Living with the Land — The Central Coast's Enduring Connection to Nature and Conservation

The Central Coast holds its ground. At Morro Rock, a 581-foot volcanic plug at the harbor mouth, the Chumash consider it too sacred to climb; the Salinan hold the established right to ascend it for solstice ceremonies; the state quarried it for breakwater stone from 1889 to 1969 and then stopped. Now peregrine falcons nest there, and the public cannot climb it. Eight thousand acres at Montana de Oro have been state land since 1965, the Chumash present long before the Spanish arrived in 1542. Twenty-five elephant seals came ashore near Piedras Blancas in 1990; by 2020, between 15,000 and 25,000 arrived each year. The monarch butterflies at Pismo Beach tell the harder story — a colony once in the tens of thousands now counted in the hundreds, down roughly 90 percent since the 1980s. This coast keeps the ledger honestly, gain and loss both.