Mount Orizaba

2,097 feet, and eight inches of snow fell on it in January 1949

Mount Orizaba is the highest point of Santa Catalina Island, the rocky Channel Island 29 miles south-southwest of Long Beach that measures 22 miles long and 8 miles across at its widest; the Tongva name for the island is Pimu. The summit is given as 2,097 feet, and the peak takes its name from Pico de Orizaba, the tallest mountain in Mexico. Snow is rare out here, but 8 inches fell on the mountain on 10 January 1949.

The US Coast Survey marked the summit in 1876. Its description puts the station on the highest peak of Catalina, with a deep canyon at its eastern foot running toward the south side of the island, holding several springs of good water and a great many willow trees. The surveyors buried a brickbat level with the ground, drove an iron spike in a lead bolt in its top to mark the centre, and set four redwood stubs, each with a copper tack, 2 feet out to the north, south, east and west. In 1933 a Coast and Geodetic Survey party recovered the mark by the route it recommended: the Blackjack Mine to Whites Landing road up to the ridge joining the station and Catalina Peak, Mount Blackjack, near a water tank, and then southwest along the ridge. They re-marked it with a standard disk set in concrete in a boulder.

The next party, in 1959, searched and found nothing. The marks had probably been destroyed when the top of the mountain was cut and shaped for an FAA VOR facility, and a local surveyor's note from 1962 is blunt: station destroyed, the entire top of the mountain removed by excavation. The FAA's VORTAC navigation beacon still occupies the summit.

Most of the island has been looked after since the 1970s by the Catalina Island Conservancy. On 15 February 1975 Philip Wrigley deeded it 42,135 acres, which gave it control of nearly 90 percent of Catalina. The Conservancy also maintains the island's herd of American plains bison; the first were brought over for a film in the 1920s or 1930s.