Vertical Exploration on the Forgotten Atoll

Words by Beau Flemister

From the bow of our catamaran in the soft light of dawn, the chalky white cliffs of Makatea rising from the sea look like a distant rushing wave, frozen in place. As we sail closer into view, approaching from the southwest, this lonely landmass is certainly like none other in the region. An island technically part of the vast Tuamotu archipelago of French Polynesia, the largest chain of atolls on the planet sprawling over a 350sq mile swath of the Pacific, Makatea sits 250 feet higher than its sea-level siblings. While most atolls on earth are low-lying broken bracelets of dead coral motus that surround lagoons, Makatea is a raised atoll, courtesy of a tectonic shift 2 million years ago during the creation of Tahiti 130 miles away. This geological event depressed the seafloor, lifting Makatea atoll skyward, eventually revealing its sheer ocean cliffs in the aftermath.

I've arrived with a group of professional climbers and surfers (atolls sometimes hide particularly good waves) but it’s those very cliffs that brought us here, seeing that Makatea’s recently become a rock climber’s bucket list destination. Those high-quality limestone walls seen from the bow are rife with holds, crags, dimples, crimps, and cracks the stuff of climbers’ dreams — in a place most couldn’t imagine exists. With nothing quite like this for climbers in all of the Pacific Islands — most rock in the region is too “chossy” or brittle — Makatea is a complete anomaly.

Having sailed half of yesterday, through the night, and now into some of the morning, it's taken us nearly 20 hours to arrive, smooth sailing as far as timing goes from Tahiti, as it can take up to 30 hours if the weather and swells aren’t cooperating. Although Makatea is becoming repute rock climbing, an eco-tourism endeavor that’s really only been a thing for five years now, the tiny island was most renown for being a global producer and hub of the phosphate mining industry from 1906 to 1966.

We motor up to the remains of Temao harbor, once a bustling port that took away the 11.5 million tons of phosphate extracted from Makatea, most used for the production of fertilizer to replenish Old World nations’ depleted agricultural soil and eventually Japan’s rice fields, ravaged by World War II. With only three moorings and a channel too narrow and shallow to fit our boat at the dock, we are forced to anchor outside of the harbor, staring at the eerie ruins of an empire. Steel turret-like structures, consumed by the ocean and salt air rot away next to other ambiguous machinery deteriorating in time, streaked in rust the color of coagulated blood. Old wounds that somehow still feel fresh. There is certainly a war-torn look and vibe but we spot a couple men next to a Hilux pickup truck parked by a pavilion with breeze-block walls.

We motor up to the remains of Temao harbor, once a bustling port that took away the 11.5 million tons of phosphate extracted from Makatea, most used for the production of fertilizer to replenish Old World nations’ depleted agricultural soil and eventually Japan’s rice fields, ravaged by World War II. With only three moorings and a channel too narrow and shallow to fit our boat at the dock, we are forced to anchor outside of the harbor, staring at the eerie ruins of an empire. Steel turret-like structures, consumed by the ocean and salt air rot away next to other ambiguous machinery deteriorating in time, streaked in rust the color of coagulated blood. Old wounds that somehow still feel fresh. There is certainly a war-torn look and vibe but we spot a couple men next to a Hilux pickup truck parked by a pavilion with breeze-block walls.

A few of us pile into a four-person dinghy with a couple duffel bags of climbing gear and attempt the approach — but double-back in a panic. The current swell is creating waves that close-out the keyhole, so we wait uneasily for an opening, charging in dangerously a second time. With no available airfield and either an expensive 4-hour speedboat from the nearest atoll Rangiroa north, or a day’s sail from Tahiti like us, Makatea surely doesn't make it easy on people getting to it. But perhaps that's the part of the allure.

Heitapu Mai, a local Makatean and head guide of Club Makatea Escalade (Makatea Climbing Club), the island’s rock climbing outfit, greets our small group, already in his helmet and harness. Handsome and smiley, Heitapu has an athlete's frame and introduces himself, his brother Tarariki, and two foreigners, James and Ally, Americans that have been staying on the island for the last two weeks to climb. Heitapu asks me and the other surfers if we’d be climbing — it’d be some of our first times — and we shrug yes like, “That’s an option?” He points to the array of protective gear, helmets, lines, gloves, carabiners, harnesses, and shoes hanging neatly from the trucks racks and replies with that typical matter-of-fact French accent, “Oui, Oui, of course it is possible. There are routes for every level here.”

We follow Heitapu, along the shoreline toward sections of the cliff shaded from the harsh sun on this side of the island until noon. Walking along the exposed reef and tidepools en route I reach down to pick up a particularly stunning sea shell and it scurries away from my fingertips, the creature within sensing my presence.

While there are many more climbing routes left on the island to discover and establish in these cliffs, much of the pre-existing ones are thanks to the efforts of Heitapu’s climbing club, and subsequently, a group of a dozen international professional climbers that came here in 2019 to bolt hangers and build the solid foundation for the sport. Having never climbed in his life before 2018, Heitapu had a friend visit from Tahiti who worked for Acropol, a work-at-height company on Tahiti made up of rope specialists and mountaineers. His friend saw the epic potential for climbing (and visiting climbers) and helped Heitapu jumpstart the scene.

Later that year, Heitapu and the team from Acropol bolted 40 climbing routes on 3 different sectors of cliffs. Around the same time, Erwan Lelann, president of the French scientific and educational NGO boat “Maewan,” passed through Makatea on his way to the Marquesas. Lelann, who was traveling with a couple professional climbers, also saw the potential for the sport and told Heitapu he’d assemble a team to return and help bolt more routes. The following year, during the summer of 2019, the Maewan came with 10 professional climbers for 3 weeks and bolted 60 more routes with Club Makatea Escalade and Acropol. The development culminated in an event called “Makatea Vertical Adventure” and hosted 150 locals from the island and nearby atolls to partake in this sustainable tourist endeavor. A film was made about the event that was released in 2020 and suddenly everyone in the climbing world was looking for the speck on Google Maps called Makatea.

“I think when we started here,” says Heitapu, “local people thought that I was crazy. Rock climbing looks like a crazy thing. But it’s a crazy thing that you can share with people, you know?

Drew Smith and Jeff Johnson, the two accomplished professional climbers that I’d arrived with get right to work, asking Heitapu for the most difficult, high-grade routes on offer. With decades of experience, I watch the two of them belay for one other, while one spidered up the steep rock faces.

Heitapu sets us newbies up at the base of a cliff section that appears to have fairly large and abundant hand-holds, foot divots and grippy, textured rock — basically, rock climbing with training wheels. He wanders over to check on the pros and leaves us in the hands of James and Ally who have been staying at Heitapu’s family-run guest house (one of two that exist on Makatea). We sniff our helmets, tighten harnesses, squeeze into our climbing shoes, and James scales 100 feet up, while Ally waits with us to belay.

She seems a little green and has a waist belt on with what looks like 50 different carabiners jangling around like a school janitor's key ring. She unclips one, looks at it and frowns, clips it back on and pauses momentarily.

But I make my way up the rock face trying not to look down, focusing on the array of holds and indents in the rock. I get to the top of the route and James helps me up, guiding me into a shallow cave with a five-star view of the coastline and ocean while I wait for the others to join. We unclip and breathe it in. It’s magnificent, and we watch, slack-jawed, as birds soar at eye level in and out of valleys and narrow canyons. Heitapu appears and leads us on a mini hike around a portion of the cliff, threw another cave to behold a prehistoric looking gorge teaming with gargantuan palms and ferns. Makatea is one of the only atolls in French Polynesia with primary forests still left intact and has some of the richest flora in the archipelago. The island’s home to 77 native species and 13 endemic species to French Polynesia, 4 of them endemic to the Makatea.

We take a quick dip to cool off in small tidal gully of electric blue water, then stroll over to a section of the cliff where Drew and Jeff are still climbing. Drew repels down grinning ear to ear.

But I make my way up the rock face trying not to look down, focusing on the array of holds and indents in the rock. I get to the top of the route and James helps me up, guiding me into a shallow cave with a five-star view of the coastline and ocean while I wait for the others to join. We unclip and breathe it in. It’s magnificent, and we watch, slack-jawed, as birds soar at eye level in and out of valleys and narrow canyons. Heitapu appears and leads us on a mini hike around a portion of the cliff, threw another cave to behold a prehistoric looking gorge teaming with gargantuan palms and ferns. Makatea is one of the only atolls in French Polynesia with primary forests still left intact and has some of the richest flora in the archipelago. The island’s home to 77 native species and 13 endemic species to French Polynesia, 4 of them endemic to the Makatea.

We take a quick dip to cool off in small tidal gully of electric blue water, then stroll over to a section of the cliff where Drew and Jeff are still climbing. Drew repels down grinning ear to ear.

From the bed of Heitapu’s pickup truck the scene while riding up the hill to the other side and through the sleepy community of Moumu, the only settlement in Makatea of about 50 people, is bizarre. All around us, on either side of the weather-worn concrete one-lane road, corroded, burnt umber machinery, structures, water towers, tools, gears, cogs, axels, engines and other relics lie frozen in the brush, most completely swallowed by vines and ferns, feeding the jungle’s insatiable appetite. Giant hooks from some kind of contraption claw at us from the forest, broken crane arms stretch out from the jungle like limbs reaching for help. The ruins of an empire are evident, and Moumu, which has two guest houses, a small primary school and one restaurant — if you could call it that — feels fairly ghost towny. But not completely.

I spot a few old men and women having midday coffee outside of their simple homes around plastic tables covered in the floral clothes universal to Oceania. They wave at us as we pass, offering warm Ia Orana’s (alohas) in our wake.

Heitapu stops at his family’s guesthouse where a handful of visiting climbers stay and picks up a couple Canadians. He shows us his relatively robust and well-stocked climbing equipment cellar, thanks to the hundreds of climbers that have come and left gear, like we would, over the last few years.

Halfway across the island, which is only about five miles long by three miles wide, Heitapu pulls the Hilux over, and we follow him through the bush, into a vast expanse of sunbaked, jagged limestone holes, many dangerously hidden by a thin layer of foliage. This clearing, which seen from above looks pockmarked as if shelled viciously in a long and bitter war, is where for nearly 60 years his grandfathers, great-uncles, and many other “diggers” unearthed phosphate rock from the natural limestone tubes with only a shovel, pick axe and wheelbarrow.

It was backbreaking work, men often working barefoot, but it paid by the barrow, not by the day — a curious incentive to dig more. A bizarre, open-air mine, there was no respite from the South Pacific sun and workers were lowered into holes ranging from 80 to 200 feet deep.

We follow Heitapu, walking cautiously along the precarious edges of the toppled Connect Four rack landscape, which was once covered in a complex maze of wooden planks to walk the wheelbarrows, eventually leading to conveyor belts and railway systems to get the phosphate directly to the harbor and off to wealthy, developed nations around the world.

Once upon a time in Makatea, there was a Golden Age. Through half of the 20th century, it was “the place to be,” as Heitapu puts it. Previously a sleepy, typical Tuamotuan island of around 250 inhabitants living a subsistence existence, once phosphate rock was discovered in 1906, with actual extraction beginning in 1911, La Compagnie Française des Phosphates de l’Océanie (CFPO) transformed the main village of Moumu into a certified company town, replete with industry-aiding infrastructure that dwarfed far larger Tahiti island. Islanders, immigrants, and other laborers from all over the Pacific Rim came for work opportunities and the population ballooned to nearly 4,000. Narrow roads were paved, railway systems for phosphate transportation were built. There were churches, shops, a boulangerie, a hospital, a library, nightclub, tennis courts, restaurants, and two cinemas.

“Two of them,” Heitapu repeats, raising a thumb and pointer finger for emphasis.

Then in 1966, as the phosphate industry was beginning to dry up in the Pacific, the French government decided to switch efforts to their nuclear program, yet another endeavor that transformed (even more destructively) another small atoll called Moruroa in the far eastern corner of Tuamotu for the next 30 years. The CFPO shut down operations in a matter of days, literally cutting the lights off when the power plant was closed, leaving the mining industry’s remains to rust and rot in its place. Many of the workers were given the option to be transferred to work on Moruroa for the French Centre d'Experimentation du Pacifique (CEP). Many simply went home to neighboring atolls like Tikehau, Rangiroa, Fakarava, Kaukura, or south to Tahiti to start over. The CFPO paid their way to wherever they wanted to get dropped off and in a matter of weeks, Makatea's population shrank to less than 50 souls.

“It was definitely a really, really sad moment for the people on Makatea,” laments Heitapu.

“What did they do once everyone left?” I ask, completely dumbfounded.

“They just returned back to nature,” Heitapu shrugs. “Back to the natural life. They hunted for coconut crabs, they fished, and they bagged up copra for when the boat would come and collect the sacks for money. Fifty years, they did like this. 1966 until almost today, really.”

“Since promoting climbing on the island, though, it’s been a boom. Like a big tank of oxygen for the community, and now Makatea is somehow known all around the world. That was my goal.”