The stories below first appeared in This Week in Berkeley, our Saturday morning newsletter. Sign up for free.
Living in Berkeley, Indian Rock has always been a go-to place for me. It’s the first place I take family when they visit and one of my favorite places to go bouldering on a Saturday afternoon.
The place always seemed to have a personality of its own, so I had the idea of writing a short profile of Indian and Mortar rocks, the way you would profile an interesting Berkeley character. I originally thought it would focus mainly on the assorted oddballs I’d seen climbing and figured it would take me a few weeks. It ended up taking a year and a half.
The stories these boulders have to tell us are more complex and surprising than I could have imagined.
I learned about the centuries-old efforts to erase Indigenous people from Berkeley’s landscape and met Ohlone leaders who are part of a long lineage resisting those attempts. Indian and Mortar rocks are a link between past and present for Ohlone people who have made the Bay Area home for thousands of years. One of the most moving moments of my reporting came when Monica Arellano and Gloria Arellano-Gomez from the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe brought their three children to the rocks for the first time.
I also learned the extent of these few boulders’ influence on the sport of rock climbing. Did you know that many modern climbing safety techniques were worked out at Indian Rock in the 1930s? Or that David Brower, who went on to head the Sierra Club, and free soloist Alex Honnold both scaled Berkeley’s stones? I loved hearing about the shenanigans of old from climbers now in their 60s and 70s.
This month I shared everything I learned in a two-part story: Part one explores the rocks’ place in Berkeley’s social history and landscape, and the role — and exclusion — of Native people in that story. And part two explores their place in climbing history.
The series is both a critical examination and a love letter to my favorite place in Berkeley. I hope you’ll take some time this weekend to read it. Let me know what the rocks mean to you by replying to this email. — Ally Markovich
For an episode of KQED’s The Bay, host Ericka Cruz Guevarra interviewed Markovich about the process of writing these stories and how her reporting changed her relationship to the rocks and to the sport of climbing. The episode was produced by Guevarra, Maria Esquinca and Adhiti Bandlamudi. Read a transcript here.
How to convey what a rock feels?
When Ally first told me she wanted to write a profile about Indian Rock, I panicked. Photographing spaces and inanimate objects is tough.
For me, photography is a precious window, and sometimes a mirror, into the lives and experiences of others. But how do you convey feelings from a piece of land, a rock or a tree trunk?
At first, I focused on what I knew — the way people move through and interact with the space. I observed how a girl would run through a clearing at Indian Rock and how a man who’d climbed Mortar Rock for decades would touch the stone he knows by memory with his eyes closed.
These small personal moments could have been enough for the assignment, but something remarkable happened. We had a lot of time to work on this story, and so I returned over and over. Sometimes I’d accompany Ally on interviews with climbers or Ohlone people like Corrina Gould, other times I’d go with friends and family, or by myself.
Each visit changed the way I saw and understood the boulders.
During our first meeting with Gould in August 2022, she said that in the worldview of the xučyun (Huichin) Ohlone people, spirits leave this world through the Western Gate. There’s a spectacular view of the Western Gate (the Golden Gate) from Indian Rock, and it made me remember how much I enjoy photographing places of worship, like cathedrals and mosques, with their awe-inspiring structures and soothing light, ideal for reflection.
I began to search for that at the boulders. For the Ohlone people, nature is a living being with identity and memory; Gould talks about the rhyolite as “rock relatives.” This reverence toward the boulders mirrored some of the climbers’ relationship with the space. And I decided to photograph the rocks using techniques I use in portraiture — focusing on their quirks and the way they stand, searching for identifying details like scars.
I hope that you’ll find in my photos a portrait of a place that’s captured the imagination of people for thousands of years. I take joy in knowing that I may have spent over a year photographing the rocks, but that this is just an insignificant, minuscule blip in their vast history. — Ximena Natera
the stones in the hills
The stories Indian and Mortar rocks can tell us
The famous boulders, places of contemplation, ceremony, gossip and industry for the Ohlone, are a symbol of a destroyed cultural landscape but also of what remains worth protecting.
How Berkeley’s famous boulders took rock climbing to new heights
A fiercely loyal community of climbers has been puzzling over Indian and Mortar rocks for decades, the sport evolving as they devise new challenges to traverse the rhyolite.
