The hook
The actual hike in the park everyone drives to for a ten-minute waterfall photo, and the one that earns the trip.
01Why it's worth it
Julia Pfeiffer Burns is famous for the McWay Falls viewpoint, which is a look, not a walk. The Ewoldsen Trail is the reason to actually park: roughly five miles up a redwood canyon along McWay Creek and out to sweeping ocean views, with a 30-foot waterfall on the way. It's about as complete a Big Sur hike as exists, redwoods and open coast in one outing. Since the Dolan Fire in 2020 the eastern half of the loop has been closed, so it's an out-and-back for now, and the climb is real, which conveniently filters out the viewpoint crowd.
02How to experience it
Start from the Julia Pfeiffer Burns parking lot, the same one people use for the McWay overlook, so pair the two since you're already paying to park. Go early; the lot is small and fills.
From the locals
It's on people's shortlists of the hikes worth doing here: "looking to do some of the popular hikes like creamery meadows and ewoldsen."
Sourcing note: the quotes above come from a harvest of r/bigsur that recorded what people wrote but not their permalinks, and r/bigsur is not in this project's offline corpus — so they cannot be re-checked here the way the rest of the atlas can. They are reproduced as recorded, not paraphrased.