end, he described the feat as a “gift of self, a breaking away from present life that would connect me with jade in deeper ways than I could ever imagine.” The boulder was initially appraised at $180,000 — a number which meant nothing to him, compared to the quest for meaning it inspired. 

Having gathered that jade holds a supernatural place among the Chinese, Wobber decided to parade the boulder a few hours north, in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Once there, it was widely celebrated — until authorities learned of its value and tried to take possession of the Nephripod on the grounds that it belonged to the state. “That’s the American way,” Wobber’s diving partner Jim Norton recalled in an interview around the time of the legal battle. “Say something’s worth a million dollars and people are interested. Say ninety-nine cents and they’re not.” Wobber offered to put the rock back in the ocean, but now the state couldn’t see past the dollar signs. He and Norton instead decided to share their bounty by donating it to the Oakland Museum of California, where it lives on to this day as a jadehound Mecca. 

A moratorium on jade-collecting was enacted in Big Sur soon thereafter: Strictly hand tools with no moving parts were permitted in the acquisition of the stone, with a 200-pound lift-bag limit on specimens found below the mean high-tide mark. Fortunately, Wobber had already solidified his legacy, and though he passed away at his home in Pacific Grove just over a decade ago, his legend lives on in the spirit of a new generation of jade divers. On a calm day with favorable visibility, they line the highway in their pickup trucks, eating sandwiches on their tailgate, wetsuits at half-mast with their shaggy hair still dripping and satchels of their day’s haul by their side. My attempts to convince them to speak to me about their craft were in vain. Until I met Marco Mazza — a longtime diver who is part of a small crew in Big Sur.

Mazza both dives for his jade and personally carves his findings as Mazza Jade Works. He was patient enough to explain the radio silence I had received from all of the other divers, as he also shares their wariness of outsiders: “I worry about riding that fine line between celebrating the culture and the art, and making sure that the resource and the underground scene isn’t blown up.”

Marco’s desire for secrecy is arguably justified. Nearly five million bumbling tourists congest the two-lane country road that is the Big Sur Highway each year, which is a cumbersome reality for the 1,500 permanent residents who sparsely pepper Big Sur’s 70-mile stretch. Evidence of these passersby includes dirty toilet paper and other littering along the pull-offs, ecological damage from off-trail foot traffic, skyrocketing living costs for locals, and the onslaught of selfie-obsessed zombies clogging the motorways.  

Big Sur’s new generation of divers, Marco among them, aim to conserve Jade Cove’s resources by respecting the elders who built the foundation. Elders like Kenny Comello, owner of Big Sur Jade Company, who honors the stone in his carving practice while also acknowledging the damage caused by rampant jade diving. “I started diving in 1975 and by the time I was done, in 2005, there was a lot less obvious jade to be found,” Kenny says. “And today it’s even worse. And 20 years from now… It’s a finite thing. All things are finite.”

A massive landslide closed a critical section of the Big Sur Highway in January of 2023, dividing the north coast from the south. Once-local commutes became four-hour slogs, and the highway remained closed for three years due to the extensive earthwork required to reopen the road. Act-of-God inconveniences — like mudslides, or, say, wildfires caused by murderous marijuana farmers seeking revenge via arson — are justifiable risks when the reward is (on most days) nirvana. Kenny Comello saved his first cabin from a wildfire, before losing it to a mudslide. But his love for the Santa Lucias is unconditional. Here is where he will remain, whatever it takes. 

It’s a crystal blue February morning and the van windows are rolled all the way down as I drive north from Cambria, making my way to Kenny’s land near Gorda Ridge. The hills are a blanket of dizzying green, stitched with lupines and Indian paintbrushes. Navigating the Big Sur backwoods often requires a cryptic set of instructions, and following my route resembles a childhood scavenger hunt, I realize, as I climb a dirt road several miles up through the shade of madrones and redwoods and head into the mountains without cell reception. While the road grows steeper and more rutted from rainfall, my mind enumerates all the survival skills I’ll need to save my ass if I get stuck out here. After forty minutes of skidding up the road, I reach Kenny’s gate and pull into his humble slice of paradise.

The first thing that catches my eye is a husky-sized boulder of buffed jade that’s thoughtfully situated near the front patio of his quaint off-grid trailer home. Kenny calls it his “Blue Angel.” The massive jade specimen has been mounted on a metallic swivel so that it can be rotated atop a thick slab of sculpted redwood. Framed by a panoramic view of the forested valley which spills into the ocean, it spins there like a dense summary of the surrounding landscape’s infinitude. When his Blue Angel twirls, it catches the light and twinkles like a deep and pure pool of water. It’s not just a stone, he tells me, but a piece of art.

“It’s the jewel of Big Sur. There’s nothing else that compares,” says Kenny, his Pacific-blue eyes shimmering. “There’s a little bit of gold here, but gold is odd. It brings out the worst in people. It’s funny how people get really greedy all of a sudden when there’s a gold nugget on the table. When there’s a jade nugget, there’s not that feeling. Jade’s special, it’s got integrity.” 

At 75 years old, he’s beginning to plan for the rest of his and his family’s future, which could unfortunately mean moving closer to the essentials of town. In order to do so, however, he may have to sell his Blue Angel. The asking price is around $40,000, though he also seems open to donating it to the right venue that will honor its magic. It’s hard to imagine the stone anywhere else than at the heart of Kenny’s haven. 

Kenny is sturdy and thoughtful in the ways that come from a lifetime of living with the land, and from trusting the wind that led him here. In 1969, after taking a bunch of acid and reassessing his whole Midwestern life, he dropped out of college without a second thought. The Vietnam War was in full swing, but he got lucky in the draft lottery, which he commemorated by hitchhiking the California coast. After washing up in a Big Sur campground, he met some other hippies with a 4x4 Ford Bronco. He cemented the friendship with some red Lebanese hash and they dropped into the backcountry together. 

“We went in there. And I never came out.”

Kenny got involved with a jade mine without even knowing what jade was. The owners of the site were made hip to its location by an old prospector named Ski — who, as a felon, couldn’t legally stake the claim. Let me fill my backpack up every once in a while, as thanks for the tip, Ski suggested. The owners agreed, the digging began, and the site came to be known as Hobbit Mine. It was Ski who later tipped Kenny off as well, which led to Kenny’s own first mining claim, a site he called Blue Heaven.

“I’m not sure I should even be telling you about the jade in the back hills.” He stops his story abruptly, like waking up from a dream. Kenny voices a refrain I’ll come to hear from most locals I speak to. “The jade was a way for me to live here and to exist here, but my first and true love is for the land itself. And during COVID, we got discovered in the back hills, not just the highway. Ninety-nine percent of people drive through Big Sur and say, ‘Yeah, I’ve been to Big Sur. It’s a beautiful place.’ That’s fine. Leave your toilet paper down on the highway. But the hills, the ocean, the beaches, they’re sacred. That’s where my concern is,” he explains, as I assure him of our readership’s good-hearted sensibility. 

Violating Kenny’s trust would be harder than a newcomer might imagine. You have to be built like a mule to get anywhere off the highway. And even if you do, good luck getting through the poison oak. Still, there is a paradox to writing about subjects you care to preserve. “If you really care about it, you probably shouldn’t say a word,” Kenny cautions.

Naturally, I begin to ponder Kenny’s logic in speaking with me. Artists and aesthetes such as Kenny, who have dedicated their lives to jade’s craft and culture — as well as its preservation — also depend upon external recognition. While Kenny is reluctant to divulge too much about jade’s specific whereabouts, he is also a founder of the annual Big Sur Jade Festival. Started in 1989, the festival attracts enthusiasts around the country and abroad, creating a sustainable market for local jade carvers and artisans to sell their wares. 

Even in Big Sur’s early years, Henry Miller was prescient of the paradox faced by its residents. “If you are an artist and think to muscle in here,” he wrote in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, “it would be wise to first find a patron, because the artist cannot live off the artist, and here every other individual, seemingly, is an artist of one sort or another. Even the plumbers.”

So, on the off chance you think you can get rich off jade, it might be helpful to know that you can’t. Jade is the toughest natural material, the Cadillac of Stone Age tools, so tough it was used for anvils before the advent of iron. But if you consider Big Sur jade’s place in the broader world market, it hardly makes a blip. No one makes much of a living from it. Its true value lies in its potential to deepen your connection to the landscape, and to open the door to adventure.

Kenny’s wife Lisa brings us some charcuterie and a couple beers. “Well, I mean, the cat’s already out of the bag,” she smiles. “It’s already been discovered.” I smile back. The pride of men, we laugh to each other knowingly with our eyes. 

“I’m just trying to make it clear where I’m coming from,” Kenny sighs. “I got a responsibility to those that are still active jade hunters, divers, and prospectors.”

As the beers lubricate our conversation, Kenny recounts when NOAA established the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary in 1992, furthering the previous moratorium’s restrictions; it became illegal to pluck any jade from the beaches, at any weight. This caused an outcry in the community among those that had long anchored their culture in the stone. Not unlike otters, locals carry around and trade their extra-special “pocket pieces.” Artists had been working with the material for decades, making sculptures and jewelry that are staples in Big Sur homes. So when NOAA came to Monterey for an open forum about the sanctuary, Kenny Comello and Don Wobber sat silently together while the local youth testified about jade’s unique role in their communities (after all, kids are more versed in the nature of magic than adults), ultimately lifting the new law while maintaining previous regulations.

We take a walk around his property, the perfume of bay laurels and coastal sage punctuating the unusually warm February afternoon. The breeze, the birds, the creaking trees all collapse into an expansive hush. Since day one, Kenny has loved the isolation this geography provides; nothing is in the way of nature, for better or for worse. He’s seen Big Sur spit many people out; those who stay are either lucky or persistent. But the world beyond the mountains continues to threaten their way of life. Wealthy vacationers have been hiking up property values by buying their second and third homes here. For an area that has historically been a bastion for artists, it’s all but impossible for them to afford their lifestyle these days. 

“You can’t come here at 19 now and think if you really work hard you’re going to make enough money to buy a piece of property in Big Sur,” Kenny laments. His words echo the sentiment of most of my peers, who grow increasingly hopeless about finding the opportunity to stake their own claim anywhere. As Big Sur gets bought up by people who don’t actually live here, enrollment at the local schools, education boards, and volunteer fire brigades has dropped. “They’re not part of the community in the real sense of being here day after day and doing what every community needs to be a community. So we’ve lost that.”

Years ago, Kenny knew these bums that lived under the Willow Creek bridge who sold jade jewelry and carved sandstone pipes and used their cash to buy wine, rolling tobacco, and cans of chili in the nearby Gorda General Store. There’s the American Dream, of which prosperity and success is often defined in terms of capital glut, and then there’s the Bohemian California Dream, in all its naturally resplendent simplicity, the holy grail of America’s vagrants. You guess which one is more endangered.

“Not too many people know that freedom these days,” Kenny says of the vagrants, looking off into the hills. What does it mean to be free, when our every thought is smelted down into algorithmic refuse? When our attention is commodified to no end? O, postmodern life. Where have all the good Transcendentalists gone? They’re out in the woods, and they’re never coming out. 

Before I leave, Kenny tells me he’s got something for me. He comes back outside with a piece of jade. It’s my favorite color, phthalo green, a smooth teardrop. I thank him for his generosity and proudly stick it in my front pocket. There’s something about it, the weight, that feels like good company.

Few people alive have lived in Big Sur longer than Richard Horan. So after my visit with Kenny, I head over to the Horan’s. Entering his home is like opening up a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog — an eccentric redwood cottage surrounded by a small orchard and self-sustaining organic garden. At 85 years old, it’s no small feat to maintain, but Richard makes it look easy. His flannel is tucked into an old pair of Wranglers, held up by a commanding jade belt buckle.

Richard shows me his studio, where he single-handedly established the Big Sur jade-carving tradition back in the ’60s. It smells like my grandpa’s basement, all metal and dust, full of hearty old machines that appear even older than him. The walls are lined with varying chunks of nephrite jade. On the windowsill, a crispy weed plant is yellowing in the sun. Outside, the green pastures tumble into the sparkling water. Looking west towards the horizon, I can see the curvature of the Earth. 

Richard moved here to pursue an artist’s life, back when hippies infested the hills like scabies in a bedroll. “In those days you could make a little cabin anywhere, and be near water,” he tells me. “But the Forest Service didn’t like that, and they went around and kicked all the hippies out and burnt down their cabins. So I built a cabin in a great big tree on a little ledge over the ocean. The branches of the tree came down right over where I was sleeping, and this hummingbird made a nest right there. I would wake up in the morning and sit up and the hummingbird would look me right in the eye.”

He was working as a janitor at the cliffside Esalen Institute (the metaphysical retreat center whose alumni include Joan Baez, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Bob Dylan, Terence McKenna, and George Harrison) when he was first bit by the jade bug.

“I had swept up a beautiful piece someone had dropped, and I thought, ‘Well, this is a beautiful thing.’ I saw it had merit, but no one was doing anything with it, other than having it and trading it. So I started walking the beaches myself. And there I saw a great big green stone, like a peyote button. I started digging, and it was about the size of a volleyball, beautiful gem-quality jade.”

The more he combed the beaches, the more their shapes invited his artistic imagination. Already a ceramicist and silversmith, Richard began carving jewelry and figurines with pieces of jade he either found or bought from the local divers. Jade’s exceptional density makes each sculpture a study in patience, an artwork capable of being passed down for generations. He shows me some of his sculptures: a fish whose every scale is carved with surgical detail, geometric pendants curling into themselves like ventricles, monstrous faces like Mexican masks, ornate belt buckles and opulent earrings, each specimen like a swirling blue-green cloud frozen in motion. 

“​​When you appreciate the jade, you look for really super-special pieces,” he says carefully, his voice hoarse. “They are few and far between. Here’s one.” He fumbles for something in his jeans and pulls out a palm-sized piece. “I’ve had this one there for maybe fifteen years, in my pocket.” He hands it over and it feels smooth, tumbled by time and touch. “Traditionally, jade is the healer of the loins,” Richard says. “And having it close to your body lets you absorb that power.” I nod and hand it back. Richard still has a good amount of mojo for his advancing age. 

“You have to look at something for a long time, not just a little time, but a long time. You want to see what the jade says. It takes a long time for it to occur, but then suddenly, out of nowhere, you get the idea it was there all along.”

I depart Richard’s with a vivid sense of awareness and make my way down to the beach at Willow Creek, where I chew on his words a bit more. I think of people like him and Kenny who’ve spent most of their lives out here in the boonies, sometimes without electricity, fifty miles from the nearest grocery store. A restless globetrotter may explore a wider surface area and amass a remarkable list of diverse experiences, but there’s something to be said for the journey into the depth of one place — an adventure to the heart.

I stroll along the beach, picking up little green stones as I go along, imagining the Esselen crouching at the creek-mouth, waiting for the right moment to spear a steelhead. Under the bridge, the winos are warming their next can of chili. I’m just awaiting the sunset, nothing left to do in paradise but look around, wrapped up in the promise that the world rewards those who pay attention.