August arrives cold and clammy on the South Coast, wrapped in a fog that blurs the shoreline from just a stone’s throw away. Waking in Plaskett Creek Campground, just south of tiny Gorda, my crew cranks up camping stoves for oatmeal and tea. The hot breakfast feels wrong at the peak of summer.

So we set our sights high: Cone Peak, the steepest coast-to-summit slope in the lower 48, averaging a 33 percent grade from sea to summit. At 5,155 feet, it’s also the second-highest mountain (after Junipero Serra Peak) in the Santa Lucia Range.

From Plaskett, it’s a 5-mile jog north up Highway 1 (or 55 miles south from Carmel) to Nacimiento-Fergusson Road, which winds dizzyingly uphill. At the fogline we pull over to watch a red-tailed hawk manipulate the vapor border, spiraling into the sunlight and coasting back into the mist.

At 7.4 miles up Nacimiento, we turn onto Coast Ridge (aka Cone Peak) Road – a dirt path suited for burly wheels – and lumber another 3.6 twisty miles, past a trio of bow-hunters in camouflage, to an easy-to-miss trailhead labeled “Cone Peak 4E12” at 3,800 feet. The road is closed in wet weather, roughly November to May, so call Los Padres National Forest’s Monterey Ranger District Office (385-5434) to check the conditions.

The 2-mile trail to the summit begins in a hallway of chaparral. Bees buzz around woolly bluecurl, California fuchsia and manzanita. These are mostly native pioneer species that have taken advantage of sun and soil vacancies following the 2008 Chalk Fire. Sulfur and painted-lady butterflies flit over clumps of sticky monkeyflower, lupine, buckwheat and bush poppy; alligator and western fence lizards dart across the rocky path. As we walk we catch whiffs of yerba santa and mountain mint.

About a mile in, the path opens up to views of the surrounding mountains. The morning’s sea-level chill is a memory; now we’re above the fog and feeling the unabashed summer sun. Shirts peel off. The pooches in our party suffer from hot paws and turn back with a pair of humans. Scrambling over scree on steep switchbacks, the rest of us pass three firefighters toting tools and wearing what must be stifling gear, God bless ’em.

Shade’s in such short supply on the trail’s final stretch that the metal-roofed concrete pad at the summit feels like a sanctuary. The dry mountains rise above the clouds in four directions, animated by acrobatic raptors and swallowtail butterflies. We digest lunch and the view, along with the words etched into the metal rail: “AZ.HI.AZ.I.AM. ’05.” “Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.” “Pac Grove represent.” “Turdhurdler 4ever.”

Not so long ago, the adjacent tower was someone’s home. According to a brief but poetic 1989 L.A. Times profile, a willowy woman in her late 30s named Soaring Jenkins lived like an ascetic in the glass-enclosed, 13-by-13-foot space, with no plumbing or electricity, trundling most of her gear up the trail herself. One of a “vanishing breed” of professional lookouts for the U.S. Forest Service, she played Celtic songs on her harp, chanted Indian prayers and scouted the surrounding mountains for smoke.

“I live in a 360-degree world… I feel the curve of the earth up here. I can see Mt. Whitney on a clear day, see 88 miles out to sea. I’m always the last one to see the sun set,” the article quotes Jenkins as saying. “On a full moon I wake up squinting from the brightness.”

Ventana Wilderness Alliance Executive Director Paul McFarland and Development Director Mike Splain offer a deeper understanding of the landscape that so inspired Jenkins. The mountain is “a chunk of granite, marble and gneiss dragged north from the southern Sierra along the San Andreas Fault system,” McFarland explains. Its plant life is “legendary in biological circles,” a reputation seeded during pioneering scientific expeditions here in the early 1800s. This area is a botanical hotspot, mingling plants at the extreme edges of their ranges.

These backcountry trails would’ve already slid into the sea or been reclaimed by wild creeping things, McFarland adds, if it weren’t for volunteers like Mike Heard, who’s logged some 2,200 hours on Cone Peak-area trails to date this year. Forest Service staffers like Esperanza Hernandez and Pat Bailey, along with VWA-funded trail crews, also help mitigate an estimated $10.5 million backlog in Los Padres trail maintenance. VWA’s own volunteer crew sweated out some major improvements over Labor Day weekend; another work day is coming up Sept. 25.

Not a bad way to spend a Saturday, especially if sea-level weather gets you down. Because daytime on the coast is simply a matter of perspective: It’s always sunny above the fog.

Ventana Wilderness Alliance hosts volunteer brush-clearing on the Vicente Flats Trail Sept. 25, National Public Lands Day. Visit www.ventanawild.org/trails.html or call 423-3191 for more.