Rose Peak's fire lookout — a century-old solitary vigil over the wildest, most switchbacked stretch of the Blue Range.
Up on the high point to the west stands Rose Peak, and on its summit a fire lookout tower that has watched over these mountains for generations. In the long dry weeks before the summer rains, a lookout climbs those stairs at dawn and spends the whole day scanning a hundred miles of forest for the first thread of smoke — one of the last of a vanishing breed, keeping a solitary, patient vigil the way it's been kept out here for more than a century. This is the loneliest, wildest stretch of the entire drive, deep in the Blue Range, where the pavement coils back on itself in switchback after switchback. Take these curves slow, use the pullouts to let any rare faster car go by, and drink in the country: ridge after blue ridge, rolling away south as far as the eye can reach, with hardly a human mark on any of it.