The history of Carmel Valley’s long-retired fire lookout tower tells a World War II story.

Hiking east up Snively’s Ridge on a warm and clear day, as freshly bloomed wildflowers light up the trailside with splashes of yellow, orange and purple, a solitary tower beckons atop a hill rising south of the ridge’s summit in Garland Ranch Regional Park.

The hill is named Pinyon Peak, which is in privately owned land in the Santa Lucia Preserve, and the tower atop it is named the Sid Ormsbee Fire Lookout Station, which was completed in 1948.

Access requires permission from the Preserve, but the reward is panoramic views sweeping across the horizon in every direction. There is also history: At that the tower’s base is a plaque that reads, “Sidney Chase Ormsbee | Forester and Soldier | 1916-1943 | Around that bay and among these hills | his home | his play | and his work.”

Who was Sidney Chase Ormsbee, and why was the tower named after him?

Christy Fischer, executive director of the Santa Lucia Conservancy, an offshoot of the Preserve, thinks it was because Ormsbee spent years of his childhood on the peak in an older fire lookout, living with his parents.

It’s a seductive story, and perhaps grew out of what people deduced from the plaque, but the historical record tells a different story – although the two stories appear to intersect.

Ormsbee, born in Oakland, moved to Capitola with his family in his youth; his father was an engineer with the State Division of Forestry, now known as Cal Fire. After graduating from Santa Cruz High School in 1936, Ormsbee was set to follow in his father’s footsteps, majoring in forestry engineering at San Jose State.

“Sputnik was seen above the Monterey Peninsula.”

He joined the forestry division when he left school three years later, and according to a Santa Cruz Sentinel article from August 1946, he “held a number of positions with forestry crews in Santa Cruz, Santa Clara and Monterey counties before he entered service for World War II.”

It is in that war that Ormsbee, who became a lieutenant in the Army Air Forces – a bombardier, essentially – met his untimely end: In August 1943, he died after anti-aircraft fire shot down his plane off Cape Faro, in Sicily, just a month after he was cited for bravery in action for a mission he completed over Naples.

His potential passing was first reported locally in a Sentinel article Aug. 26, 1943: “A telegram from the U.S. adjutant’s office in Washington D.C. brought distressing word to Mr. and Mrs. H. N. Ormsbee, of Capitola, that their son… has been missing in action in the middle east area since August 16.”

According to a July 4, 1948 Sentinel article – about the dedication of the lookout tower – Ormsbee bailed out of his plane after it was hit, “but was machine-gunned on his way down or in the sea.” Among other posthumous distinctions, Ormsbee was awarded a Purple Heart.

The naming of the lookout, which was not yet built, was announced by the state in 1946. According to a Sentinel story from that year, it was “one of a number of new lookouts which the state division of forestry is planning to name after division men who were killed in World War II.”

According to a 1993 Cal Fire report about the state’s fire lookouts, the tower replaced an older one on nearby Mt. Toro, and while there doesn’t appear to be evidence that Ormsbee or his parents ever resided on that peak, his family did have connection to another lookout tower: Loma Prieta, atop a peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains with the same name. Ormsbee’s father, in the 1920s, was instrumental in founding the Loma Prieta Lookout, as well as a ranger station at Felton.

It is unclear when exactly the Sid Ormsbee Lookout was decommissioned – sometime in the 1980s, it appears – but it was listed in the National Historic Lookout Register in 2010. Two years later, the Monterey County Planning Commission approved a non-commercial telecommunications tower affixed to the lookout to help facilitate emergency communications for firefighters who may be battling blazes deep in the Santa Lucia Mountains.

There was a harbinger for the tower’s new function, it turns out, as far back as the 1950s: The tower’s first lookout was a man named Ferdinand Haasis, a graduate of Yale and a teacher at Carmel High. Normally, he was fixated on events like lightning storms, but on Oct. 16, 1957, he and his wife had their eyes on the sky above.

“Sputnik, or its rocket, was seen above the Monterey Peninsula this morning and you too will be able to see it tomorrow weather permitting,” reads an article in the Monterey Peninsula Herald. “The Russian satellite or the fellow traveling rocket which launched it was spotted about 5:11am today by Mr. and Mrs. Ferdinand Haasis, lookouts on duty at the Sid Ormsbee fire tower south of Carmel Valley.”