California Swimming Holes: Red Rocks of Santa Barbara Part Two

Filed in archive on July 21, 2006

To be seventeen again! Crazy enough, brazen enough, filled with enough moxie to propel oneself off this ragged stack of boulders close to eighty feet from the shallow swimming hole. This one kid with the mop top must have sat on top of that precipice for nearly a half hour trying to get enough courage to join his friends in the leap of faith.




Down below, poised with my camera for several minutes in the focused position, I was surrounded by college-aged kids who have neither respect nor consideration for the feat being attempted above. Their catcalls and words of discouragement did not help raise the boy's confidence level.




"Go, Chicken!" "Yeah, c'mon, kid, jump!" "Either jump or fall off and hit the rocks, it don't matter!" "We're waiting!"

The college kids forced me into counteracting this pseudo-psyche job by shouting common sense things like: "Don't go unless you feel really confident!" "Don't listen to them, you can always back down and not jump!" "Don't jump unless you are sure, really sure you are going to make it!"




But my cries of encouragement were dwarfed by cries of astonishment as the first of the high school boys launched off the top, arms circling and flailing, and BOOM . . . SPLASH . . . into the narrow pool below. Cheers and Applause follow each of their trajectories and subsequent emersions.




For the twice-your-age old guy author of this weblog, "the eighty- footer" was a bit out of my range, and quite honestly, it may have been out of my range seventeen years ago too! However, I do like to jump into fresh water pools like this, and there was another option. The twenty-five footer. The only problem with particular leap of faith is that you have to do some serious rock-climbing out and around jutting chunks of limestone to get to the take off spot. This means not loosing your grip and falling, because were that to happen, you would be in worse condition than if slipped off the eighty footer. Why? Well off the top you at least have a chance of hitting water, whereas in some of the rock-climbing sections to get to the lower take off, there is nothing but solid, hard ground below.

Red Rocks

ER Harris