Morro Rock: What You Take From a Sacred Place

Before there was a harbor here, before there was a power plant or a breakwater or a fishing fleet, there was the rock. The Salinan and Chumash peoples had considered it sacred ground for generations before any European ship rounded the point. It rises five hundred seventy-six feet from the water, a volcanic plug left over from a chain of ancient eruptions, and it sits at the mouth of Morro Bay like a sentinel. Or it did. Not all of it is still there.

In eighteen eighty-nine, the California state government authorized quarrying operations on Morro Rock. The purpose was practical: the bay needed a breakwater to shelter harbor construction, and the rock was the most convenient source of stone. The extraction continued, episodically, for eighty years. By the time the California legislature finally prohibited further quarrying in nineteen sixty-nine, an estimated two hundred fifty thousand tons of rock had been blasted and hauled away. The rock is now roughly two thirds of what it once was. The Salinan and Chumash people had no legal standing to prevent any of this. The legal system that governed the quarrying was the same system that had stripped them of citizenship rights, property rights, and any recognized claim to their sacred sites.

Nineteen sixty-nine was the year the quarrying stopped, and also the year rock climbing was prohibited. Today the peregrine falcons that nest on the summit are protected, the rock is listed as California State Landmark number eight hundred twenty-one, and interpretive signs describe its geological and cultural significance. The Northern Chumash Tribal Council has worked for years toward a formal ceremony of reunification with the site.

What those signs do not always make clear is the timeline: the protection, the significance, the interpretive care, all of it came after eight decades of industrial extraction from a place that was sacred throughout the entire period.