Krakauer - Classic Krakauer: Mark Foos last ride, After the fall, and other essays from the vault

PUBLISHED IN OUTSIDE, MAY 1995

Twenty-two miles down Highway 1 from San Francisco, a craggy fist of land called Pillar Point thrusts emphatically into the cold Pacific. Friday, December 23, 1994, dawned fair over this stretch of coast. Mountainous waves crashed against the headlands, spraying up billows of mist that unfurled languidly across the beaches. Beyond the end of the point, some fifteen surfers bobbed in the winter sunlight, scanning the horizon for approaching swells.

It was not uncommon to see surfers off the pointa spot they called Mavericksdressed in heavy, hooded wetsuits and sitting astride oversize boards. But the hovering helicopter, the three boats of photographers just outside the surf line, and the throng of spectators lining the cliffs suggested this was no ordinary surf session.

For more than a week, the largest, most perfectly shaped waves in a decade had been thundering over the reef at the end of Pillar Point. Word traveled quickly over the international surfers grapevine: Mavericks, which had recently emerged as one of the worlds heaviest waves, was going off. Upon hearing the news, a trio of renowned big-wave surfers from the Hawaiian IslandsBrock Little, Ken Bradshaw, and Mark Foohurried to California to join the local crew in the surf.

The names and faces of the three Hawaiians were familiar to most of the five million surfers on the planet. Who among them was top dog in the surf was a matter of lively debate, but there was no disagreement over who cut the highest profile out of the water.

Mark Sheldon Foo was not afflicted with an excess of modesty or self-doubt. In his rsum, he unabashedly described himself as surfings consummate living legend. Detractors called him grandiose, and worse, but it didnt crimp Foos style. In his Filofax were the phone numbers of surfings premier photographers, whom he cultivated and kept in close contact with. His picture appeared in print with uncanny frequency, and he hosted a surfing show on cable television.

Foo made no bones about his thirst for fame or his strategy for achieving it: ride the worlds biggest waves with singular audacity and do it when the cameras were rolling. That Friday morning, cameras were present in abundance to document the historic convergence of Foo and his celebrated colleagues on Mavericks. It promised to be a momentous coming out for an underappreciated California wave.

Despite its proximity to San Francisco and Santa Cruz, as recently as 1990, only a handful of locals had ever heard of Mavericks, and only one brave soula townie named Jeff Clarkhad actually surfed it. By and by, rumors started to drift up the coast about a mysto surf break near Half Moon Bay that generated thick, grinding barrels tall enough to drive a bus through. They were reputed to be at least as big asand considerably more hollow thanthe famous waves that rumbled ashore at Hawaiis Waimea Bay, the Mount Everest of surfing. Mavericks, moreover, gave off a vibe that made Waimeas daunting aura seem benign by comparison. A 1992 article by Ben Marcus in