John Gibbons shivered in the back of a small boat heading out on his first mission as a member of the U.S. Coast Guard.
That was in 1953. Gibbons was a baby-faced 18-year-old kid from Ohio who had only recently seen the ocean for the first time. And he receives new orders to work at one of the most isolated and dangerous lighthouses in the country.
The St. George Reef Lighthouse sits six miles off the coast of California’s sparsely populated northwest corner, perched on a sheer rock with nothing but the cold, raging Pacific Ocean.
“When I came out of the fog, I saw this light. It was like a scene from a horror movie,” Gibbons, now 91, said. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, how did they build something like this in the middle of the ocean?'”
St. George Reef Lighthouse is a World Heritage Site, an architectural masterpiece and an important symbol of California maritime history. Built over a 10-year period in the late 1800s, it is the most expensive American lighthouse ever built.
But time and fresh air took their toll. The lighthouse was largely abandoned for 50 years. A leak occurred from the lantern room. The handrails were rusty. The paint was peeling and the original wood floors were spongy. The hooks and booms that once hoisted the boat out of the water and onto the rocks have long since fallen apart.
Few people have ever stepped foot inside. But a small group of volunteers and old salt are on a mission to fully restore the site and draw lighthouse-loving tourists to this struggling corner of California. Industries dedicated to logging and fishing disappeared there long ago.
The challenge is tremendous. Climate change is sure to raise sea levels and bring stronger storms to these stone sentinels. More directly, the lighthouse is currently only accessible by expensive helicopter ride, unless the wind is gentle and foggy.
“When you look at the big picture of this project, you just want to fold up your tent and forget about it,” said John Zimmerman, president of the St. George Reef Lighthouse Preservation Society. “But the fact is, and I remind our volunteers of this, the people who did the hard work were the ones who built things in the first place.”
Zimmerman’s group doesn’t have much money. And maybe they’re a little romantic. But history is worth fighting for, he says.
“Every time I go out, it’s a religious experience for me,” he said. “I know it sounds corny, but standing there, 45 miles of visibility, a beautiful lighthouse, a beautiful view. In my mind, it couldn’t be any closer to God.”
Every lighthouse has a great story, he said. And this film, he added, “has a better story than most.”
The West Coast’s first lighthouse was lit in 1854 during the Gold Rush, when hordes of ships were sailing into California. Since then, more than 40 lighthouses have graced the state’s rugged and foggy coast.
The northernmost point is on St. George’s Reef, a series of volcanic formations called Dragon Rocks by British explorers in the 1700s because of the danger they posed to ships.
On July 30, 1865, just three months after the end of the Civil War, disaster struck.
A side-wheel steamer called the SS Brother Jonathan hit one of the rocks. The ship, carrying heavy railroad and mining equipment and a large quantity of gold, sank within 45 minutes, killing all but 19 of the 244 people on board.
The U.S. Lighthouse Commission then petitioned Congress to build a lighthouse on the reef. However, the war-torn country was in ruins. It took 17 years for the government to approve funding, and construction took another 10 years as funding continued to be scarce.
The lighthouse cost $752,000 to build, or about $27 million today. That is the Statue of Liberty, which was completed six years ago.
The workers lived aboard a schooner moored in the , and accessed the schooner by aerial tramway on a small platform connected to a cable strung between the ship’s mast and the rocks, like a zip line.
They blasted explosives from the top of the rock onto the terrace that anchored the lighthouse’s foundation, known as a caisson. They used cargo nets and boom derricks to hoist the 6-ton granite boulders that make up the 70-foot-tall oval caisson and five-story tower.
Huge waves repeatedly swept people off the rocks, and one National Park Service employee fell to his death.
On October 20, 1892, a Fresnel lens was illuminated for the first time, emitting a beam that could be seen over 32 miles away. That day, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the lighthouse was “so solidly built that the tremendous waves which so frequently assault it resemble the ripples of a stream.”
Life at St. George’s Reef Lighthouse (the so-called deer cabin, where women and children were not allowed) was harsh and lonely.
Within a year of operation, an assistant caretaker left the rock at sea on a small boat bound for Crescent City. Of the 80 people who worked there between 1891 and 1930, before the Coast Guard took over, 36 resigned and 27 were transferred to other lighthouses, according to the 2007 book Sea Watchers: Life and Death at the Most Dangerous Lighthouse in History.
In 1951, three Coast Guardsmen drowned when the rope lowering their boat from a rock snapped and they fell into the icy water.
The following year, Floyd Shelton, a 19-year-old Guardsman from Portland, was ordered to replace one of the fallen soldiers.
“The accommodations were horrible,” Shelton, now 93, told the Times. Guards would “hot sack” twin beds, with men finishing their shift jumping into the still-warm beds of men starting their shift. They rarely took showers because there was little fresh water.
But the place was undeniably beautiful, Shelton said. Shelton recalled climbing onto a sectional steel boom and lying on it, watching whales migrating below. Once, he was showered with whale fountain.
“I’ve been accused of being a romantic,” Shelton said. “There are very few people left who built lighthouses and lifeboat bases, mostly men, like me.”
The men were to rotate. He worked 10 days on the rocks and 10 days at the land station. But in the fall of 1952, a storm stranded Shelton and several other Guardsmen for more than 45 days.
Waves crashed into the lens chamber, which is 146 feet above sea level, and water cascaded down a circular staircase “like a waterfall,” Shelton said.
The men had run out of food, scavenging for vitamins and pancake mix. When the big waves came, the whole lighthouse shook.
“All we did was hope things would work out,” he said. “And so it happened.”
Shelton said maintaining the lighthouse required a lot of work. Shelton said he nearly fell off the tower while painting the oil chamber under the lens, and was nearly blown off by the wind while greasing the boom cable. Because it has been vacant for so long, Shelton is skeptical that the lighthouse can be restored despite the dedicated efforts of volunteers.
“This is just a monumental mission, but it gives them more power,” he said.
The St. George Reef Lighthouse was decommissioned in 1975, replacing its magnificent structure with a floating automatic buoy light.
The last entry in the logbook read: “After 40 years and three years, the light on St. George’s Reef has dimmed. … May Mother Nature show you mercy. You have been abandoned, but you will never be forgotten.”
In 1986, a group of local residents learned that the government was planning to sell the rapidly decaying beacon for scrap. Eventually, the federal government deeded the lighthouse, and it is now being given to a nonprofit organization for $1 a month.
When Huell Hauser visited the lighthouse in 1995 for his TV show “California’s Gold,” he was accompanied by the late Preservation Society director Guy Towers. He has been fighting to protect the lighthouse for 10 years, but has not yet been able to reach it. One by one, the men were lowered into wire baskets from a hovering Coast Guard helicopter.
“Touchdown: It was a little tough! But believe me, I was happy to get up on that big rock,” Hauser said.
For years, members of this small preservation society, now ranging in age from their 60s to their 80s, have taken off in helicopters and landed on the caissons.
They brought in a generator and stayed overnight, removing peeling paint and plaster and hauling away trash and rotting furniture. They power-cleaned the bird droppings, rebuilt the rusty railings and, in an even more spectacular feat, installed a lantern room, suspending the original dome from a helicopter and flying it to shore.
They installed a solar-powered lens, illuminating the lighthouse for the first time in decades. But earlier this year, winds carried away the solar panels.
For years, volunteers had to limit their activities to the winter months of the year because federal wildlife officials wanted to protect the sea lions on the rocks during their mating season. It has since been lifted.
“We’ve been fighting like hell for 30 years,” said Jim McLaughlin, a deep-sea fisherman and original member of the preservation society. “It’s very expensive to hire people, so there’s no need to waste your time. We need jobs like electricians and pipe fitters.”
When McLaughlin, 84, was a child, he could see the lighthouse’s light from his bedroom window. Then he laughed and said: “I used to shoot ducks near there at night.”
For many years, some of the preservation society’s repair costs have been covered by small donations and occasional public helicopter tours. But air tickets cost thousands of dollars per flight.
“The big challenge is to raise the funds to hire a helicopter and, of course, find one nearby that has the necessary flotation devices and a sling hook that can transport the baskets of supplies,” said Zimmerman, who has not visited the lighthouse since summer 2024.
Mr. Zimmerman, a 68-year-old retired landscaper who has “proven to suffer from arthritis,” took the helm of the nonprofit several years ago and spends much of his time raising money, applying for historic preservation grants and persuading people to cherish the lighthouse, which is barely visible from the shore.
He envisions the fully restored and publicly accessible lighthouse being used as a “nature classroom” by people staying for days at a time to study marine mammals, birds, weather patterns, tides, and more.
Zimmerman said engineers have evaluated the lighthouse and estimated that a complete restoration, including transportation by helicopter, would cost about $10 million. That’s a lot of money for a rural county of 27,000 people.
Structural engineer Tyler Finkle, who has restored offshore lighthouses across the country, said restoration seems like a “tough job” but is doable. Much of the corroded metal throughout the structure will need to be replaced, but “the masonry is in good condition,” he said.
Finkle, the historic preservation manager for ICC Commonwealth, the company that evaluated the lighthouse, is working on the Pigeon Point Lighthouse south of San Francisco State Park in California.
St. George Tower is in better shape, he said.
Among those hoping to see the St. George Reef Lighthouse shine again is Gibbons, who served a Coast Guard record 39 months on the rock.
When he and Shelton first arrived in Crescent City, they mistakenly assumed they would be serving in a cheerful red-roofed Cape Cod-style house on a small island close enough to the shore to walk at low tide. Gibbons said her heart sank when someone handed her binoculars, pointed out to sea and said St. George was there.
Life there was difficult, but an adventure, Gibbons said. He hooked lingcod and other fish on rocks. He installed a television with one channel (they used to watch “The Liberace Show”). And he ate steak almost every night.
In the winter of 1955, a storm stranded him and four other men for about 30 days. On Christmas Eve, a Crescent City radio station aired a program featuring their names, “and when ‘Silent Night’ came on, there wasn’t a dry eye in the galley,” he said.
For Christmas dinner, Gibbons surprised everyone by toasting moldy bread and sharing a can of Spam with everyone.
About three years ago, I took a helicopter ride and saw the lighthouse for the first time in decades. He noted that his old Marilyn Monroe calendar had been removed from the galley.
He hopes preservationists will succeed, despite the challenges.
“There is only one St. George Reef Lighthouse and it would be a shame to leave it alone,” he said.
