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.