Mr. Gafill said the reopening of the highway marked the end of a two-year struggle against Mother Nature that had disrupted tourism, beginning with the Soberanes Fire, a large wildfire near Big Sur that burned more than 130,000 acres in 2016.

Like other business owners in the region, Mr. Gafill had seen a sharp fall in visitors. Businesses in the area like his, he said, had lost anywhere between 15 percent to 40 percent of revenue because of the Mud Creek landslide. Hotels and inns lost more because fewer visitors from Southern California were coming and staying overnight. Visitors from the south could still get to Big Sur through a treacherous detour inland that involved steep cliffs and hairpin turns, but many stayed away.

Visitors from the north still came, he said, but they were more likely to visit just for the day.

The first pieces of the Pacific Coast Highway opened in the 1920s as part of what was then known as the Roosevelt Highway, according to KCET. Later, the route became entwined with the lore of California, where the western edge of the United States met the Pacific Ocean, and where the freedom of the road met dazzling natural beauty.

Over the years, and not infrequently, landslides have taken out portions of the highway. But none were as big as the one in May 2017, when some 6 million cubic yards of earth moved after torrential rainfalls, adding 15 acres of coastline, according to Susana Cruz, a spokeswoman for Caltrans. Before that, the largest landslide had been in 1983, farther north at Pfieffer Burns State Park.

There is no shortage of travel literature about a road trip up or down the Pacific Coast Highway. In the spirit of the highway’s reopening, here a few offerings from The New York Times, Vogue, National Geographic and Smithsonian.