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She stood 60 feet tall above the tunnel on Malibu Canyon Road, and for nine months in the happening year of 1966, the Northridge artist Lynne Westmore Bloom slung on nylon ropes and climbed the rockface by full moonlight to erase the old graffiti, then to sketch and paint the lady.

Growing up on his family fjord farm on an unimaginably steep Norwegian mountainside, Magne Åkernes learned to live with risk at every turn—especially around a crack hidden in the rockface.

Ongoing, constant drainage of rainfall in the mountain can create enough friction between rock fractures to temporarily stabilize the rockface—at one Canadadian site now for 35 years, while others needed additional drain holes to maintain stabilization.

He told councillors at a meeting in July: "I am a keen rock climber, so I'm used to a bit of jeopardy, but as a blind person I can honestly say I feel more intimidated and at greater risk of injury on my local pavements than I've felt on any rockface."

The rockface immediately above the village, nicknamed "the island", had been unstable for decades.