Still, Devil’s Slide is renowned locally for its stark beauty and treacherous mystique. It played a starring role in the 1960 thriller “Portrait in Black,” in which Lana Turner and Anthony Quinn shove a car containing her dead husband over the edge.

Toward the southern end, a fair hike down, is Gray Whale Cove Beach, which has a good-sized parking lot on the eastern side of the road. We decided to forgo this to avoid having to dart through moving cars and stopped instead at one of two narrow coast-side pullouts nearby. Standing at the top of the cliffs, we had a clear sense of their imposing height and scale.

From here down to Santa Cruz, the next sizable city, is only 60 miles, and the drive can easily be done in under two hours. But we took three meandering days, lingering in seaside towns and along the water.

The beaches where we stopped are state parks and, for the last several months, coastal residents had feared that some of them would be closed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger because of the state’s budget crisis. For the remainder of this fiscal year, however, the beaches will remain open, as savings were found elsewhere in the budget. Although most of the shoreline is public in California, state-owned beaches provide ample parking and well-maintained paths. Montara Beach, a well-sheltered and generally peaceful strip of pale gold sand, is the first of these beyond Devil’s Slide, and we found it carpeted with delicate sand dollars. From November to April, gray whales pass by on their annual migrations.

In the late 19th century, shipwrecks caused by jagged offshore rocks propelled the construction of the Point Montara Lighthouse, which stands about a half mile south of the beach and is still operated by the Coast Guard. Hostel accommodations are available on the lighthouse grounds.

On Day 2 we stopped at the town of Princeton-by-the-Sea, where expansive tide pools displayed amber sea stars, pearlescent anemones and magenta urchins. Vocal seals, dive-bombing pelicans and scurrying snowy plovers animated the broad expanse and, a few hundred feet northward around a point, the kids discovered wind-sculptured stumps of smooth, gray rock punctuating an otherworldly landscape. In winter, crowds gather on the clifftops above this spot to watch extreme surfers challenge waves up to 70 feet high.