Messy Affair Plays Out Atop a Famed Rock

Born with a caul and pale-blue eyes, John Burch was always seen as different by his Native American family. He was just 3, he says, when his grandmothers led him up a steep trail to a summit thought to have great mystical power.

In the lore of his people, it was called Lesamo, where the Falcon of ancient legend killed the serpent Teleekatapelta. Craggy and dome-shaped, and often shrouded in fog, the dominant landmark of the Central California beachfront is more widely known as Morro Rock.

Up top sit a stone altar and throne that his grandmothers helped him build, Burch says. And in recent years, on dates prescribed by the heavens, Burch has again climbed the 576-foot-high rock in Morro Bay to practice rituals handed down by elders of his Salinan tribe. He is alone all night in blackness and starlight.

“A perfect hallway of isolation,” Burch, 52, calls the spot where he enters an altered state and asks for spiritual guidance. “There’s suffering involved. It’s cold. It’s dark. It’s treacherous.”

His throne is upholstered in moss and lichen. He says he finishes the night of prayer feeling like he’s “floating on air. It’s euphoria. It’s peace.”

The solitary rituals have not fostered much euphoria among environmental groups, however. The top of Morro Rock is a nesting ground for the peregrine falcon, a species once nearly wiped out by DDT poisoning. Normally it is forbidden to hikers and climbers.

Nor has Burch created any peace between the Salinan and Chumash Indians, tribes engaged in a bitter dispute. Each claims Morro Rock as a sacred spot.

The tale is messy and the details seem to differ with the teller. But about three years ago, Burch sought a permit to conduct his rituals atop the state-owned rock and was granted one despite the area being declared a falcon sanctuary.

“It’s broadly the policy of the department to allow reasonable requests for religious practices to take place on state park property,” says Joe Mette, a district superintendent for the California Department of Parks and Recreation, who approved Burch’s request. “He made some fairly compelling arguments. He said biologists go up there--and they handle the eggs. He said, ‘I won’t be anywhere near the nests.’ He didn’t intend to harm the birds in any way.”

Burch said he has been able to use the permit only two or three times. The rituals are usually conducted during an equinox or solstice. Burch had just finished such a ritual and was descending the rock one foggy morning, he recalls, when he was spotted by a member of the Audubon Society.

That person alerted the rival Chumash leadership. Elders met and brought political pressure to revoke Burch’s permit.

“We were very upset,” says Rhonda Vigil, whose husband, Mark, is chief of the Chumash tribe’s San Luis Obispo County Council. “This is Chumash territory. It’s a sacred shrine to us.”

Historic evidence suggests the Chumash held rites atop Morro Rock for centuries, but the tribe has deliberately avoided the summit in recent decades because of the falcons, according to Tarren Collins, an attorney for the Chumash who also heads a local chapter of the Sierra Club.

“There are many places you can hold ceremonies,” Collins says. “You don’t have to interfere with nesting peregrines.”

Collins says she and several tribal elders, including Mark and Rhonda Vigil, stood watch at the landmark during the summer solstice of 2000 to prevent Burch from going up. Yet the conflict simmers.

Not long ago, Burch led a small group of Salinans in a winter-solstice ceremony at the base of the rock--outside the protected area--but he vows to seek a new permit to return to a holy summit he considers irreplaceable. The altitude creates a sense of solitude that opens a spiritual door, he says. It fulfills him and makes him whole.

Morro Rock, a volcanic plug formed 21 million years ago, has a grandeur many find difficult to describe. The peak, sometimes called the Gibraltar of the Pacific, is one of the Seven Sisters, a row of volcanic mounds reaching a dozen miles from San Luis Obispo to the sea. Others are larger, but Morro Rock rests right at the water’s edge, dominating the harbor of Morro Bay.

The Portuguese explorer Juan Cabrillo saw the rock and named it in 1542--for a word meaning round hill. The name does it justice only from a distance. Up close it is immense, complex and chiseled-looking, as if some god had gouged out half of a Yosemite cliff and dropped it on the beach.

The rock offers, as John Updike once wrote of an old ballpark, “a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities.” It has visible strata and veins etched with lichen, angled faces chipped and eroding, jumbled boulders caulked with dirt and grass. It is painted by the sun and sky and seems to change all day--becoming rosy and gray and, finally, at dusk, a black silhouette.

“When Morro Bay gets fogged in, there’s like this halo that comes over Morro Rock,” says one nearby resident. “It has this presence about it.”

That remains the case even though quarrying in the first half of the 20th century removed about a third of the rock’s surface--material used to build breakwaters. People who know little of the rock’s history feel beckoned by it. It conveys a force, says Laurel Day, who recalls the sense of mystery she felt when seeing it for the first time on a family trip in the late 1950s.

“It makes me feel less stressed just looking at it,” she says. “I could stare at that rock all day long. I’m sure it was a sacred spot for the Indians--it’s got to have been.”

And still is. But a solution to the John Burch controversy appears doubtful any time soon. Not even the state can decide who should call the shots.

Two separate agencies are involved--the parks department, which oversees the land, and the Department of Fish and Game, which runs the sanctuary.

“Where’s the final authority going to rest?” wonders Mette, the parks official. “Is Fish and Game going to represent the birds? Or will parks ... look after the human side?”

He can’t say.

“That’s the embarrassing part.”