July 28, 2019 - Delilah Lookout

Title: July 28, 2019 - Delilah Lookout
Hike Info : Description : Trail Lessons : Background : Menu 

Trail head: Delilah Lookout

Hike Info:

Type: Lookout

Description:

What a great night! I slept on the Delilah catwalk. A bit narrow, particularly with a person of my girth. But the stars were shining so bright against a black canopy. One can imagine what the ancients saw in the night sky. The stories, the meaning, the beauty. Being blind, I kept my glasses on and fell asleep that way. At 0430, I woke up to another light. What could it be? A sliver of a moon arising in the east. I can understand why people would seek after Luna. That blast of light kept me awake for awhile. But still I fell asleep some more, only to be woken up by the greater light: the dawn of the morning sun.

At Delilah, the morning sun is not the spectacular event which the evening sunset is. Looking at where the sun will rise, it is only bright. But looking south, I see clouds getting a rosy tint. Just worth waking up for that. By 0600 I am ready to get up. Sherri is slumbering peacefully in the lookout’s bed. I just read for a little while.

Just before sunrise

By 0730, we are getting the lookout cab cleaned up and cooking breakfast. Breakfast is standard-oatmeal and stuff. We are here for one night so everything we hauled up yesterday needs to come down today. Unlike yesterday, this does allow us a more relaxed pace.

We take the weather-humidity is still up there pretty nicely-around 45-50%. Of course, it is 77 degrees pretty early. Yesterday we got interested in hearing the “Air to Ground” radio traffic, so we included that on our scan. So this morning, I took it off. We go into service with Sierra at 0930. Then try to go into service with Porterville. They do not respond. I wait and try again. No response. I go to Park Ridge on another channel (R5 Project). They respond, but they were out of the cab so they did not hear me. I then asked Buck Rock if they heard me. No. In the meantime, I use the handheld radio to go into service with Porterville-they heard me loud and clear. A mystery about what happened.

Whiteboard

As it turns out we only need to listen to the base radio the rest of the day, not actually transmit on it, that is until we go out of service. But in the meantime we do our normal routine of doing scans, listening to the weather and staffing and the like. We even have six visitors. The first five came up from Sequoia Highlands Camp, just down the road. Their relatives own the camp and they came over upon their recommendation.

The last person is a motorcyclist who is interested in going down Davis Road or one of the other roads in the area. But almost everything is closed in our area. He is at Lake Sequoia for a few days and would like to explore some of the areas. But a couple of our roads-White Deer and Delilah Springs are all closed permanently. Davis Road is closed until they can get it repaired. We had heard informally that it would be in July, but the end of July is closing in fast. He goes on looking for new areas to enjoy-we recommend the Buck Rock area.

Our duty officer for the Hume Lake Ranger District gives us a call to check up on us. I tell him about the radio incident. He asks did I hear the tone* feedback. I plead ignorance (I now know what he was talking about.) He will have the radio man from the Forest take a look Monday.

Sherri the Lookout

Then Kathy calls and I go over some things with her. Such as updating the white board with current fires. But the main point of interest is the radio. She has been change off of channel 3 and on to channel 4. She then walks be through changing the tones-to 12. This will cause us to bounce off of Park Ridge’s repeater. I then do a radio check with Porterville and they hear us. So we are now left in a quandary about why they cannot hear us on channel 3 without a repeater involved. Sounds like somebody above my pay grade’s problem to figure out.

Back to the normal day’s events. For the most part it like what was said above. Sherri takes a short nap. When she gets up, it is my turn. I sleep for about an hour, waking up at our 1600 weather and lookout check-in. From here on out, we start working on cleaning up the lookout for the next person. Mopping the floor, cleaning the windows, washing dishes and tidying up. Then it is ferrying down the stuff-both with the pulley system and sherpa style. 


 

Gathering of the Black Eagles

We also heard on the radio that down south there is a smoke spotted by Jordan Lookout called the Solo Fire. Lots of excitement. Way to far south for us to even be looking there-just for the record, azimuth 152^o 44’, 54.4 miles away. Also we had been hearing that a crew called Black Eagle 6 was heading towards the Hume Lake Ranger District. Then on R5 Project Black Eagle 6 was trying to figure out where to congregate. Sherri spotted several trucks where Davis Road joins the Delilah Road. Maybe they are here to work on Davis Road?

So at last it was time to go out of service. We went out of service with Sierra a bit early, in case we needed the handheld to go out of service with Porterville. This time, I got the brilliant-well maybe at least a half of a watt light bulb-idea. Go to channel 3 and set the tone to 8, like it should be. I called out “Porterville - Delilah - Channel 3, Tone 8 - Out of Service.” Miracle of miracles. I got a response from Portereville! Whether resetting the tone did it or the repeater decided to work, I do not know.

I take one last look around to make sure everything is OK and we have all of our stuff out. Then down the hill we go. We order a pizza from Bear Mountain Pizza. While there, I hear sort of whisper sa… Gary Duran…. But you know old mean can hallucinate. Then a hiking friend of ours gives Sherri a hug-guess no hallucination. They had taken a day hike up to Pear Lake (14 miles, 3,000’ gain).

After we ate our pizza, we left, but not before I lost my lookout pin. I discovered that about a mile down the road. Went back and saw it in the parking lot-no worse for wear. We got back to Fresno around 2100. Tired. We unpacked and went to bed. You know how I looked around at the lookout for anything left behind? I did not see Sherri’s pillow. So we might be doing another trip back up there soon.

Trail Lesson:    No matter how much you think you have checked everything off of a list, you will have missed something.

Background

*Between the lessons Kathy gave me, reading the manual on the base radio, and Brent’s guide called Tones and Repeaters: An unofficial tutorial I gained a lot more understanding of what the tone does for us. The idea is that a repeater allows for a radio signal’s range to be extended. But there is overlapping ranges involved. Such as Park Ridge and Delilah can share some of its same territory. So if a repeater repeats all messages it hears, it will walk over other messages. So a tone is added to the message. It is a frequency which may be heard as a low level hum. When the repeater hears the hum it has identified as its own, it will repeat a message. So a tone selects which repeaer to use. Most of the time, the lookouts do not have to worry about a tone since we almost always have a direct line of sight on our traffic.

Menu
 

Breakfast	Lunch	Dinner	Snacks
Oatmeal and add-ins, such as dried peaches, strawberries, nuts, granola. Tang.	Peanut Butter, Nutella Sandwich, Chips	Pizza at Bear Mountain	String cheese and smoked almonds