10-32 Cape Blanco Lighthouse, OR—Sept 2010

This will be our work place for the month of Sept. It is a working lighthouse and we will be giving tours all the way up into the lantern room. Pretty awesome job!

Before we started working we toured the historic Hughes house which is about a mile from the lighthouse. This is where the Hughes family raised their seven children and ran a dairy farm, milking 100 head of cows by hand. They had ranch hands who also lived on the farm, raising their families. One of their sons did become a lighthouse keeper at Cape Blanco lighthouse.

This was not the original ranch house. Mr. Hughes had it built as his retirement home, although some of the children did grow up here. He died three years after it was built, but his wife lived in it until she was past ninety. It has been preserved and restored and another host does tours of the house.

This is the view from the front of the Hughes house. It sits just above where the sixes river flows into the ocean. Lots of grassland for cattle grazing. The day we visited was a beautiful clear day. The wind was blowing at about 15 miles an hour. The wind blows almost every day.

Our home for the month. There were supposed to be three host couples, but one had to leave for a family emergency. So there are just the two RVer’s here in this host site. There are two more couples that are the Camp Hosts, and then there are couples at Humbug State Park, The Lifeguard Museum and the Day use Area parks.

First day at the top of the lighthouse. What a view out this window.

Believe it or not that is a 1000 watt light bulb, inside the lens.

Below are shots of the lamp itself, and the views out the windows One shot is of the greeting center/gift shop where the people get their tickets to tour the lighthouse. It costs a whopping $2.00 each to get up close to the lantern. We each have a script we use depending on what part of the lighthouse we are in. The bottom part is the workroom and that person tells about the life of a keeper, what that room was used for and a little history of the men who kept the light burning. The Lantern room script tells more about the lamp, how it shown out into the ocean, when it became a rotating light and what kind of lens is used to shine 26 miles out into the ocean on a clear day.

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The two couples, who are here now, are Lighthouse interpretive hosts. We share the duties in the light house. Each couple works half a day. One of us is in the lantern room and one in the work room for our half day shift. We only have to climb the 64 steps once a day.

On Wednesday Sept 15, the Rangers held a BBQ thank you lunch for all the hosts in the area. There were quite a few hosts, from as far away as Umpqua River State Park, near Roseburg, OR. About 30-40 of us were there. It was windy and cold and the campfire felt really good. A nice time was had by all of us.