Cheshire Cat Photo Blog(...said the Cat: 'we're all mad here....')

I learned for the first time today about a beacon, named the “Eye of Diablo” atop Mount Diablo in the East Bay Area. The beacon shines tonight, as it does EVERY December 7, and then will be extinguished for another year.

The rusty 84-year-old beacon is in major disrepair, but it shines again tonight, visible for over 200 miles, to commemorate the darkest day in America history, the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This morning, volunteers worked to make sure that the Eye of Diablo would shine again, as an ancient motor rotates the lamp on old, worn bearings. SFGate.com says:

“It has to last one more night,” said John Gallagher, one of the volunteers who is working on the light. “After that, we will have all the time we need.”

Gallagher, a Danville veterinarian, is among several members of the nonprofit Save Mount Diablo organization who have agreed to completely rebuild the Eye of Diablo so it will operate for years to come.

The beacon is part of Mount Diablo State Park, which doesn’t have the money to fix it. No one is sure exactly what it will cost to rehabilitate it, but Save Mount Diablo is providing the money, the enthusiasm and most of the expertise. It is a labor of love and history.

Mount Diablo is a prominent peak with a view to a VAST area of land and sea. The area of the view does not result so much from the height of the mountain as from the relative flatness of the surrounding land. The mountain has two peaks, and the higher peak, at 3,849 feet, can be seen from 35 of California’s 58 counties!

The peak is so prominent that in 1851 a surveyor named Leander Ransom drilled a hole in a rock at the summit and erected a flagpole. That point became the baseline meridian – where north and south, east and west lines intersected – and the measuring point for all property surveys in Northern California and Nevada to this day.

Before that, of course, Diablo was sacred to the American Indians of the area. It is said that more than 25 native groups lived within sight of the mountain. Spanish soldiers named the mountain for a group of Indians who escaped an ambush – the work of the devil, they thought.

There are old ranches and old stories on its slopes, and more than 110,000 acres of public land, an area nearly four times the size of San Francisco. A road was built to the summit in 1874 and a lookout tower in 1876.

 As for the light itself – the Standard Oil Co. of California erected the beacon to guide airplanes, in 1928. In 1939, the Eye of Diablo was moved from a steel tower to the current site on the stone and steel summit building.

On December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the light was turned off so that it could not be used as a navigational reference for attacking enemy planes. The beacon remained off for 23 years.

Then, in 1964, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz suggested that the Eye of Diablo be turned on every December 7 to honor the memory of Pearl Harbor, and, every year, survivors of Pearl Harbor came to tell their stories. Now, after 71 years, there are only five remaining survivors of Pearl Harbor among the million people who live near Mount Diablo, and the ceremony has been turned over to the sons and daughters of those who served at Pearl Harbor.

The beacon is lit at sunset and remains lit for only that single night.

One year, in the 1970s, the beacon would not light, and a group of volunteers want to ensure that it always will. One day last week, six of the volunteers gathered in a tiny room, accessible only by retractable ladders, at the top of the mountain, to test the light. The bearings that turn the device are nearly worn out, and Richard Heron, a Danville engineer, climbed through a trapdoor and onto a catwalk and pulled the device around by hand, in a wind that gusted to over 30 miles per hour, to “warm up” the bearings. He said that one year he needed to turn the device manually for 45 minutes.

The volunteers say that, as long as the Eye of Diable shines from atop the mountain, the memory of Pearl Harbor will never fade.

-Bill at

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