Peninsula’s Bluffs Rise in Isolation From the Frenzy

You can call them cliff dwellers, because Vickie Terry and her cousin, Robin Christian, hold their kaffeeklatsches perched like eagles on the tops of cliffs.

They started 23 years ago. They used to convene once a month on the bluffs near Point Mugu, looking out over the ocean while they discussed their families, their childhoods, events in the news--anything, really.

Now that Terry lives in Chapel Hill, N.C., it is tougher to maintain the tradition, but they try when they can. So on a misty Thursday morning, with Terry in town for her mother’s 81st birthday, they occupy a shady aerie atop a cliff in Palos Verdes Estates, more than 100 feet above the rocky beach of Bluff Cove. What passes for a bench is the massive root of a gnarled pine tree. They sip their coffee from silver mugs with a big thermos between them.

“You feel like you’re the only people here,” Christian says, describing the expanse and solitude.

The view is spectacular. Off in the distance rises the facing cliff across the cove--a striated wall of tobacco brown and tan, mottled with green brush--and beyond that the long stripe of sand running through Redondo, Hermosa and Manhattan beaches.

These cliffs are among the Los Angeles region’s most arresting features. Running nearly unbroken for 15 miles around the rim of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, they soar to 150 feet in places--sheer drops and precipitous slopes.

The cliffs form a wall against the beach throngs you might find in Redondo and Manhattan. On the cliffs you see a much smaller, less frenzied, crowd: artists, hikers, people walking their dogs. There are no skateboarders, no beach babes, no blasting tape decks. At night, lovers roll quietly into secluded vantage points.

Terry attended Palos Verdes High in the 1960s. She remembers very well.

“Palm Tree Lane was a smooch spot,” she says, recalling their nickname for a cliff-top row of palms. Her avid tone invites a question: Did she park there herself?

“Absolutely. Several times.”

Christian gives her a sharp look.

“I’m not even going to touch that.”

*

In Los Angeles, a vast flood plain lying flat against the sea, the cliffs are an anomaly. A million years of geologic uplift, powered by the grinding of tectonic plates, hoisted the Palos Verdes Peninsula off the sea floor. The land is still rising about a foot every 1,000 years, according to geologists.

Like Gibraltar, the exposed rock has endured because it is especially hard. Some of it is sedimentary strata, rich in fossils, created 15 million years ago and cemented with silica or dolomite. Some is igneous basalt, formed by volcanic foment just below the ocean floor.

Wind, rain and tides have carved the cliffs and the narrow, rocky beaches below, says Perry Ehlig, a professor emeritus of geology at Cal State L.A. Seen from above, the cliffs form a line as wrinkled as crepe paper. They are changing at an astonishing rate, compared to other geologic features.

Landslides this half-century have destroyed homes near Portuguese Bend and Bluff Cove. This spring, a 400-foot chunk fell out of a new cliff-top golf course, a slide that not only dumped 1 million gallons of sewage into the sea--the effluent from a ruptured pipe--but also plunged a man who was walking his dog 100 feet down the cliff into a crevice. He was not badly hurt but had to be rescued by airlift.

In spite of these mishaps, the cliffs are widely beloved, a favorite place of rich and poor, locals and outsiders alike.

Jim Piper was a skinny kid from Hermosa when he first surfed here in 1957. He fondly recalls the system of ropes that surfers used to negotiate the steep dirt trails that slice down some of the cliffs. Rain would make the trails muddy and slick, but surfers, being surfers, were determined to surf anyway.

Today the ropes are gone, but surfers and beachcombers still use the trails to scramble down to Lunada Bay, Bluff Cove and other inlets.

Piper, a retired commercial pilot, has not caught a wave in ages, but he and his wife, Diana, so loved the striking landscape that they moved here. They have lived for 28 years on Paseo del Mar, in a tree-shrouded, two-story home across the street from the cliffs.

*

Homes rimming the peninsula seem to rest on a giant pedestal--a fitting image, given the property values: upward of $5 million for the better cliff-top views. Yet price alone fails to convey the startling contrast between neighborhoods above and the dense, noisy beach towns below.

To drive up here is like entering “a time warp,” says Jim Hendrickson, the city manager of Palos Verdes Estates, the oldest of the four small towns on the hill. PVE, as the locals call it, was incorporated in 1939--a 60th-year celebration was just held--and has grown to a population of 14,550. Still, it remains a town with no street lights and not a single traffic signal. Those who live here do not come for the sand, surf and parties; they are an older bunch looking for a retreat from the surrounding metropolis.

The feel is languid, quiet, and, in spite of the wealth, unpretentious. There are rambling lawns and circuitous roads, trees and peacocks, and only enough markets and eateries to keep from starving. Swaths of open land undulate and abruptly fall away to the rocks below.

In such isolation, news rarely happens. A murder recorded earlier this year was the first in PVE since 1992. When a body turns up here, it is usually because someone hauled it in from a more violent place and dumped it over the cliff. Or because someone fell. Or jumped.

Suicides occur at the cliffs perhaps three or four times a year, authorities say. A few of them--high school sweethearts, a Superior Court judge--are sufficiently stunning to merit a big write-up; others go almost unnoticed.

Stroll below the cliffs of Rocky Point and you can smell death in the air. It is only a dead seal that has washed ashore, lying flattened on the rocks near a much larger carcass: the remains of the Dominator, a Greek freighter that piled up here in 1961. Lost in a dense fog without radar, the 441-foot ship crashed on a reef and defied more than 50 attempts by salvagers to move it. Though all of its crew members were rescued, several divers later drowned venturing too close to the wreckage.

The rusted bow, 35 feet long, now sits canted on the beach--you can walk on the side of it--and eaten through in places. It is a mottled orange, frosted with guano and surrounded by other debris: twisted beams, bent panels of uncertain purpose, half a car engine melted away by the salt water. Sixty yards away is the broken hulk of a bulldozer, its massive shovel crushed against the tide pool rocks.

The only person on the beach today is Evan Mathis, the creative director of an advertising agency. He has climbed down the cliff trail at Lunada Bay because he wants to create a rough, metallic look for the cover of a video. So all alone, he clambers around the Dominator, shooting photos of the corrosion.

“I just happen to know it’s a local resource for this type of thing,” Mathis shrugs when he is finished, preparing for the steep climb back up the cliff face. “It’s a pretty cool thing to check out.”