She’s perched, and poised for trouble

KATHY BALL, a fire lookout in Sequoia National Forest, lives atop a tower at an elevation of 8,502 feet. She has seen bobcats and bears in the wild and has felt the force of a lightning strike.

But when women visitors climb the 172 steps to Buck Rock lookout, there’s one thing they always ask: Where does she go to the bathroom?

Like most other fire towers in the U.S., the “cab” at Buck Rock doesn’t have a toilet, and the outhouse on the ground below is no comfort in the middle of the night. But the tower has just about everything else a lookout could need -- a soft, single bed with pillows and a comforter, phone, sink, stove, coffee maker and refrigerator. Ball has a solar shower on the catwalk, her books and radio, a lookout manual, maps, binoculars and fire-sighting instruments. What else does she need?

Only her dog, it seems. Annabelle, a 12-year-old English setter, has been following Ball up and down the tower five days a week every summer for the last seven years. Several times a day, the two take walks around Buck Rock, though the stairs are getting hard on Annabelle.

But they aren’t a challenge for the 48-year-old Ball, and not only because she’s fit. If you spend any time with her, you’ll figure out quickly that to her, Buck Rock’s 14-by-14-foot cab is only a few clouds away from heaven.

I visited her last month for an afternoon of lookout training, given to volunteers who relieve her at Buck Rock. The lookout tower was closed in 1987 but now is back in service full time. Without Ball, Buck Rock probably would have remained permanently empty, with fire-spotting taken over by aircraft.

But the tower proved crucial in fighting the Choke fire, which raged in the Monarch Wilderness above Kings Canyon during the summer of 1997, burning more than 3,900 acres. For six weeks, Ball was stationed at Buck Rock, monitoring the blaze and relaying messages. Afterward, she and a group of concerned locals started the Buck Rock Foundation, a nonprofit organization that renovated the tower with the help of the national forest.

The foundation solicits and trains volunteers such as Wendy Garton, who spends two days a week at the nearby Park Ridge tower, and Lea Dotters, who returned to work at reactivated Buck Rock after serving as its first female lookout in 1944. Now the foundation has its sights set on refitting 7,753-foot Baker Point, another vintage lookout on the west flank of the central Sierra Nevada.

From Pasadena to the forest

HOW Ball, born in Pasadena, got to Buck Rock is another story.

Twenty years ago, she was commuting on freeways and working in retail management. Then she met the man who would become her husband, John Zak Ball, an expert on peregrine falcons who wanted to move to the mountains. In 1988 they settled in Pinehurst, a small community in the foothills west of Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. Two years later, while learning how to fly an ultralight aircraft, he died in a crash with his instructor.

After that, she got a job collecting camping fees and then became a fire watcher at the 90-foot-tall Delilah lookout, one of the most remote in Sequoia National Forest. Only a handful of people visit it every summer.

“I did my grieving at Delilah,” she told me. “Being a lookout made me physically, mentally and spiritually stronger. It gave me the opportunity to really get to know myself and what makes me happy. I enjoyed living a simpler life. Everything I needed was in that 14-by-14 cabin.”

It is a solitary life, during fire season, but Ball is no hermit. She listens to National Public Radio news religiously and heard about the Sept. 11 attacks about the time they happened. “At first I thought it was ‘The War of the Worlds.’ Campers who came up that day had no idea what was going on,” she said.

At Buck Rock, Ball receives 5,000 visitors a season who climb to the tower to take in the view.

“There are about as many kinds of fire watchers as types of lookout towers. Some may not be overly friendly. Others make cookies for visitors and talk their ears off,” Ball said. “The towers are the lookouts’ homes for the season, so visitors should keep that in mind and be respectful of their space.”

Ball doesn’t get bored. Her day starts at sunrise, when she rises, grabs her binoculars and makes the first scan of the horizon from the catwalk. It’s generally clearest in the morning, so suspicious smoke plumes stand out. Before breakfast, she takes weather observations -- including the temperature, wind direction and velocity, relative humidity and cloud conditions -- and then treks down the tower to use the facilities, open the front gate and walk Annabelle. Back up in the tower, she makes herself and the cab presentable for visitors.

Throughout the day, she scans 14 channels on a radio and calls three wilderness agencies -- Sequoia and Sierra national forests and Sequoia/Kings Canyon -- to report she’s in service. Communicating by radio and phone is one of a lookout’s chief jobs, and Ball is good at relaying information to the people who need it.

Sometimes the Forest Service sends her on special assignments. She spent two weeks in the summer living in a tent and monitoring communications for the Heart-Millard fire from a command post in the San Bernardino National Forest.

“I’ve never worked a fire myself,” Ball said. But she has called in many first reports of fires and seen flames from Buck Rock, as well as smoke jumpers, heli-rappellers who reach fires by rappelling down ropes from helicopters and big World War II-era air tankers full of fire retardants flying into tight spaces.

Buck Rock has been hit by lightning, blowing out the radio, though the cab has a grounded awning and chairs, which help protect watchers during storms. “If it’s a direct hit, the thunder and lightning happen at the same time. My hair stands on end with static electricity,” she said. “There’s a blinding flash of light and the sound is deafening. I scream every time.

“But I love to watch it. Lightning is a tremendous force of nature. I’ve seen it make trees explode.”

During thunderstorms, Ball uses a red pencil to mark hits on a glass-topped map, which is important because 80% of fires in national forests are caused by lightning, including the Choke fire. Sometimes the blazes they start can be sleepers that smolder, unnoticed, for weeks before popping up as a smoke plume.

Buck Rock has a perfect view of Mitchell Peak, which is especially prone to lightning. Fires caused by naturally occurring electric bolts are sometimes allowed to burn unimpeded to clean out dangerous undergrowth. But when the populated foothills to the west and landmark giant sequoia groves in nearby national parks are jeopardized, the battle to stop them begins.

Fire towers are important because they help spot blazes early, when they are easiest to fight.

Her mission to staff and save them keeps her happy. The seasonal job doesn’t pay well, and Ball must take sales and road construction jobs to support herself in the winter, when the Sierra is covered with snow and Buck Rock is closed.

Sometimes she wishes she could travel. When I visited, she had just finished reading Peter Mayle’s “A Year in Provence” and looked a little wistful after learning that I live in Paris.

But later she e-mailed me, writing, “Last night I enjoyed one of those perfect sunsets where high clouds, valley dust and local smoke painted the sky in deep shades of orange and yellow. The most prevalent color looked like pumpkin-pie filling. How was your sunset?”

susan.spano@latimes.com