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Fog drifts in like lazy waves, curling through the jumble of boulders rising from the sand and into the thick stands of redwood and Douglas fir that loom above the seashore. The fog’s ethereal fingers caress the jade-green faces of the Lost Rocks, leaving a film of condensed vapor on the smooth stone. Looking up at the smooth slope of greenish sandstone I wonder: Will mine be the first ascent? No way to know. Any chalk left by other climbers will long since have washed away. As I step up to the wall of stone, white sea-foam kisses my ankles. Behind me the muffled crashes of ten-foot waves, barely visible through the fog, meet my ear with hypnotic persistence. LOST ROCKS is not on any official maps. The name that boulderers (those who climb smaller rocks sans rope and protective gear) call the place refers to a shoreline area in Redwood National Park, a half-mile south of the Klamath River, where huge boulders are often swallowed by sand, then again exposed as winds and tides sweep the sand in and out. It takes roughly half an hour to cross this stretch of shore on foot from Flinthead Rock, a beautiful monolith of banded and folded chert, to High Bluff and the abandoned World War II radar station constructed to spot an invasion from overseas. Today the invasion is coming by land, climbers armed with crash pads, chalk, and sticky rubber.…I climbed for nearly a decade all over the western United States before I thought much about the problem of access on potentially sensitive lands. Bennett Barthelemy currently teaches Native American history at College of the Redwoods in Eureka and rock climbing through Humboldt State University Center Activities in Arcata. This article is abridged from the Spring/Summer 2005 issue of Coast & Ocean. For a copy of the print edition or to subscribe to Coast & Ocean, click here. To return to the article, click here. |