The Rectangle of Legend
A trip to a decommissioned missile detection facility from the cold war during my brief visit home
If you live anywhere near San José, California you at some point have doubtlessly looked up to the mountains and seen that the Santa Clara valley is flanked on two sides by mountains with man-made objects on the top.
To the east you have the Lick Observatory, a white dome at the top of Mount Hamilton; it's significantly further away and less obtrusive, but to the south/west you have Mount Umunhum (the Ohlone word for Hummingbird); this peak is only 3400 feet up but it's noticeable because it's got a fucking tall-ass rectangle sticking out the top of the mountain.
Wide angle lens doing some work here; that metal door at the bottom is about 8 feet tall
Growing up in the valley it was impossible not to have weird fixations about this thing. The top of the nearest mountain has a giant rectangle on it! A forbidden rectangle! You couldn't drive up to it because the roads leading in ended at a private road gate, only accessible by the residents who lived up in the mountain off the grid.
These surrounding mountains and hills had so many myths; the ghost of a dead girl killed by a car crash who would appear to motorists, the colony of (depending on who told the story) cannibalistic albinos, alien abductions, the goat man, you name it - all surviving on word of mouth based on the fact that it was the most "wilderness" you could get in the surrounding area. San José isn't by any means highly urban, but the city itself is mostly suburbs where any area that was far enough out into the hills to not have street lights got their own urban legends.
Plus y'know, there's this fucking ominous rectangle at the top
In truth, the rectangle was part of the Almaden Air Force Station, a decommissioned radar tower that was part of a cold war era missile defense program called the SAGE system; it's purpose was to detect and shoot down Soviet warheads heading in from the pacific. By the time I was cognizant as a kid the large red and white radar dish had been removed from the rectangle proper, and the base had been abandoned.
I cannot get over how much that person in the middle photo looks like Chit
The site of the base itself was closed off until about 2017 when they cleaned it up, removed most of the Air Force buildings and let the Open Space department take over managing it. It's a hiking trail now.
In 2008, in true "This might be the story of how Della and MSD get murdered by a stranger from the internet" fashion, we had a friend we knew entirely through Flickr (remember pre-Yahoo Flickr??) who kept posting photos about the base or of the nearby areas; he'd do aerial photos of the tower from planes or find archive photos of life there from the 70's - and through random conversations we ended up meeting up with him one night because he had a friend who lived beyond the private road, and they let us in to go do long exposure photos of the tower under the promise that we'd never post the photos online to avoid encouraging others to trespass up there; I'm sticking with that even though now it's kind of moot since, as mentioned, it's become a public hiking trail - but I wanna do right by the man who helped us get up there and the grizzled old bearded guy living there who told Della and I that we were "alright for flatlanders".
In the post-cleanup and public access world all but the rectangle itself have been removed, but when we got our 2008 moonlight tour of the place, ALL of the Air Force buildings were still intact. The base's pool was full of water plants that had grown into it from decades of rainwater and wind. Someone spray pained a LOST 'Dharma Initiative' logo on the barricade outside and I gotta tell you, the vibes fuckin matched. The barracks building had a small grave outside of it for "Colonel Tom", the base's cat.
Now though, it's a beautiful hike with a stunning view of both the Santa Clara valley and most of the Santa Cruz mountains. From the peak you can see both Downtown San José in one direction and the Pacific Ocean in the other. It rules.
It's also nice that there's any indication of what the land was BEFORE the Air Force took it over; a sacred location for the Ohlone people. Their history (as with most indigenous peoples of the Americas) gets papered over or outright disregarded a lot; even if this placard is immediately followed by the "and then what happened to them" question never being answered I'm glad someone's bringing it up.
I only had my 20mm on me for this trip, I traveled quickly and light so I couldn't get a better shot of this but while I was heading toward the tower, a hummingbird (the mountain's namesake) flew into my frame. It's incredibly hard to see but if you open the full image (click it) that black blob in the center of the frame.
