San Francisco Call Bulletin , February 1933

Fremont Older
President and Editor

Every time I have visited Point Lobos, just south of Carmel, I have been thrilled to my finger tips by its marvelous beauty and grandeur, but have never been able to describe it.  When asked to I have replied: "It is beyond description," and let it go at that.  Not until recently have I eve read an adequate description of it.

In the New York Times, Robert L. Duffus has done the ob to my entire satisfaction.  Duffus is a graduate of Stanford University, and later, became the editorial write for the old Bulletin.  Still later, for a short time, he held the same position on the Call.  He has been in New York for twelve years, but has not forgotten his many visits to this beauty spot in the world.  Here are some quotations from his article:

“Point Lobos is a salient in a western front of warfare between land and sea.  The brunt of the assault of the sea is met by rocks, some half submerged islets lying just off the point, and the broken ramparts of rugged cliffs. The surf charges thunderingly into narrow v-shaped indentations, mounts sometimes for twenty or thirty feet to wet a sunny brown slope which was seemingly out of reach, roars like distant artillery in the hollows of the Devil’s Cauldron.  It is as though the Monterey cypress, like the Celts of Europe, had been crowded further and further westward by some enemy from the land and at this point had met a second enemy, the sea, and made its final struggle for existence…Point Lobos lies like a gnarled fist thrust against the sea, a hand of King Canute commanding the tide to come no further…The beauty of its remains the beauty of strife and of danger and of adaptation to strife and danger.

The smooth brown safety of rolling fields give place suddenly to abrubt declivities; an unwary visitor could wander down a gentle slope and suddenly find himself slipping over an unexpected edge into thin air, into the white surf and onto ragged rocks far below.  Beauty and death are close at hand.”

After Robert Duffus’ satisfying description of this beauty spot it is pleasant to know that the state had added it to the park system.  Point Lobos had been privately owned, but largely through the activity of the Point Lobos Association the deeds to it have been passed into possession of the state.

Image of lower Sea Lion Point to Sea Lion Rocks by Chuck Bancroft,  copyright 2010