Originally published 2020-12-06.
In the early hours of 3 December 2020, a small group of men climbed Pine Mountain in Atascadero, California, pushed over the shiny metal monolith that had appeared there a day earlier, and planted a wooden cross where it had stood. They streamed the whole thing online while chanting "Christ is king." The city said it had not removed the object, the cross soon vanished too, and within days the four local artists who had built the monolith came forward and put up a sturdier replacement.
The Atascadero episode was a small chapter in the strange "monolith craze" of late 2020, when gleaming pillars started turning up in deserts, on hilltops and in parks around the world. Here is what happened on Pine Mountain, who was behind it, and how it fits into the wider story.
What happened on Pine Mountain
Hikers began posting photos of the object on Wednesday, 2 December 2020. It stood at the top of the Pine Mountain trail, in a city park in Atascadero, a town on California's Central Coast roughly halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Some early reports placed it in Los Angeles or the Bay Area; it was in neither.
The monolith was three-sided, close to 10 feet (3 metres) tall and weighed around 200 pounds (90 kg). It was hollow stainless steel, welded and riveted, and anchored with rebar driven into the ground. Its look deliberately echoed the pillar found in the Utah desert two weeks earlier.
It lasted barely a day. By Thursday morning only the rebar remained, sticking out of the ground where the base had been.
Who toppled it, and the livestream
Video streamed on the platform DLive showed several young men, wearing night-vision goggles and military-style gear, arriving before dawn. According to local reports they had driven around five hours from Orange County in Southern California. They rocked the pillar back and forth until it fell, chanting "Christ is king," and one of them ranted that the country wanted neither illegal immigrants nor aliens from outer space. Insults aimed at the object itself were part of the performance.
The men then raised a plywood cross in its place. The monolith was reportedly dragged partway down the hill and left in the brush, and the cross itself disappeared not long after. Some national outlets described the group as linked to QAnon or far-right online circles; that label circulated widely, but it was never established by police or by any official statement, so it is best treated as unconfirmed.
(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)
A video of the toppling was shared on YouTube in the days that followed, but it is no longer available there.
How Atascadero responded
City officials made clear that the removal was not their doing. Deputy City Manager Terrie Banish told the Atascadero News: "The Monolith disappeared this morning. We did not remove it." She added that the leftover rebar was a safety hazard the city would take out, and that it had no plans to investigate further.
Mayor Heather Moreno was more pointed. In a statement on the city's social media she said she was upset that the young men had driven five hours to vandalise something in her town, calling the monolith "unique and fun in an otherwise stressful time" during the pandemic. The Associated Press reported that police were reviewing the video, and the police department asked anyone with information to get in touch. No charges were reported.
The artists who built it, and the comeback
For a few days nobody knew who had put the pillar up. Then four people from San Luis Obispo County stepped forward: lifelong friends Travis Kenney and Wade McKenzie, with Randall Kenney and Jared Riddle. McKenzie is a welder; Travis Kenney builds cars. Inspired by the Utah and Romania sightings, they had decided to "build a third one" and had carried it up the mountain themselves.
Their original plan, they told local public radio station KCBX, was to take it down after a couple of days and keep the mystery alive. The vandalism changed that. Within days of the toppling they installed a second, nearly identical monolith, this time filled with concrete and welded so it would be much harder to move, and they went public so people would know it had been built and secured safely. They also said they hoped to give part of the proceeds from merchandise to the city to help maintain its trails.
The replacement became a local landmark that drew hikers up the trail. It was attacked again in August 2021, when vandals pried apart its metal sides, and the artists repaired it and had it back on the mountain within two days, according to KSBY.
The wider monolith craze of 2020
The sequence began on 18 November 2020, when Utah state biologists counting bighorn sheep from a helicopter spotted a metal pillar in a remote red-rock canyon in San Juan County. It was about 9.5 feet (2.9 m) tall, made of riveted metal sheets, and satellite images later showed it had been standing there since 2016. Its resemblance to the alien slab in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey made it a worldwide story.
Crowds of visitors followed, driving and camping in fragile desert. On the night of 27 November a group including the extreme-sports athletes Andy Lewis and Sylvan Christensen took the Utah pillar down, saying they wanted to protect the land; Lewis later handed it to the Bureau of Land Management. That same week a rougher pillar appeared on a hill near Piatra Neamț in Romania, and it vanished about four days later.
Atascadero was third, but far from last. Copycat monoliths appeared in dozens of countries over the following weeks, and by mid-2024 more than 245 similar structures had been recorded. Most were the work of local artists and pranksters, and the creator of the original Utah piece has never been confirmed. An art collective called The Most Famous Artist briefly hinted it was responsible, then admitted it was not.
Why a metal pillar caused so much feeling
Part of the appeal was simple: in a grim year of lockdowns, a mysterious object on a hilltop gave people a reason to go outside and a puzzle to talk about. The Kubrick reference let everyone, from science-fiction fans to conspiracy theorists, project their own story onto a blank surface.
That same blankness made the monoliths a target. To the men on Pine Mountain the pillar seemed to stand for everything they disliked, and toppling it on camera was a way to make a point to an online audience. To the artists and many residents, it was just a playful piece of public art. The episode is a useful reminder that a viral clip can show exactly what people said and did without proving every claim made about who they are.
It also raised a practical question that applied in Utah too: who gets to decide what stands on shared public land? Unpermitted art, however charming, can cause damage and safety problems, while vigilante removal, however well-meant, is still vandalism. In Atascadero the city effectively accepted the rebuilt monolith as part of the trail.
Sources: CalCoastNews, 3 December 2020; Cox Media Group, 4 December 2020: vandals topple California monolith; Associated Press via Audacy; Atascadero News; KCBX, 9 December 2020: Atascadero monolith creators replace stolen art; KSBY, 18 August 2021; Wikipedia: Utah monolith. Monolith built by Travis Kenney, Wade McKenzie, Randall Kenney and Jared Riddle.
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