Stoney Point Park : Jesus Wall Tests Alpinists’ Mettle on a Large Scale

Halfway up the perpendicular Jesus Wall is some people’s idea of the right place to be on a cool spring morning, when the fog softens the distant houses of the San Fernando Valley and a few well-placed expansion bolts make the difference between life and death 50 feet above the ground.

“It’s difficult to be pessimistic. When you take a good fall and come out alive, you feel exuberant,” said Joe Chiang, 26, a physicist who lives in Huntington Beach.

Chiang spoke while waiting his turn to mount the Jesus Wall at Stoney Point Park, a city-owned pile of sandstone cliffs and boulders in the foothills of the Santa Susana Mountains north of Chatsworth.

Its 300-foot summit, surrounded by sagebrush, wild tobacco, laurel and poison oak, is hardly Alpine. Instead of cows grazing in green meadows, nearby Topanga Canyon Boulevard is lined with pickup trucks and sports cars, and the cliffs are splashed with graffiti. But climbers say Stoney Point is the best place in Los Angeles to practice the skills needed to scale tougher mountains elsewhere, and more of them are showing up on weekends as the sport grows in popularity.

A guidebook lists 55 routes that are hard enough to require the protection of a rope, and several boulders that offer challenges closer to the ground for veterans and neophytes alike.

“You think about the little square inch in front of you and whether you’re going to make the next move,” said beginning climber Cindy Wood, 25, a law student from Lancaster. “It takes a lot of concentration.”

Wood has yet to reach the stage of climbing the Jesus Wall, which may have been named after someone who left his name there in spray paint, or because that is what the climbers say when they run out of handholds and footholds.

This climbing up a straight wall requires a lot of experience, along with special sticky-rubber shoes and dozens of pieces of jangling gear to hold a 165-foot rope in place to break the force of a fall.

Wood said she finds enough of a challenge in shimmying up the narrow gap in the heart of 30-foot-high Split Rock, a cleft boulder at the eastern end of the park.

Elbow Grease

Working her way up by pushing palms, elbows, back, buttocks and feet against opposing rock faces, she emerged eventually and picked her way gingerly down the sloping outer face.

“I like getting up to the top,” she said.

The area has been a climbers’ outdoor gymnasium for more than 50 years, according to the Stoney Point Guide, a handbook that records a Sierra Club expedition on Dec. 1, 1935, as the first organized outing.

Some of the country’s best known alpinists, among them Royal Robbins, author of two standard instruction books about rock climbing, and Yvon Chouinard, head of the country’s largest manufacturer of mountaineering equipment, made their first climbs there in the years after World War II.

In the Stoney Point Guide, Robbins recalls the rock then as “not far different than it is today: lots of graffiti, plenty of trash, poison oak--and the best playground for budding rock climbers.”

One climber who remembers that era is Alexander Saxton, 66, a history professor at UCLA who knew Robbins and Chouinard in those days.

‘A Lot More Popular’

“The world of climbers used to be rather small,” he said. “It’s a lot more popular today.”

Although he is decades older than most new climbers, Saxton says the demands of the sport have kept him in shape. Because of the prolonged effort needed, climbers seek to develop aerobic fitness as well as muscle power in their fingers, arms and legs.

“It keeps his fingernails clean, too,” said his companion, Mike Nauer, 33, referring to the abrasive qualities of sandstone when held in a death grip.

Nauer, an employee of a mountaineering store, said a fully equipped climber could spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on equipment, but most people get by with used equipment by shopping at sales and by sharing with friends.

At the other end of the scale, a climber can get by with a rope, a few oval-shaped metal spikes to hold it in place, a pair of sticky-soled shoes and a bag of chalk to absorb sweat, all of which should cost less than $200.

Hands in the Dirt

The use of chalk is debatable, however, since esthetically minded climbers dislike the white stains it leaves on the rock. Plain dirt will do the job as well, said Kathy Moore, training secretary of the newly formed Southern California Mountaineers Assn., which uses Stoney Point for practice climbs.

No one knows exactly how many rock climbers there are, although Peter Metcalf, general manager of Chouinard Equipment, said there are about 250,000 in the country, including mountaineers and ice climbers. According to Paul Hellweg, author of the Stoney Point Guide, the number of committed climbers in the Los Angeles area is probably around 12,000. One gauge of the sport’s increasing popularity is the surge in equipment sales. According to Metcalf, Chouinard expects to sell $3 million worth of equipment this year, a 31% increase over 1985. He attributes the growth in popularity to safer new equipment, which in effect makes more daring maneuvers easier.

He also said the sport seems to follow a 10-year cycle, although when it last boomed in 1975, most of the practitioners would take off for months on end to go climbing in places like Yosemite.

Trendy Bunch

Now, the average climber is more likely to train by running after work, then head for Stoney Point on a weekend in a Saab, BMW or other trendy car after a leisurely brunch, Metcalf says.

Although beginning climbers often suffer cut fingers, gashed shins and other scrapes, Capt. Steve Bressler of nearby Fire Station No. 96 said emergency calls to Stoney Point average no more than one a month and those generally involve motorists or youths on a drinking spree.

One climber was killed when he fell 150 feet last year, and there was another fatality in 1979.

Fearing possible damage suits, the city attorney’s office and the Recreation and Parks Department recommended against buying the 22-acre property. Mayor Tom Bradley then vetoed the transaction. But the City Council, heeding appeals from the Sierra Club and other groups concerned that it might be turned over to commercial development, overrode his action and agreed to pay $250,000 for the rocky site.

Improvements Avoided

The city has been careful to make no improvements since the sale was completed in 1982, since such changes could be seen as creating an “attractive nuisance” and could figure in a lawsuit in case of injury.

“One of the things we were told was that as long as we keep it in its natural state, the city probably does not have liability as far as climbers are concerned, because they take the risk of doing it,” said Councilman Hal Bernson, who led the drive to acquire the property.

It was the fear of legal action that prompted formation of the Mountaineers Assn., most of whose members once made up the rock-climbing section of the Sierra Club. They split off last winter after the Sierra Club could not find insurance to cover any climbing dangerous enough to require a rope. They now climb without insurance.