Calpine Lookout

The tower stands painted all white on a hilltop at 5,980 feet in the Sierra Nevada, a couple of miles off State Highway 89 and about 10 miles north of Sierraville. Giant boulders take up much of the summit. A locked gate closes the road below. It is a three-story structure with stairs on the outside: a storage room on the ground floor, a sleeping room in the middle, and on top the observation cab, the only part a visitor may rent.

The cab on Calpine Hill

The cab measures 14 feet by 14 feet. It holds two twin beds, a dry sink, a table and chairs, three propane lights, a propane heater, a propane stove and oven, and a fire finder, the instrument a lookout once used to fix the bearing of a smoke. The tower has no electricity and no water. It has its own propane tank. A few pots, pans, and cooking utensils are supplied, and renters carry up their own water, bedding, and food. Outside, at the base of the tower, are a vault toilet, a picnic table, and a fire ring. In dry summers, fire restrictions can bar campfires and charcoal.

From the windows the Sierra Valley spreads below. Haskell Peak rises to the west, Nevada lies to the east, and Lassen Peak stands far to the northwest. The Forest Service and Recreation.gov both describe the stargazing. On a clear night, in Recreation.gov’s words, renters can look on “an almost endless galaxy of stars and meteorites.”

Terry Musgrove, a retired government video producer from Oregon City, Oregon, spent five nights here in June 2019 with his dog, Woody. “The dog and I often had trouble getting around the 14′ by 14′ interior without tripping over each other,” he wrote for the National Forest Foundation. The two beds took up most of the room. During his stay the oven did not work, though the four burners did. The sink drain was disconnected, so he set a bucket under it. The picnic table was damaged but usable. Musgrove found a campfire area among the boulders and wrote that he was likely never to see another person on the hilltop. He also noted that the trees had grown up on all sides since the tower went idle, threatening to block much of the view. “So unless the Forest Service decides to cut some of them down,” he wrote, “you’d better hurry and get up here.”

The Sierraville Ranger District of the Tahoe National Forest runs the lookout. Renters stop at the district office in Sierraville, a town of around 350 with a gas station and a general store, according to Musgrove. There they receive the combinations to the gate and to the lockbox that holds the door key. The tower is rented year-round, and the Forest Service says reservations fill about six months ahead.

In winter the Forest Service does not plow the road. Once snow covers it, the way in is a 2-mile trail with 1,000 feet of climb, traveled on snowshoes, on skis, or on snowmobiles the renters bring themselves. Winter temperatures may fall as low as 21 below.

A windmill tower from 1934

The Civilian Conservation Corps built the tower in 1934. Congress had approved the Corps in 1933, and it took unmarried men between 18 and 25 whose families were on relief for six-month stints in work camps. The Truckee-Donner Historical Society lists Calpine with Saddleback and Sardine Peak among the lookouts the Corps raised in the region. In those years, the society writes, Corps work in the forests centered on fire prevention, fire-fighting, and fire-suppression.

The Forest Service classes Calpine as an “L-7” or windmill-style enclosed tower with a “BC-3” cab. It has been determined eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. The windmill style was once common across California, used by the Forest Service, the California Department of Forestry, and some counties. Calpine is one of three left in the state. Musgrove names the other two as Girard and Sardine, and says all three were built by the Corps in the early 1930s.

Mrs. Wallace’s station

An active lookout was staffed through fire season by one person trained to spot fires. The Forest Service describes the work as all day, sometimes all night, seven days a week. For at least part of the 1960s that person at Calpine was a Sierraville woman known in print as Mrs. Robert Wallace. On December 1, 1960, the Portola Reporter noted that she had “manned the Calpine station this year.” On June 3, 1965, the paper reported that the lookout, “for fire reporting purposes, was manned by Mrs. Robert Wallace last year,” and that Forest Service personnel planned to open it the following week. On June 24 it reported that the station would open that Thursday after being closed since the fall, and that “Mrs. Robert Wallace, local resident, will operate Calpine lookout station again.”

The tower was staffed every summer until 1975. Since then it has had limited use, mostly during summer lightning.

The lumber town below

The lookout takes its name from Calpine, a company town that the Davies-Johnson Lumber Company laid out and built in the Sierra Valley. Logging crews in this part of Sierra County skidded logs with large donkey engines. In Calpine, the county historian William G. Copren writes, those same engines dragged houses in from the surrounding logging camps. As late as the 1970s, many of the houses in town still sat on their skids.