CRESCENT CITY, Calif. -- John Gibbons shivered successful the backmost of the small vessel hauling him to his first duty arsenic a personnel of the U.S. Coast Guard.
It was 1953. Gibbons was a baby-faced 18-year-old kid from Ohio who had only precocious seen the water for the first time. And he had caller orders to get to activity astatine 1 of the country's about isolated -- and about vulnerable -- lighthouses.
The St. George Reef Lighthouse, six miles disconnected the seashore of California's sparsely populated northwest corner, stands atop a sheer stone surrounded by thing but the cold, tempestuous Pacific.
"We came retired of the fog, and I saw that ray -- it looked for illustration thing retired of a scary movie," said Gibbons, now 91, adding: "I thought, 'Holy cow, how'd they ever build thing for illustration this retired successful the mediate of the ocean?'"
The St. George Reef Lighthouse is listed connected the National Register of Historic Places arsenic an architectural masterpiece and an important awesome of California maritime history. Constructed complete a decade successful the precocious 1800s, it is the about costly American lighthouse ever built.
But clip and briny aerial person taken their toll. The lighthouse has been mostly abandoned for 50 years. Its lantern room leaked. Its handrails rusted. Its overgarment peeled, and its original woody floors turned spongy. The hook and roar that erstwhile hoisted boats retired of the h2o and onto the stone fell isolated agelong ago.
Few group person ever group ft inside. But a mini group of volunteers and aged salts are connected a ngo to afloat reconstruct the spot and tie lighthouse-loving visitors to this struggling area of California, wherever industries devoted to logging and sportfishing cratered agelong ago.
The challenges are monumental. Climate alteration is judge to batter this chromatic sentinel pinch higher seas and stronger storms. More immediately, the lighthouse is now accessible only by an costly chopper ride, if the winds are merciful and it is not shrouded by fog.
"If you look astatine the task successful its entirety, you want to fold your shelter and hide it," said John Zimmerman, president of the St. George Reef Lighthouse Preservation Society. "But the truth of the matter is -- and I punctual the volunteers of this -- the group that had the difficult occupation are the ones that built the point successful the first place."
Zimmerman's group doesn't person a batch of money. And possibly they're a small romantic. But history, he said, is worthy fighting for.
"Every clip I spell retired there, it's a belief acquisition for me," he said. "I cognize that sounds corny. But opinionated retired there, 25-mile visibility, beautiful lighthouse, beautiful scenery -- it's arsenic adjacent to God arsenic you could get, successful my mind."
All lighthouses, he said, person a awesome story. And this one, he adds, "has a amended communicative than most."
As hordes of ships sailed to California during the Gold Rush, the West Coast's first lighthouse was illuminated on Alcatraz Island successful 1854. Since then, much than 40 lighthouses person graced the state's rugged, foggy shores.
The northernmost is connected St. George Reef, a concatenation of volcanic formations nicknamed the Dragon Rocks by a British explorer successful the 1700s because of the threat they posed to ships.
On July 30, 1865, conscionable 3 months aft the Civil War ended, disaster struck.
A side-wheel steamer vessel called the S.S. Brother Jonathan sewage caught successful a windstorm and struck 1 of the rocks. The overloaded alloy -- carrying dense railroad and mining instrumentality and a immense shipment of golden -- sank wrong 45 minutes, sidesplitting each but 19 of its 244 passengers and crew.
Afterward, the U.S. Lighthouse Board pleaded pinch Congress to build a lighthouse connected the reef. But the war-torn state was broke. It took 17 years for the authorities to o.k. backing and, because money kept moving out, different decade for construction.
The lighthouse costs $752,000, aliases about $27 cardinal today. It cost much than the Statue of Liberty, completed six years earlier.
Workers lived aboard a schooner moored to North West Seal Rock, which they accessed via aerial tramway, riding connected a mini level connected to a cablegram stretched betwixt the ship's masts and the rock, for illustration a zipline.
They blasted disconnected the apical of the stone pinch explosives and sculpted it into a terrace that would anchor the lighthouse's instauration -- known arsenic a caisson. They utilized cargo nets and roar derricks to hoist the six-ton granite rocks that would constitute the 70-foot-high oval caisson and five-story tower.
Giant waves many times swept men disconnected the rock, and 1 worker fell to his death, according to the National Park Service.
On Oct. 20, 1892, the Fresnel lens was illuminated for the first time, casting a beam that could beryllium seen for much than 20 miles. That day, the San Francisco Chronicle declared the lighthouse was "so powerfully built that the tremendous waves which often onslaught it mightiness arsenic good beryllium the ripples of a brook."
Life astatine the St. George Reef Lighthouse -- a alleged stag position wherever nary women aliases children were allowed -- was sadistic and lonely.
Within its first twelvemonth of operation, an adjunct keeper who near the stone successful a mini vessel bound for Crescent City vanished into the sea. Of the 80 men who served location betwixt 1891 and 1930 -- earlier the Coast Guard took complete operations -- 36 resigned and 27 transferred to different ray stations, according to the 2007 book "Sentinel of the Seas: Life and Death astatine the Most Dangerous Lighthouse Ever Built."
In 1951, 3 Coast Guardsmen drowned aft a statement lowering their vessel from the stone snapped, plunging them into the icy water.
The adjacent year, Floyd Shelton, a 19-year-old Guardsman from Portland, sewage orders to switch 1 of the dormant men.
Shelton, now 93, told The Times that "the accommodations were grim." The Guardsmen "hot-sacked" their copy bunks, pinch the man coming disconnected work hopping into the still-warm furniture of the man starting his shift. They seldom showered because location was small caller water.
But the spot was undeniably beautiful, said Shelton, who recalled climbing onto a alloy cross-section roar and lying connected it to watch whales migrating beneath him. Once, he was sprayed by a whale spout.
"I've been accused of being a romantic," Shelton said. "There's not galore of america near that did lighthouses aliases lifeboat stations, guys -- mostly guys, almost exclusively -- for illustration me."
The men were expected to rotate: 10 days connected the rock, 10 days astatine the on-shore station. But successful the autumn of 1952, a large wind stranded Shelton and a fewer different Guardsmen for much than 45 days.
Waves collapsed complete the lens room 146 feet supra the sea, and h2o cascaded down the information stairs "like a waterfall," Shelton said.
The men ran retired of food, subsisting connected what they scrounged up: vitamins pills and pancake mix. When a large activity hit, the full lighthouse shook.
"All we did was dream the point held together," he said. "And it did."
The lighthouse required a tremendous magnitude of activity to maintain, said Shelton, who about fell disconnected the building while coating the lipid room beneath the lens and was wind-whipped while greasing the cables for the boom. Now that it's been quiet for truthful long, Shelton is skeptical the lighthouse could beryllium restored, contempt the devotion of volunteers.
"It's conscionable a monumental task ... but much powerfulness to them," he said.
The Coast Guard decommissioned the St. George Reef Lighthouse successful 1975, replacing the expansive edifice pinch a floating, automated buoy light.
The last introduction successful the logbook read: "After 4 people and 3 years, St. George Reef Light is dark. ... May Mother Nature show you mercy. You person been abandoned, but ne'er will you beryllium forgotten."
In 1986, a group of locals, upon learning the authorities planned to waste the quickly decaying beacon arsenic scrap, started the St. George Reef Lighthouse Preservation Society. The national authorities yet deeded the lighthouse to Del Norte County, which now leases it to the nonprofit for $1 a month.
When Huell Howser visited the lighthouse successful 1995 for an episode of his TV show "California's Gold," he was joined by the precocious Guy Towers, the preservation society's founder, who had fought to prevention the beacon for a decade but had not yet been capable to scope it. The men were lowered, 1 astatine a time, successful ligament baskets from a hovering Coast Guard helicopter.
"Touchdown: A small hard! But judge me, I was gladsome to beryllium connected that large ol' rock," Howser said.
For years, members of the mini preservation nine -- their ages now ranging from 60s to 80s -- person flown retired successful helicopters, landing connected the caisson.
They bring generators and enactment overnight, removing peeling overgarment and plaster, hauling retired trash and rotted furniture. They person power-washed vertebrate poop, rebuilt rusted railings -- and, successful 1 epic feat, replaced the lantern room, suspending the original dome from a chopper and flying it to shore.
They installed a solar-powered lens, illuminating the lighthouse for the first clip successful decades. But the upwind carried distant the star panels earlier this year.
For years the volunteers had to limit their activity to a fewer wintertime months annually because of national wildlife officials who wanted to protect the mating play of oversea lions connected the rock. That deed regularisation has since been lifted.
"We've been fighting for illustration hellhole for 30 years," said Jim McLaughlin, a deep-sea fisherman and an original personnel of the preservation society. "Because it's truthful costly to get group retired there, you don't discarded time. You've sewage to person a trade: Electrician. Pipe fitter."
Growing up, McLaughlin, 84, could spot the lighthouse beam from his chamber window. And, he said pinch a laugh, "we'd sprout ducks astatine nighttime by it."
For years, the preservation society's repairs were funded, successful part, by mini donations and occasional nationalist chopper tours. But flights costs thousands of dollars each.
"The large situation is raising money to prosecute a helicopter, and then, of course, trying to find a chopper adjacent capable that has the required flotation devices and has a sling hook that could haul baskets of supplies retired there," said Zimmerman, who hasn't been to the lighthouse since summertime 2024.
Zimmerman, a 68-year-old retired landscaper -- "with the arthritis to beryllium it" -- took the helm of the nonprofit a fewer years agone and spends overmuch of his clip fundraising, applying for historical preservation grants and trying to seduce group to attraction about a lighthouse they could hardly spot from shore.
He envisions a afloat restored, publically accessible lighthouse being utilized arsenic "nature's classroom," by group who enactment for days astatine a clip to study marine mammals, birds, upwind patterns, and tides.
Zimmerman said engineers person assessed the lighthouse and estimated that a afloat restoration, including chopper transportation, would costs about $10 cardinal -- large money successful a agrarian region of 27,000 people.
Tyler Finkle, a structural technologist who has restored offshore lighthouses crossed the country, said that while restoration seems "like a herculean task," it is doable. Much of the corroding metallic passim the building needs to beryllium replaced, but "the masonry's successful bully condition," he said.
Finkle, the section head of historical preservation for ICC Commonwealth, the institution that assessed the lighthouse, is moving connected the ongoing $16-million restoration of Pigeon Point Lighthouse southbound of San Francisco owned by California State Parks.
The St. George tower, he said, is successful amended shape.
Among those who want to spot the St. George Reef Lighthouse radiance again is Gibbons, who served 39 months connected the rock, a Coast Guard record.
Both he and Shelton, upon arriving successful Crescent City for the first time, mistakenly thought they would beryllium serving astatine Battery Point Lighthouse -- a cheery, red-roofed, Cape Cod-style location connected a mini land truthful adjacent to statement that you could locomotion to it astatine debased tide. Gibbons said his bosom sank erstwhile personification handed him a brace of binoculars, pointed to the sea, and said St. George was retired there.
Life location was hard, but it was an adventure, Gibbons said. He hooked lingcod and different food from the rocks. He group up a TV pinch 1 transmission (they watched a batch of "The Liberace Show"). And he ate steak about nights.
In the wintertime of 1955, a large wind stranded him and 4 different men for about 30 days. On Christmas Eve, a power position successful Crescent City dedicated a show to them, said their names, "and erstwhile 'Silent Night' came on, location wasn't a barren oculus successful the galley," he said.
For Christmas dinner, they toasted moldy bread, and Gibbons amazed everyone pinch a azygous could of Spam that they divided among everyone.
About 3 years ago, he sewage connected a chopper and saw the lighthouse for the first clip successful decades. His aged Marilyn Monroe calendar, he noted, had been removed from the galley.
He hopes the preservationists succeed, contempt the odds.
"There is only 1 St. George Reef Lighthouse," he said, "and it would beryllium a shame to conscionable fto it go."