This article is the second in a two-part series about Indian and Mortar rocks. In part one, we explored their place in Berkeley’s social history and landscape, and the role — and exclusion — of Native people in that story.
Ten million years ago, about 10 miles southeast of present-day Berkeley, a rumble began deep in the earth’s crust. Magma gurgled and shot upward, exploding to the surface. When the lava flow cooled, it became the hard volcanic rocks that now make up Indian and Mortar rocks.
Out of the eruption came Northbrae rhyolite — a fine-grained rock that is glassy in some places, sharp or cracked in others, and, like granite, sturdy and reliable, not prone to crumbling.
It formed along the Hayward Fault, where two sections of the world’s largest tectonic plates meet. Over several million years, slow tectonic forces pulled the rhyolite northwestward at a rate of a centimeter or so annually, movement so slow it’s imperceptible to the human eye.
Periodic earthquakes along the fault broke up these volcanic rocks into boulders. They were shuffled “like a deck of cards,” UC Berkeley geologist George Brimhall has said, leaving them scattered in pieces for several miles.
In another 10 million years, the rocks will move 10 more miles northwest. But for our lifetimes, they will remain where they are in the Berkeley Hills.
It’s these geological processes that created one of the East Bay’s best vistas, a place of significance to Ohlone people, and shaped the features in the stone that have drawn generations of rock climbers.
The climbers who have scaled these walls are now the stuff of legend: David Brower, who went on to head the Sierra Club; Dick Leonard, sometimes called the “father of California rock climbing”; and free soloist Alex Honnold, who climbed there as a student at UC Berkeley, to name a few.
“When you’re there, you’re grabbing the same holds that all these legends of the sport did. Royal Robbins. David Brower. Nat [Smale]. You know, me,” said John Sherman who’s gone by Verm, short for Vermin, most of his life and has established over 2,000 new climbs.
The climbers have left their marks on the rhyolite itself. Streaks of white chalk trace the paths of the wall’s most popular routes. And several cracks in the rocks appear to bear scars from spikes climbers nailed into the wall. But they spared the rocks the extensive damage caused by drilling bolts.
When you’re there, you’re grabbing the same holds that all these legends of the sport did.” — John ‘Verm’ Sherman
Just a handful of boulders nestled into a neighborhood near the base of the Berkeley Hills, not much taller than the houses nearby, Indian and Mortar rocks have had an outsized influence on the development of rock climbing.
Pivotal moments in the sport’s modern history can be traced back to them: First, the creation of new belaying techniques used in major ascents in Yosemite Valley, and later, the sport’s transition from traditional climbing to powerful, dynamic bouldering, a form of low-to-the-ground, ropeless climbing that began to dominate the area in the 1970s. Guidebooks refer to the two rocks as “the heart and soul” and “the grand daddy” of Bay Area climbing.
“A fit boulderer could climb most of the main lines in an afternoon,” Sherman wrote of Indian Rock in his classic bouldering history book Stone Crusade, “but some locals have managed to be entertained by these few boulders for over 20 years.”
What draws them back
For many, their first time climbing at Indian Rock marks an induction into a lifelong pursuit.
As they hone their craft, swapping advice, called “beta,” passed telephone-style from mentor to mentee, climbers find their chosen family, find purpose, find themselves. Indian Rock becomes at once an outdoor gym and a sanctuary from the trouble in people’s lives.
“It’s like going to therapy and temple and just hanging out with friends at the same time even if I’m just by myself,” said Devlin Gandy, a rock climber, archeologist and a member of Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, who lived at a house on the corner of Indian Rock Avenue when he was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley.
Life unfolds here — birthdays, broken ankles, anniversaries, engagements, break-ups, tears. The adventures are marked by a touch of whimsy, sometimes fueled by drugs. Once, Gandy watched a traveling Georgian band play, tuba and all, at the top of Indian Rock. Memorable, but somehow unsurprising.
Shenanigans abound, good-natured fun skirting the edges of risk. Who can jump up the stairs fastest? Who can run farthest on the slab without falling? Who can do the rock’s most legendary climb in a single minute? Teenagers sometimes ramble up the rocks with their eyes closed. “I figured if I can climb it in my dreams I can climb it blindfolded,” a climber captioned a video of his ascent of the center overhang in the pit.
Many have spent more time at Indian and Mortar rocks than anywhere else in Berkeley, climbing there day in and day out for several brief and intense years.
In 1963, Amy Fillin, then a junior at Cal, was hooked after one day of climbing at Indian Rock. “The first day here, I learned so much — lessons that are good for the rest of my life, like trust your feet,” said Fillin, who recently suffered from a stroke. At 79, she still climbs at the gym with a group of friends she calls the gray-haired ponytail club.
A select few devote much of their lives to the rocks.
Fillin at the rock in October. Credit: Ximena Natera
“It’s interesting. I always laugh at the amount of money, time and resources rock climbers put to go to these little rocks and basically worship them,” Gandy said.
And yet, the rocks draw him back, as they have countless others, time and again.
“Did I get married? No, I went climbing. Did I have kids? No, I went climbing,” said Scott Frye, 66, a sprightly man with bright eyes who has been a staple of Indian and Mortar rocks for half a century.
The Mayor of Indian Rock was a mathematician turned dirtbag named Dave Altman. Known among climbers for his superhuman feats of strength, he first got serious about climbing there in 1972, when he was a graduate student at Cal. “It was probably a mistake: I’d be a fat, tenured professor on the verge of retirement now if I hadn’t done that,” Altman told Touchstone Climbing in 2012.
Altman could pull himself up on one finger while holding a 50-pound weight in the other hand and could hoist his body into a human flagpole, seemingly without effort, even in old age. He died in a 2020 SUV fire outside Berkeley Ironworks, the local gym where he’d taught outdoor rock climbing and weight training.
In September, a memorial bench in his name was installed at the pit at Indian Rock.
A pattern of exclusion
Climbing today is more diverse than it once was. But even as the sport has become more popular, climbing, especially outdoors, has remained exclusionary. Some are made to feel unwelcome, subject to sexist or racist behavior, and Indian and Mortar rocks are no exception.
White men dominated the climbing scene at Indian Rock from the start, like they did at crags across the country.
In the early ’60s, Fillin was one of the only female climbers at the crag, though she didn’t mind. Climbers were her people — it was others who didn’t understand her. “I came back from college one year, and my father looked at me and he said” — pointing at her biceps — “What are those for?” Fillin remembers. Other times, she heard: “Who’s going to marry you if you have scraped-up knees?”
More women and nonbinary climbers have since started showing up. Still, it’s more common to see men, and the pit at Indian Rock can sometimes feel like a men’s locker room, depending on the crowd.
“There have certainly been times where it was like 20 guys and me,” said Grace O’Connell, a fixture at Mortar Rock who is familiar with male-dominated spaces as a mechanical engineering professor at UC Berkeley.
An accomplished climber and an introvert, O’Connell exudes a quiet confidence at the crag, letting her powerful moves on the wall speak for themselves. She is able to send problems that few casual climbers can. But she watches some other women climbers shy away from trying and failing on problems, for fear of taking up too much space.
Climbers have drawn attention to offensive route names. At Mortar Rock, Jungle Fever was renamed Fever and Yellow Fever was renamed Yellow Thumbs.
The parks are located in one of Berkeley’s least diverse neighborhoods, in part the product of historic policies that excluded African Americans and other people of color from buying homes east of Martin Luther King Jr. Way. The area’s racial demographics, coupled with the fact that rock climbing has drawn a primarily white crowd, can make for a tense experience.
Sexism and racism can surface in minute interactions. Men might assert their turn in the queue to climb more aggressively than a woman. Some wrongly assume a climber’s skill level based on their race or gender. And too often, climbers talk of having to earn respect by sending hard problems, rather than having it granted more easily to white, especially white male, climbers.
Even the oral exchange of information, treasured by some for its role in building community at Indian and Mortar rocks especially, can be exclusionary — particularly when it’s the only source of information.
“This is how information gets shared — through talking, through storytelling,” said Kimbrough Moore, a professor of philosophy and computer science at San Francisco State University and a rock climber. Both the beauty and harm in that is that “you have to be part of the community to get this information,” Moore said. At its worst, it can be a form of gatekeeping from climbers not already in the know.
There have also been times when bigotry at the rocks has been blatant, horrific, even.
In June 2020, a white passerby called Black children climbing Indian Rock the N-word. The children were part of a team called Brown Girls Climbing that cultivates a dedicated space for Black and brown youth to learn climbing. The team’s coach Emily Taylor, who has been an elite climbing coach, posted an Instagram video about the trauma it caused.
“It hurts our bodies, like rope around our bodies being pulled by the hands of white people,” Taylor said in the video. She explained the deeply rooted racism of the climbing industry. “And until you are able to have that hard conversation, we can’t move forward.”
Over the last few years, climbers began drawing attention to offensive route names across the country. Those who climb a route first get to name it, and some first ascenders have chosen offensive names. There’s Welfare Crack in Colorado; Clean Shaven Girls in Squamish, Canada. In Wyoming, climbers pushed to rename an entire wall of routes themed around Slavery.
At Mortar Rock, Jungle Fever was renamed Fever and Yellow Fever was renamed Yellow Thumbs.
Efforts are underway to make climbing more inclusive. There are groups for women and nonbinary climbers, queer climbers, Black climbers, climbers with disabilities, deaf climbers and more, some holding meetups at Indian Rock, introducing a more diverse generation to climbing outside.
Golden State Bouldering captures some of that oral tradition on paper in an effort to democratize access to the sport. The guidebook also features a more diverse range of local climbing legends in its pages. A full-page spread on Mortar Rock features O’Connell on the crux of The Impossible Wall, a boulder problem that was first climbed by Sherman in 1980.
Climbers and tribes navigate rocky terrain
At mountains across the country, rock climbers have clashed with Native tribes over land use.
Some climbers have ignored pleas by tribes and parks to limit rock climbing in places like Cave Rock in Tahoe and Mato Tipila in the Black Hills, commonly known as Devil’s Tower. In Utah, a climber drilled bolts over petroglyphs thousands of years old. They have also defied the Navajo Nation’s indefinite ban on rock climbing.
The rocks are “sacred places. To climb them is to profane them,” Charles Damon, parks director for the Navajo tribe, wrote in a 1971 letter.
Some Indigenous people believe that certain rock faces are the living embodiment of the first people. “It’s like, would you climb on grandma’s face?” Gandy asks. “Would you climb on the face of your creator, or your ancestor?”
Rock climbing’s emphasis on “conquering the mountain” and first ascents is often at odds with and disrespectful to Indigenous perspectives, ignoring Native people who may have climbed there before. One of California’s most famous alpinists, John Muir, helped establish the country’s national park system, but his vision of pristine wilderness in Yosemite Valley was absent Indigenous people, who were violently driven from the area to create the park under the banner of conservation.
But rock climbing does not always conflict with Native peoples’ relationships to land. It depends on the tribe, the rockface and the individual. In some places, climbing may be appropriate, but drilling lines of bolts is often seen as unnecessarily damaging.
This kind of conflict has not come to a head at Indian and Mortar rocks. Ohlone people haven’t protested climbing on the site, so far as Berkeleyside could find.
When asked about climbing on Indian and Mortar rocks, several Ohlone leaders responded that they didn’t have a problem with it as long as people weren’t harming the rocks.
“This is a beautiful place. It calls human beings to it for a reason,” Corrina Gould, who leads the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation, an Ohlone tribe, said by way of explaining why climbers are naturally drawn to the place.
Because the area is primarily used for bouldering now, there isn’t much bolting or scarring, though pieces of the rock break off from wear and tear every so often. Climbers caused the most significant damage to the rock by hammering pitons into the cracks in the 20th century and drilling several bolts at the top of a couple of climbs to create anchors.
The kind of reverence that the Lakota have for Mato Tipila, the Ohlone reserve for Tuyshtak, or Mt. Diablo, a place so sacred that Native don’t visit the top of it. Today, rock climbers climb the lower peak and hikers frequent the peak on a hiking trail.
There are Indigenous rock climbers who help raise awareness about the difference between the sacred rocks that tribes want to protect from human use and those where climbing is more appropriate. CHamoru climber Briana Mazzolini-Blanchard and Native Hawaiian climber Skye Kolealani Razon-Olds paired up to create The Indigenous Field Guide, a website highlighting Indigenous perspectives on outdoor recreation. It offers links to resources like Indigenous GeoTags, which identifies the Native tribes that land was stolen from.
In Yosemite, Ahwahneechee climber Lonnie Kauk intertwines his Indigenous culture with rock climbing. “The whole tribe climbs the route with me from the beginning. If I send, they send,” Kauk told Outside. “You get to know yourself when you climb [the rocks], and Yosemite gets to know you, too. … Our Native beliefs are that the rocks are watching you, and they like it when you’re strong.”
Safety innovations defined sport’s early days
Beginning in 1931, a cadre of burgeoning climbers made the rocks of Berkeley their training ground.
At the time, the adventure sport was still on the fringes in California. Climbers had just begun ascending the high peaks of Yosemite.
Without the time or money to get to the High Sierra every weekend or the expertise to climb there safely, the group — many graduate students at UC Berkeley — began practicing at Indian, Cragmont and Pinnacle rocks, all located within a mile of each other near the Hayward Fault. Regulars included Brower, Leonard, Jules Eichorn and Bestor Robinson, who went on to make some of the first ascents of now famous Yosemite Valley climbs.
“The peaks of the Sierra Nevada are 200 to 300 miles away — too far to reach every week-end,” Leonard, the future president of the Sierra Club, wrote in a 1934 essay in the Sierra Bulletin while he was a student at Cal Law. “We have all felt that we have derived values from local rock-climbing that we could have gained in no other way.”
Calling themselves the Cragmont Climbing Coalition, which later became the Sierra Club Rock Climbing Section, the adventurers did not seek out the most challenging routes up the local rocks — quite the opposite. The sloped routes they sought after in the Valley were low-angle, requiring more balance and technique than brute strength.
A 1950 diagram of climbing routes at Indian Rock published in The Yodeler lists the easiest routes first. All the better if a route could be done hands-free: “elbows permitted, but has been done without,” reads one description of a route that few bother to ascend today.
The techniques they perfected at Indian Rock put them at the forefront of climbing in the United States, making their big ascents possible, and are still foundational to the safety of the sport.
At first, they used cotton clotheslines for ropes, figuring they could hold about 200 pounds, and quickly switched to hemp ropes. They hammered pitons — metal spikes with a loop on the end — into cracks in the walls. They practiced hanging in the air and belaying the second climber from above. And they jumped off overhangs, over and over again, to make sure they knew how to safely take a fall.
“A fellow would jump 10, 15 feet freefall, and we would catch them before they reached the ground. Once in a while we’d reach the ground first,” Eichorn told an interviewer in the movie Vertical Frontier, laughing. “But most of the time we had 6 or 8 inches left over.”
Iterating on techniques brought over from European climbers, they moved the belay from the shoulders down to the hips and figured out that the belayer could soften the fall for the leader by leaving slack in the rope. Both are now the standard in rock climbing.
Before, any significant fall risked severe injury or death. The force of a fall might have snapped the rope in two, leaving both the leader and the follower in freefall. The techniques worked out at Indian Rock made mistakes possible, allowing climbers to test their limits. “I certainly wouldn’t be here if not,” Brower said.
Their practice sessions culminated in a breakthrough ascent in Yosemite. In 1934, after 11 hours of rock climbing, Leonard, Eichorn and Robinson summited Higher Cathedral Spire, completing the first technical roped climb in the Valley. Several months later, the trio submitted Lower Cathedral Spire, a shorter but more technically difficult climb. The summits ushered in a new era of ambitious roped climbing in Yosemite.
When the climbers began to jump
For decades, climbing at Indian Rock continued largely in the tradition of the Sierra Club Rock Climbing Section.
The emphasis was on rope safety, knowing your limits and preparing for the Valley — what Fillin called “the real world,” as opposed to a city park. The style of climbing was distinct: The climber moved slow, maintaining three points of contact with the wall at all times. Movements were methodical and balance was paramount.
But by the 1970s, a different kind of climbing began taking root. Climbers began attempting the steepest sections of Indian Rock, experimenting with dynamic movement, leaping to catch holds that were previously out of reach and contorting their bodies in new ways. Harder moves meant more falls and there were no pads to cushion the landing.
“We started jumping around,” said Scott Frye, who after 35 years has hung up his climbing shoes in exchange for table tennis.
As climbers pursued more challenging problems, the sport began to emphasize athleticism. What mattered before was that you got up the mountain. Now it mattered how you did it. It also paved the way for bouldering to become valued as a sport in its own right, not just as training for the big walls. Indian and Mortar rocks were among several crags across California and the country where this transition was brewing.
Not long after they started climbing, a group of teenagers including Frye and Nat Smale abandoned their mentors at Indian Rock in exchange for harder problems down the street. At Mortar Rock, the pair set the tone.
“They were an odd couple,” Sherman remembers. Smale was reserved and impossibly strong, “built like a golf tee” with a gymnast’s physique, his biceps bulging out from underneath his thrift-store T-shirts. Frye was the opposite, outgoing, and at least for a time, always seemed to lag just behind Smale in climbing ability. “We were all hanging onto Nat, truth be told,” Frye said.
In five years or so, Smale left an indelible mark on Mortar Rock.
In 1976, Smale strung together a series of moves to make Nat’s Traverse, a route 36 feet long that avoids Mortar Rock’s easier holds. It was among the most challenging endurance boulder problems in the country at the time.
After working on Nat’s Traverse nearly every day, “all the goddamn time,” for a year, Frye made the second ascent. Later, he climbed it in reverse (Stan Traverse — Nat’s spelled backwards) and then back and forth (Nat’s Stan Traverse). (The pair also helped establish a tradition of buildering — scaling the UC Berkeley campus buildings like real-life Spidermen — but that’s a story for another time.)
A few years after creating his famous traverse, Smale swapped climbing for textbooks while Frye continued to ascend in climbing. Check the first ascents of some of the Bay Area’s hardest routes and you’ll find Frye’s name listed.
Now a retired math professor, Smale moved back to Kensington, not far from Mortar Rock, into a home with a fence made from old climbing ropes. The two are still best friends, Smale still reserved next to Frye’s ebullience. Frye is a regular visitor at Smale’s home, dropping by often for dinner and margaritas on his vintage mountain bike.
As Smale and Frye have moved on from the sport, Nat’s Traverse has lived on in climbing lore. In 2016, Smale held a party marking the 40th anniversary of his first ascent, drawing climbing celebrities like Beth Rodden. The route remains an important goal post for ambitious climbers today.
The first woman to send Nat’s was Susan Patenaude, in the summer of 1988. Female climbers today can still name the women who’d climbed it before them (O’Connell was No. 15) thanks in part to the meticulous effort of a Mortar Rock regular named Rodney Jue.
Next up is a new generation of kid crushers, raised on climbing camps and competition teams as the sport has exploded in popularity.
Perhaps the youngest person to climb Nat’s Traverse is Arief Nagara, who completed the problem after a few tries, several months apart, at 10 years old. He has long moved on to his next goal: Climb a steep problem at Mortar that is one of the most difficult in the Bay Area before he turns 14.
The mail slot and the boomp and wedge
California climbing gyms wouldn’t open until the 1990s. Before the gyms transformed the sport, Mortar and Indian rocks were, as Frye put it, “the only game in town.”
In modern gyms, setters refresh the configuration of colorful plastic holds every couple of months, so the routes never go stale. At Indian and Mortar rocks, lacking that ability and having a small space to work with, local climbers relied on their creativity to continue to challenge themselves. The rocks became incubators that yielded new ways of moving, borne of necessity and a concentration of climbing talent.
One strategy climbers use to push themselves after they’ve mastered a wall is elimination. Once you make your way up the rock on the most obvious line, you take something away — a key hand hold, then another, then your right hand altogether. Removing holds forced climbers to think differently about how to ascend the walls and produced an inordinate number of variations to problems.
Climbers refer to the Indian and Mortar rocks as the “spiritual home of the eliminate.” In his guidebook Golden State Bouldering, Moore calls Indian Rock the “eliminate jungle.”
“I don’t think there’s any count to the number of problems at Indian Rock. It has to be in the thousands,” said Dan Zimmerlin, a white-haired tower of a man flanked by his giant Newfoundland dog, Leon, his sixth Newfoundland to accompany him at the rocks since he started climbing in 1977.
Though a longtime Yosemite climber, Zimmerlin admits to having a “tremendous fear of heights.” He avoided high-balls, boulder problems high off the ground, and later took to documenting “a tiny fraction” of the routes at Indian Rock, storing the files on a CD-ROM.
An experienced climber sees hundreds of variations emerge on every wall of the local crag. The moves bear their own unique names: the clampet, Ellie May, the boomp and wedge, the mail slot, the snatch, the ear. A persnickety hold at the top of Fever called “the peanut” bedevils many climbers.
While variations exist on all sorts of rock climbs, it’s not typical to approach climbing this way today, and the climbers steeped in the area’s history work to keep the tradition alive.
“Here, you’re encouraged to think a little bit differently,” O’Connell said. Eliminate culture is thriving at Mortar Rock, where climbers regularly build upon old variations, adding their own flair.
As gyms became more popular, climbers gravitated toward indoor training boards to get strong. But when gyms shuttered during the pandemic, the local crag resumed its role as a mass training board, introducing a new generation of climbers to the rocks’ endless variations.
At the pit, it’s typical to find climbers offering explanations of the many variations to strangers, suggesting a particular sequence of moves or just being friendly. If you go up to the left, it’s one route, but to the right, it’s another. O’Connell recently lent another woman climber her knee-bar pad to get through a hard problem, and weeks later, saw her send it after she bought her own.
A few minutes after entering the pit, Zimmerlin approaches a green climber wearing a tye-dye T-shirt. “Are you new here?” he asks gently, before offering to explain the possibilities hidden in the rock face.
Sanctuary and second home
On a foggy October evening at Indian Rock, climbers scaled its walls, adjusting the placement of their feet and the angle of their hands again and again, leaning one way and then the next, seeking a solution to an elusive boulder problem.
Some had been coming to the rocks virtually every day, pursuing bouldering with the kind of crazed intensity required of someone to repeat the same moves to failure, again and again, like Frye once did as a young climber. “It was all I had,” Frye said, biking home late at night down Arlington Avenue.
Occasionally, someone would call out for advice, frustrated. A chorus of suggestions, laced with historical knowledge of the climb — its variations, who developed it in the first place — would echo back. Somewhere between the concentrated effort and the natural beauty, a kind of sanctuary emerged for some, though not all, of the climbers who made the rocks a second home.
In this way, over thousands of evenings like this one, climbers improved their skills, cultivated a community and advanced the trajectory of the sport.
