The Dark Watchers (also known by early Spanish settlers as Los Vigilantes Oscuros) is a name given to a group of entities in California folklore purportedly seen observing travelers along the Santa Lucia Mountains.
The Dark Watchers are described as tall, sometimes giant-sized featureless dark silhouettes often adorned with brimmed hats or walking sticks. They are most often reported to be seen in the hours around twilight and dawn. They are said to motionlessly watch travelers from the horizon along the Santa Lucia Mountain Range. According to legend, no one has seen one up close and if someone were to approach them, they disappear.*
The mountains extend parallel with the coast from Monterey southeast for 105 miles to San Luis Obispo. Competing with the riveting spectacle of a winding road with vertiginous cliffs plunging to the shimmering Pacific Ocean with an undefined horizon, the highway hangs on the enormous shoulders of the Saint Lucia Mountain Range.
Lush ferns, newts, slamanders, and the southernmost stretch of redwoods all thrive in the wet ravines. Chaparral and coastal scrub cover more than half of the San Luca Mountains, with yucca plants from souther deserts, lupine, sagebrush, and manzanita growing on the drier slopes. Together, these two zones provide habitat for mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes, deer, squirrels, and numerous other animals.**
Mount Manuel from Buzzard’s Roost Trail
*Dark Watchers/Wikipedia
**Big Sur, The Making of a Prized California Landscape by Shelley Alden Brooks
The Ventana Wilderness of Los Padres National Forest is a federally designated wilderness area located in the Santa Lucia Range. This view is from the terrace of The Sur House looking south.
The slopes of the coastal highlands receive the most water from orographic rainfall, or rain that occurs when moisture-bearing clouds are forced to higher elevations. During the dry summer months, the trees collect most of their water from adsorption and condensation of moisture in prevailing fog and low ceilings. Redwoods revive about 35 percent of their water from the air. A large redwood can consume up to five hundred gallons of water a day.*
Orographic cloud belts can produce Atmospheric Rivers, (a term coined in the 1990s), that produces massive amounts of rainfall undermining watersheds and creating the rockslides that close Highway 1.
Orographic lift of moist air coming off ocean produces clouds along the Santa Lucia Range, of the California Coast Ranges System, NOAA Photo Library, Robert Schwemmer, NOAA, NOS, CINMS.
*The Centennial: A Journey through America’s National Park System by David Kroese