CRESCENT CITY, Calif. — John Gibbons shivered behind the little boat hauling him to his first project as a member of the U.S. Coast Guard.
It was 1953. Gibbons was a baby-faced 18-year-old child from Ohio who had solely lately seen the ocean for the primary time. And he had contemporary orders to get to work at one of many nation’s most remoted — and most harmful — lighthouses.
The St. George Reef Lighthouse, six miles off the coast of California’s sparsely populated northwest nook, stands atop a sheer rock surrounded by nothing however the chilly, tempestuous Pacific.
“We got here out of the fog, and I noticed that mild — it regarded like one thing out of a horror film,” mentioned Gibbons, now 91, including: “I assumed, ‘Holy cow, how’d they ever construct something like this out in the midst of the ocean?’”
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The St. George Reef Lighthouse is listed on the Nationwide Register of Historic Locations as an architectural masterpiece and an essential image of California maritime historical past. Constructed over a decade within the late 1800s, it’s the costliest American lighthouse ever constructed.
However time and briny air have taken their toll. The lighthouse has been largely deserted for 50 years. Its lantern room leaked. Its handrails rusted. Its paint peeled, and its authentic wood flooring turned spongy. The hook and growth that when hoisted boats out of the water and onto the rock fell aside way back.
Few individuals have ever set foot inside. However a small group of volunteers and previous salts are on a mission to totally restore the place and draw lighthouse-loving vacationers to this struggling nook of California, the place industries dedicated to logging and fishing cratered way back.
The challenges are monumental. Local weather change is bound to batter this stone sentinel with increased seas and stronger storms. Extra instantly, the lighthouse is now accessible solely by an costly helicopter trip, if the winds are merciful and it isn’t shrouded by fog.
“In the event you have a look at the challenge in its entirety, you need to fold your tent and overlook it,” mentioned John Zimmerman, president of the St. George Reef Lighthouse Preservation Society. “However the reality of the matter is — and I remind the volunteers of this — the those that had the laborious job are those that constructed the factor within the first place.”
John Zimmerman, president of the St. George Reef Lighthouse Preservation Society, pictured with the historic first-order Fresnel lens from the lighthouse. The lens is now displayed on the Del Norte County Historic Society Museum in Crescent Metropolis.
(Mike Zacchino / For The Occasions)
Zimmerman’s group doesn’t have some huge cash. And possibly they’re slightly romantic. However historical past, he mentioned, is value combating for.
“Each time I am going on the market, it’s a spiritual expertise for me,” he mentioned. “I do know that sounds corny. However standing on the market, 25-mile visibility, stunning lighthouse, stunning surroundings — it’s as near God as you may get, in my thoughts.”
All lighthouses, he mentioned, have an awesome story. And this one, he provides, “has a greater story than most.”
As hordes of ships sailed to California in the course of the Gold Rush, the West Coast’s first lighthouse was illuminated on Alcatraz Island in 1854. Since then, greater than 40 lighthouses have graced the state’s rugged, foggy shores.
The northernmost is on St. George Reef, a series of volcanic formations nicknamed the Dragon Rocks by a British explorer within the 1700s due to the hazard they posed to ships.
Management panels within the St. George Reef Lighthouse, pictured in October 2021.
On July 30, 1865, simply three months after the Civil Warfare ended, catastrophe struck.
A side-wheel steamer ship referred to as the S.S. Brother Jonathan acquired caught in a windstorm and struck one of many rocks. The overloaded vessel — carrying heavy railroad and mining gear and an enormous cargo of gold — sank inside 45 minutes, killing all however 19 of its 244 passengers and crew.
Afterward, the U.S. Lighthouse Board pleaded with Congress to construct a lighthouse on the reef. However the war-torn nation was broke. It took 17 years for the federal government to approve funding and, as a result of cash stored operating out, one other decade for development.
The lighthouse value $752,000, or about $27 million right now. It value greater than the Statue of Liberty, accomplished six years earlier.
Staff lived aboard a schooner moored to North West Seal Rock, which they accessed through aerial tramway, driving on a small platform linked to a cable stretched between the ship’s masts and the rock, like a zipline.
Sea lions relaxation on a platform under the St. George Reef Lighthouse.
They blasted off the highest of the rock with explosives and sculpted it right into a terrace that will anchor the lighthouse‘s basis — generally known as a caisson. They used cargo nets and growth derricks to hoist the six-ton granite rocks that will compose the 70-foot-high oval caisson and five-story tower.
Big waves repeatedly swept males off the rock, and one employee fell to his dying, in keeping with the Nationwide Park Service.
On Oct. 20, 1892, the Fresnel lens was illuminated for the primary time, casting a beam that could possibly be seen for greater than 20 miles. That day, the San Francisco Chronicle declared the lighthouse was “so strongly constructed that the large waves which frequently strike it’d as effectively be the ripples of a brook.”
Life on the St. George Reef Lighthouse — a so-called stag station the place no girls or kids had been allowed — was brutal and lonely.
Inside its first 12 months of operation, an assistant keeper who left the rock in a small boat certain for Crescent Metropolis vanished into the ocean. Of the 80 males who served there between 1891 and 1930 — earlier than the Coast Guard took over operations — 36 resigned and 27 transferred to different mild stations, in keeping with the 2007 ebook “Sentinel of the Seas: Life and Dying on the Most Harmful Lighthouse Ever Constructed.”
In 1951, three Coast Guardsmen drowned after a rope decreasing their boat from the rock snapped, plunging them into the icy water.
The following 12 months, Floyd Shelton, a 19-year-old Guardsman from Portland, acquired orders to interchange one of many lifeless males.
Shelton, now 93, informed The Occasions that “the lodging had been grim.” The Guardsmen “hot-sacked” their twin bunks, with the person coming off obligation hopping into the still-warm mattress of the person beginning his shift. They not often showered as a result of there was little contemporary water.
Plane land on this helipad atop the St. George Reef Lighthouse caisson.
However the place was undeniably stunning, mentioned Shelton, who recalled climbing onto a metal cross-section growth and mendacity on it to look at whales migrating beneath him. As soon as, he was sprayed by a whale spout.
“I’ve been accused of being a romantic,” Shelton mentioned. “There’s not many people left that did lighthouses or lifeboat stations, guys — largely guys, virtually completely — like me.”
The boys had been speculated to rotate: 10 days on the rock, 10 days on the on-shore station. However within the fall of 1952, a storm stranded Shelton and some different Guardsmen for greater than 45 days.
Waves crashed over the lens room 146 ft above the ocean, and water cascaded down the round stairs “like a waterfall,” Shelton mentioned.
The boys ran out of meals, subsisting on what they scrounged up: nutritional vitamins capsules and pancake combine. When an enormous wave hit, the entire lighthouse shook.
“All we did was hope the factor held collectively,” he mentioned. “And it did.”
The lighthouse required an amazing quantity of labor to take care of, mentioned Shelton, who almost fell off the tower whereas portray the oil room beneath the lens and was wind-whipped whereas greasing the cables for the growth. Now that it’s been empty for thus lengthy, Shelton is skeptical the lighthouse may be restored, regardless of the devotion of volunteers.
“It’s only a monumental process … however extra energy to them,” he mentioned.
The Coast Guard decommissioned the St. George Reef Lighthouse in 1975, changing the grand edifice with a floating, automated buoy mild.
The ultimate entry within the logbook learn: “After 4 rating and three years, St. George Reef Mild is darkish. … Might Mom Nature present you mercy. You could have been deserted, however by no means will you be forgotten.”
In 1986, a gaggle of locals, upon studying the federal government deliberate to promote the quickly decaying beacon as scrap, began the St. George Reef Lighthouse Preservation Society. The federal authorities finally deeded the lighthouse to Del Norte County, which now leases it to the nonprofit for $1 a month.
A contemporary automated mild contained in the lens room within the St. George Reef Lighthouse.
When Huell Howser visited the lighthouse in 1995 for an episode of his TV present “California’s Gold,” he was joined by the late Man Towers, the preservation society’s founder, who had fought to avoid wasting the beacon for a decade however had not but been capable of attain it. The boys had been lowered, separately, in wire baskets from a hovering Coast Guard helicopter.
“Landing: A bit of laborious! However imagine me, I used to be glad to be on that massive ol’ rock,” Howser mentioned.
For years, members of the tiny preservation society — their ages now starting from 60s to 80s — have flown out in helicopters, touchdown on the caisson.
They bring about turbines and keep in a single day, eradicating peeling paint and plaster, hauling out trash and rotted furnishings. They’ve power-washed chicken poop, rebuilt rusted railings — and, in a single epic feat, changed the lantern room, suspending the unique dome from a helicopter and flying it to shore.
They put in a solar-powered lens, illuminating the lighthouse for the primary time in many years. However the wind carried away the photo voltaic panels earlier this 12 months.
For years the volunteers needed to restrict their work to a couple winter months yearly due to federal wildlife officers who wished to guard the mating season of sea lions on the rock. That deed restriction has since been lifted.
“We’ve been combating like hell for 30 years,” mentioned Jim McLaughlin, a deep-sea fisherman and an authentic member of the preservation society. “As a result of it’s so costly to get individuals on the market, you don’t waste time. You’ve acquired to have a commerce: Electrician. Pipe fitter.”
The St. George Reef Lighthouse was first illuminated on Oct. 20, 1892.
Rising up, McLaughlin, 84, may see the lighthouse beam from his bed room window. And, he mentioned with amusing, “we’d shoot geese at evening by it.”
For years, the preservation society’s repairs had been funded, partially, by small donations and occasional public helicopter excursions. However flights value hundreds of {dollars} every.
“The large problem is elevating cash to rent a helicopter, after which, in fact, looking for a helicopter close to sufficient that has the required flotation gadgets and has a sling hook that may haul baskets of provides on the market,” mentioned Zimmerman, who hasn’t been to the lighthouse since summer time 2024.
Zimmerman, a 68-year-old retired landscaper — “with the arthritis to show it” — took the helm of the nonprofit a number of years in the past and spends a lot of his time fundraising, making use of for historic preservation grants and making an attempt to influence individuals to care a few lighthouse they will barely see from shore.
The St. George Reef Lighthouse consists of heavy granite blocks.
He envisions a completely restored, publicly accessible lighthouse getting used as “nature’s classroom,” by individuals who keep for days at a time to check marine mammals, birds, climate patterns, and tides.
Zimmerman mentioned engineers have assessed the lighthouse and estimated {that a} full restoration, together with helicopter transportation, would value round $10 million — massive cash in a rural county of 27,000 individuals.
Tyler Finkle, a structural engineer who has restored offshore lighthouses throughout the nation, mentioned that whereas restoration appears “like a herculean process,” it’s doable. A lot of the corroding metallic all through the construction must be changed, however “the masonry’s in good situation,” he mentioned.
Finkle, the division supervisor of historic preservation for ICC Commonwealth, the corporate that assessed the lighthouse, is engaged on the continued $16-million restoration of Pigeon Level Lighthouse south of San Francisco owned by California State Parks.
The St. George tower, he mentioned, is in higher form.
Amongst those that need to see the St. George Reef Lighthouse shine once more is Gibbons, who served 39 months on the rock, a Coast Guard report.
Each he and Shelton, upon arriving in Crescent Metropolis for the primary time, mistakenly thought they’d be serving at Battery Level Lighthouse — a cheery, red-roofed, Cape Cod-style home on a tiny island so near shore that you may stroll to it at low tide. Gibbons mentioned his coronary heart sank when somebody handed him a pair of binoculars, pointed to the ocean, and mentioned St. George was on the market.
John “Gibby” Gibbons, left, born in 1934, and Bob Hachmeister, born 1933, are photographed with a portray of the St. George Reef Lighthouse that Hachmeister’s daughter painted. Whereas within the Coast Guard, they served on the lighthouse collectively within the Nineteen Fifties.
(John Zimmerman)
Life there was laborious, but it surely was an journey, Gibbons mentioned. He hooked lingcod and different fish from the rocks. He arrange a TV with one channel (they watched lots of “The Liberace Present”). And he ate steak most nights.
Within the winter of 1955, a storm stranded him and 4 different males for about 30 days. On Christmas Eve, a radio station in Crescent Metropolis devoted a present to them, mentioned their names, “and when ‘Silent Night time’ got here on, there wasn’t a dry eye within the galley,” he mentioned.
For Christmas dinner, they toasted moldy bread, and Gibbons stunned everybody with a single can of Spam that they cut up amongst everybody.
About three years in the past, he acquired on a helicopter and noticed the lighthouse for the primary time in many years. His previous Marilyn Monroe calendar, he famous, had been faraway from the galley.
He hopes the preservationists succeed, regardless of the percentages.
“There is just one St. George Reef Lighthouse,” he mentioned, “and it will be a disgrace to simply let it go.”
