Mortar Rock Climbing

This digital Mortar Rock climbing guidebook gives you GPS navigation, verified topos, and beta for hundreds of climbs. Explore classics and hidden gems with offline access to maps, directions, and beta videos. Whether it's your first visit or fiftieth, KAYA makes your Mortar Rock days smoother, safer, and more dialed.

Mortar Rock is the center of hard climbing in the East Bay. The main boulder contains piles of variations ranging from V0 to V13. The following pages contain the most obvious lines, followed by a curated collection of eliminates, variations, and linkups. The holds are notoriously sharp, and the climbing itself is relentless. Mortar Rock will never appeal to everyone, but for those who get it, this is paradise, albeit a heinous one.

Around the back of Mortar Rock there are rocks with mortars in them. Part of what makes these mortars impressive is that the Ohlone people car... Show more

This digital Mortar Rock climbing guidebook gives you GPS navigation, verified topos, and beta for hundreds of climbs. Explore classics and hidden gems with offline access to maps, directions, and beta videos. Whether it's your first visit or fiftieth, KAYA makes your Mortar Rock days smoother, safer, and more dialed. Mortar Rock is the center of hard climbing in the East Bay. The main boulder contains piles of variations ranging from V0 to V13. The following pages contain the most obvious lines, followed by a curated collection of eliminates, variations, and linkups. The holds are notoriously sharp, and the climbing itself is relentless. Mortar Rock will never appeal to everyone, but for those who get it, this is paradise, albeit a heinous one. Around the back of Mortar Rock there are rocks with mortars in them. Part of what makes these mortars impressive is that the Ohlone people carved them directly into the stone, and it is the permanence of the material that has preserved them all these years. Other Native cultural resources, such as the many shellmounds (sacred burial sites) scattered around the Bay Area, have been systematically demolished over the last few hundred years. The destruction of shellmounds continues today. As a result, there are annual protests at the Bay Street Mall in Emeryville, which was built on top of a large shellmound. Similarly, in 2021 the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, one of many Ohlone tribes in the area, lost the legal battle to stop a housing development on another shellmound in Berkeley. From the Berkeley Circle, head north on Arlington Ave. Take an immediate right onto Indian Rock Ave. Pass Indian Rock on your left and Mortar Rock will be on the right before the road makes a 90 degree turn. Parallel park.