A few years ago, I texted my dad a photo of myself and a dear friend harnessed a few hundred feet off the ground, attached to a cliff by a trio of bolts and some rope, both of us smiling (though my smile looks more like a grimace). “Find another sport,” he replied.
I did not, for some years, find another sport. In part because I loved hanging from cliffs with my friends, who kept us safe with fastidious knot tying and rope management. In part because the point of climbing was to outrun my fear.
I first visited Salt Point State Park, about 90 miles up the Sonoma Coast from Oakland, on a climbing trip. My friends and I were guided by directions provided by other climbers over years and decades, posted to online climbing forums. Climbers share knowledge that has been passed from person to person, often through word of mouth, about specific routes and risks, the clearest lines to follow up the wall, and ways to minimize impact on fragile ecosystems.
This is a careful sport, requiring the climber to confront the illusion of durability. Rock reveals itself as changeable, given enough time. Holds break and boulders shift. Cliffs crack into rubble. A sole climber, grabbing or stepping or falling at the wrong moment, can undo millennia of geologic work.
Salt Point’s sandstone is, in this regard, striking. Finger- and fist- and head-size cavities in the stone mark the park’s immense rock formations—sea stacks and arches and cliff walls—as undeniably vulnerable. These tafoni are formed when salt meets rock. The rocky terrace of Salt Point’s shoreline was exposed when the ocean receded during the Ice Ages. Now, the sea laps and pounds right up to the rock. Wind- and wave-driven salt eats the shoreline away, moment by long moment. While climbing, I see deep geologic time all around me. I grasp its works: its ridges and pockets. And I am aware of both my own and the rock’s fragility.
It is my fragility that feels most present these days. In the long years since the pandemic hit, my relationship to climbing has changed. Climbing gyms reopened relatively quickly, but I tire more easily and am wary of crowded indoor spaces after repeated Covid infections. After witnessing and grappling with ongoing social and political crises, I find less joy in moving up steep terrain, navigating adrenaline and cortisol spikes, tensing my body against possible catastrophe.
What I remember most about climbing at Salt Point is fear. I’ve edged up the guano-slick ledges of Shipwreck Wall—a vertical sandstone cliff to the southwest of Fisk Mill Cove that’s home to nesting raptors and cormorants during some seasons—afraid of slipping, of the rope failing. And I have clung to the yawning underbelly of the Arch—one of many such sandstone caves in the park, hollowed by waves crashing against the coast—unwilling to commit to one more big throw.
There are terrific forces at play on the coast, easily seen, heard, and felt. Hang at any height from a rope and harness, or your own damp hands, and the ocean surges beneath you. Many climbs at Salt Point are only doable during very low tide, and even then, you will have to manage the nearness of the sea, the discomfitingly loud waves. Climb farther from the shore and you might still fall into a tidepool, where your crashing climber body will threaten starfish and urchins and chitons. Bolts and carabiners rust and stick in damp, salt-heavy air. Climbers will have posted in forums about which bolts have recently been replaced (by largely volunteer crews), but known routes change suddenly, the result of broken and delicate holds. Grits of sand, the rock eroding in real time, fall into your eyes as you climb. The Arch collapsed entirely last winter, part of the natural course of shoreline geology, a moment of deep time experienced in the here and now.
I haven’t returned to Salt Point in years. Still, I love to remember climbing above the ocean. Bull kelp and red abalone swarm beneath the surface. California sea lions sun themselves on exposed shelves. Gulls and terns float, white and gray-bodied, above. I do not climb anymore, I am too afraid. I am porous and pitted, vulnerable as sandstone, if on a different timescale. And isn’t it beautiful, to be so exquisitely part of this ecosystem? To be dependent upon the interaction between rock and water, the kindness of friends and strangers, and upon our willingness to tread carefully? To say not only of the shoreline, but of our soft and gentle bodies, “be careful, you might, you will, break.”
