The catastrophist's idea that California will someday slide into the sea plays well in the theater, but can't really happen. On the other hand, parts of California can, and that is what began to develop about 30,000 years ago when a section of sea cliff just west of what now is called Piedra Gorda Canyon started landsliding seaward. Eventually, a series of progressively larger slides occurred working upslope and westward until the feature now called Big Rock Mesa was formed. If ever a landform was misnamed, Big Rock Mesa is it. A mesa is a relatively large, broad, isolated flat-topped hill. It is an erosional remnant of the kind John Ford loved to have in the background while photographing John Wayne atop a racing stagecoach with his carbine, blasting away right and left, at native Americans on galloping pintos who for some reason were incensed (the natives, not the pintos). Big Rock Mesa is not a mesa; it is a kind of terrace, one formed by landsliding. And "Piedra Gorda" means fat rock, not Big Rock. This has always bothered me, purist that I am. However, my campaign to rename Big Rock Mesa "Fat Rock Landslide Terrace" is going nowhere, and I may have to abandon the idea. But I digress.

As Jack Corrodi tells it, the area we now generally refer to as Big Rock was once owned by William Randolph Hearst who, during WWII, forgot to pay property taxes on its six hundred acres which included a mile of adjacent beach. When early Malibu entrepreneur Art Jones found out about this, he took a train and about 45,000 dollars in a paper sack to San Francisco. There, after schmoozing up Hearst's receptionist, he met with the great man. Although Corrodi is not sure of the exact conversation, it appears that Jones told Hearst that he wanted to buy the property and had brought the cash with him in the sack. Hearst asked to look in the sack and when Jones let him, Hearst said "Deal."

Back in Malibu after the change in title was worked out, Jones sold a chunk of the upper Big Rock area to Pierce Sherman a realtor from Pacific Palisades. Sherman graded upper Big Rock Drive, Rockcroft Drive, Seaboard and Rockpoint roads, and Little Rock, Cool Oak, McAnany, White Cap, and Pinnacle ways, and subdivided. All this was before the County had a grading ordinance which, it turns out, became kind of important.

Jones kept the lower part of the mesa, i.e., the terrace area, as his ranch. At this point, the history is a little murky, but eventually an outfit called the Cave Club (I believe a sort of poor man's California Club) apparently became the successor in interest to the terrace where Jones' ranch was located. In 1959, the Cave Club hired me to study the terrace for a subdivision. In those days, it wasn't so clear that the terrace was due to landsliding, but it was obvious that there was a potential landslide problem due to the injection of effluent from some two hundred or so proposed septic systems. As a consequence, I suggested that along with subdivision, an off-site sewage treatment plant would be a good idea. In support, based on rather wild assumptions, I calculated that if septic systems were to be used, landsliding would begin to occur about seven years after substantial residential development.

A treatment plant for Big Rock Mesa was then, as now, a good idea geology-wise, but a bad idea employment-wise, and the Cave Club bid me a not-so-fond farewell. Sure enough, seven years later, slope failures began to occur in the sea cliff below Inland Lane and eventually involved all of the terrace and part of the upper Big Rock area as well to become, finally, the Big Rock Mesa landslide. The sliding began almost seven years to the day after my report to the Cave Club. I've always felt good about that.

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