There is a picnic area at the intersection with Sand Canyon Road. It's quite the party site. I filled two grocery bags worth of littered beer bottles and cans of energy drinks. You could have a decent time up there just living off the unconsumed portions. Then you could get the recycling money and buy a pizza in Santa Clarita.
Our first stop was Contract Point (3635'). At least that's what it's called on the USGS topo. A sign onsite said Contractors Point.
Though that sign was placed next to this tower
which was before the end of the service road
where we found the Mesa benchmark
and a great view of the San Fernando Valley.
If you look in the other direction you'll find a partial view of the Pacoima Dam.
Continuing our drive, we entered Fire Camp 9. Here the old administrative buildings for the Nike missile site are being used by county fire.
The place looks nice with some outdoor displays for sightseers. The road goes straight through the facility with buildings on either side. Some firefighters were actually leveling a fresh section of concrete during our visit. We asked if they knew about a benchmark at the camp. One had heard of it but didn't recall its location. Cecelia and I searched all around but couldn't find the traditional disc type. I've now read the datasheet and think it was an antenna somewhere near the helipad.
On Peakbagger the fire camp site is labelled "Hero Peak," so I'm counting this visit as bagging that summit, which is really just a plateau now, probably flattened during the original construction in the 1950s.
Above this site, on a peaklet, was the camp's large water tank. We made the short ascent to check out views and have a snack. To the south was the old Nike launch facility, but that side road was posted private property so earlier we skipped it. To the east was an impressive panorama of mountains.
On the tank the firefighters had placed their emblems.
To the west of the camp we visited the Nike control location, now used by KCSN-FM (according to my Garmin map).
A cool feature of this site is the old radar building.
The tower is actually a benchmark, but I didn't know that at the time. We did, however, find two disc type marks at this site. Across the plateau and helipad, near these crosses,
we found the Camp benchmark stamped 1983.
This surprised me because I expected it to be called Fernando 2 (4003'), based on the USGS topo. Looking around some more, we failed to find the Fernando 2 benchmark. However, nearby we did locate the Fernando 2 reference mark 3.
Here is a view of the fire camp from the Nike control site. You can see the water tank above the camp.
This particular Nike site was somewhat unique because the three facilities (administration, control and launch) were all very close together within line of sight from each other. This is more evident in an old aerial image I found online.
Driving a little further along the Santa Clara road (3N17), we stopped briefly to bag a tiny Peakbagger summit called Tribute Peak (3789').
That's it on the right. There was nothing special up there, except for Cecelia, who beat me to the top.
And of course it wouldn't be a mountain road trip without some water tank action.
