Carpinteria's Seal Rookery and the Tar That Saved Everything

The bluffs just ahead drop down to a beach where several hundred harbor seals use the sand for pupping and haul-out through the winter and spring months. It is one of the largest harbor seal rookeries on the Southern California coast. Harbor seals were hunted close to local extinction along this coastline in the nineteenth century and recovered after federal protection under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of nineteen seventy-two. They have been using this beach for decades now, which is long enough that the beach has begun to feel like theirs.

A short distance south, at the state beach, the natural asphalt seeps that gave this town its name are still visible at low tide. The tar seeps here are among the five known natural asphalt lake sites in the world. They have been seeping continuously, releasing oil from deep in the Santa Barbara Channel formation, since long before humans arrived on this coastline.

The Chumash used this asphaltum for tomol construction and for waterproofing baskets and attaching shell inlays to stone. Spanish soldiers saw them working with it and named the place La Carpintería. Commercial miners excavated it in the nineteenth century and paved roads with it. Union Oil's offshore platforms drilled into the same formation in the nineteen sixties and a blowout covered thirty-five miles of this coastline with crude.

The tar seeps predate all of those uses. They will be seeping after all of them are history. The seals on the beach below the bluffs have been here long enough to stop noticing the smell. Some things are older than all the stories told about them, and the tar here is one of them.