Climbing A Staircase To The Sky: Sierra Buttes Fire Lookout

My parents loved camping. So much so that I swear they took my sister and me to every campground in California when we were kids.

But I hated camping. So much so that I vowed, while standing at one “campground” that was little more than a parking lot just off the interstate, to never sleep in a tent again once I had any say in the matter.

And for nearly 40 years I kept that vow. Until this year, when I learned about the Sierra Buttes Fire Lookout Station.

“Stand here one time, and you’ll never forget it the rest of your life,” wrote Tom Stienstra and Ann Marie Brown in “Northern California Hiking,” a book that has been my hiking bible for nearly 10 years now, steering me to some of the most gorgeous places I have ever seen, including Burney Falls in Shasta County, and the otherworldly Fern Canyon in Humboldt County.

So when my friend went camping at Sardine Lake, located just a short drive from the Sierra Buttes Trailhead, I knew I had to join her so we could hike to the lookout, even though it would mean spending the day driving, then spending the night in a tent so we could get up with the sun to beat the heat.

And I am very pleased to report that climbing the lookout staircase was more than worth the effort to reach it – worth not only every minute of the nearly five hours it took to drive to the trail from Ukiah, but every minute of sleeping in a tent again, even though I forgot my earplugs and our neighbor sleeping just a few yards from me snored almost as loudly as my father had.

But all the driving and snoring was forgotten as we headed up the trail, because few things are more exhilarating than hiking at sunrise, especially if you’re walking along what feels like the spine of California.

My joy bubble was briefly burst, however, when a group of young men passed us. As friends who hike to the lookout every year while their families camp at Sardine Lake, the men told us the hike to the station would be four miles each way, nearly twice the five-miles total that my book had described.

And so I feared we wouldn’t make it to the lookout after all, as we couldn’t do eight miles that morning without overheating ourselves and the young dog we had with us. So I tried to just soak in all the views, telling myself it had still been one of the most beautiful hikes I’d ever done in one of the most beautiful places I’d ever been, and prepared to turn around at 9 a.m. no matter how far we had gotten at that point.

Then at 8:20 a.m., a trail sign declared that the lookout was only a half mile away, so we had plenty of time to reach the staircase after all, which meant that of course my book was right about the mileage to the lookout, and about the views you find when you reach it. Because not only is it amazing to stand on a platform offering 360-degree views of what feels like every mountain in California, the last steps to those views are perhaps even more amazing, because walking up what amounts to scaffolding clinging to a rock cliff feels like climbing a staircase to the sky.

A plaque at the bottom of that staircase “honors the five Tahoe National Forest employees who, with great difficulty, made it possible for visitors to climb to this lookout with ease and safety,” first constructing the stairs, hand rails and platforms, then “attaching them to the side of this peak in the summer of 1964: Norman Ellis, Elmer (Don) Hoskin, Walter Huson, Edward Forsthoff and Howard Welch.”

In the years since, fire detection equipment more sophisticated than human eyeballs has been added to the station, including what looks like a small windmill at the base of the platform. Cal Fire Battalion Chief Drew Rhoades, who supervises operations at the Ukiah Air Attack Base, said the apparatus that caught my eye was an “anenometer,” which measures wind speed using a spinning wheel.

Rhoades noted that many anenometers are set up in Mendocino County as well, as “we have several ‘full’ (Remote Automated Weather Stations) in the county.”

Also at the Sierra Buttes platform once we reached it were the young men who passed us much earlier, still enjoying the view after drinking their celebratory beers. Yes, they packed out their cans, and yes, one of them admitted to me that my book had been right, that the hike there was only 2.5 miles. So once again, Tom and Anne Marie had not steered me wrong, and I am so glad I followed them to yet another jaw-dropping sight.

(Ukiah Daily Journal)