Big Sur is a marvel of topography, a titanic clash of ocean and cliff. Along the roadside, cascades poured from narrow defiles toward the Pacific. The Santa Lucia Mountains were swathed in green after recent rains. On a cloudy January morning, I set out to meet Pantilat at a dirt pullout along Highway 1. “A lot of the hikes are not really what most people would call fun.”
“There are ticks and leg-breaking obstacles,” he said. To ease his mind-or perhaps my own-about my ability, I mentioned that in years past I had done some strenuous canyoneering in Utah. He said it was possible on one condition: that I didn’t reveal our destination. But I don’t doubt that I’m the first person to see some of these places in a long, long time.”Īgainst my better judgment, I asked to join him for a day. “Indigenous people were living, hunting, and gathering in what is today the Ventana Wilderness for millennia before us. “I don’t claim to have discovered any of these waterfalls,” he told me. It entails hours of careful preparation, research, and conversations with people who intimately know the Big Sur backcountry. It also demands supreme endurance, strength, and, occasionally, a measure of luck. Getting to many of these places requires a host of skills, from bouldering to route finding through complex terrain. He calls it the Big Sur Waterfall Project. To date he has found more than 150, from small pour-offs to towering 100-foot cascades. Several years ago, Pantilat set out to find and document as many unnamed waterfalls in central California’s Big Sur as he could.
“You can tell a lot about how beautiful a place is going to be,” he said, “just by looking carefully at a topo map.” He meticulously pores over maps, looking for patterns in the contour lines that indicate deep gorges, towering cliffs, ragged spires, and other severe landscapes that, to his eye, are places of scenic grandeur. “It could be a canyon or a hanging valley, someplace that looks totally isolated,” Pantilat said. Rather than the longest distances or the biggest climbs, he’s after elegant routes to the most out-of-the-way places on the map. These days, the 38-year-old, who works as a corporate attorney in San Carlos, California, goes at a relatively slower pace, mostly off-trail, seeking out and photographing destinations far from the weekend crowds. I was going too fast to let it all sink in.” I felt like I was moving too quickly through all of these amazing places. “I wasn’t having a whole lot of fun anymore. Then, after placing third in a 50K in 2013, he gave up the racing scene. “It also meant that I was constantly dealing with injuries-Achilles strains, IT-band soreness, you name it,” Pantilat said. Between 20, he won 36 of the 49 races he entered.Ī typical training week consisted of 65 to 80 miles on the trail. For a while, he held the fastest known times on more than a dozen routes in California and Washington, including the John Muir Trail, the Lost Coast Trail, and the Sierra High Route, a grueling 200-mile traverse of the Sierra crest. Years ago, Pantilat was a top-tier trail racer. “But some of these places are just way too sensitive to disclose to everyone.” “I get flack sometimes,” he told me on the phone. Pantilat never revealed where his images were taken, and he rarely appeared in them. But the vantages themselves were unfamiliar-rugged, even otherworldly. As an avid hiker and backpacker with decades of mileage in the wilds of California, I recognized the general features of the images he posted-the scoured granite of the Sierra Nevada and Trinity Alps, the poppy-littered ridges of the Coast Ranges, and the fern-strewn gorges of the Santa Lucia Mountains. I first learned about Leor Pantilat the way one learns about lots of things these days: while sitting on my couch and scrolling through Instagram.
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