About the 757th
Blaine Air Force Station, aka the 757th Radar Squadron, was a small US Air Force installation located about a mile from Birch Bay, Washington, just south of the Canadian Border at Blaine Washington. This was a cold-war era radar site, whose mission was to look for hostile air traffic coming at us from over the horizon. As part of the SAGE system, there were height and search radars there, as well as radio gear to communicate with military aircraft in the area. With the end of the cold war came the end of the site's mission, and it was decommissioned in 1979. The nearest Air Force Base was McChord, near Tacoma WA, about 150 miles to the south.It was a plum of an assignment, located near 2 large cities, with many recreational amenities either onsite or nearby. Compared to the usual location of other radar sites, on mountain tops or 20 miles past the middle of nowhere, there weren't many other sites like it.
My Time At the 757th
I was stationed at the 757th between 1969 and 1970, when I got orders for Korea. I was there less than a year, and I suspect that Blaine AFS was a parking spot for me that was near McChord until USAF could find an overseas slot for me. I'd had three CONUS assignments and I'm sure that as far as HQ was concerned, it was my turn. 1969 was a long time ago, and a lot of what I remember of the site is quite hazy now. In particular, the assignments then of various buildings is quite fuzzy, and your help in identifying them is appreciated.I was not particularly disposed to staying on base when I wasn't working, so I really didn't avail myself of many of the amenities there. The truth is that I was passing time until my DOS. I worked at the GATR (Ground Air Transmitter Receiver) site, which diminished my understanding of the rest of the site even more. Since my parents lived in Seattle, I drove home during my breaks. That close to home, the 757th was a great place to be.
After the 757th shut down in January 1979, the site was given to Whatcom County and the county leased a portion of the site to the Lion's Club, for a facility called Camp Horizon which is devoted to kids with special needs.
On Saturday, May 16, 2009, I visited the old radar site. It was warm, but not particularly clear, which you can see in the pictures. Another grey day in the Pacific Northwest. There is demolition sometime in the old site's future, and I wanted to see it before this happened.
I visited the site previously in 2002, and recall that a few more buildings were present, especially down by the 24-tower. Those buildings were the steam plant (612) and the water treatment plant (626). They're gone now.
I located the images taken in 2002, but they didn't fill in any more details.
The Future
I did some further research and found a couple of articles in the Bellingham Herald that described Whatcom Couunty's current and future plans for the site. They want to develop it into a county park site, and in order to do this, need to demolish some of the existing buildings. It appears this is still in the planning stages and they do not yet have funding.Bellingham Herald, March 22, 2009 Bellingham Herald, May 7, 2009
There is also more to be found in the
Whatcom County Park's openspace plan.
Search/look for Bay Horizon Park. Excerpts here:
Openspace Plan Excerpt #1 (1.9mb)
Openspace Plan Excerpt #2 (33kb)
Visit: January 2010
On January 23, 2010, I visited the site again after hearing rumors of demolition. It was true. The following buildings are now gone:- OPS, building 658
- Supply, building 740
- unknown, building 750
- 26-tower, building 550
- Auto Hobby shop, 428
On another note, the property across Alderson Road from the entrance to the site has been sold. It looks like someone will be building homes on that land.
I took some time to drive towards Blaine along Birch Bay, to see what had changed. The answer is, a lot. There are many resorts now, upscale hotels, etc. the homespun look is gone. It's pretty commercial.
There are pictures from this trip in the pictures section of this page.
Software
Most of the time I use a free image editing tool called xnview. I find it works really well, has a good feature set, and you can actually get work done with it. Best of all, it is free. I have Photoshop for when the going gets tough, but I find xnview easier and faster to use.For panoramic photos, I use a program called Panavue Image Assembler. It stitches multiple photos together to make a single large composite frame. You can download a free demo version. I liked it enough to pay for it.
Contact Me
If you have comments, corrections, etc... you can contact me via email:I still live in the Seattle metro area.
Panoramic Photos
These images were taken by using my wide angle lens, taking successive shots while rotating the camera around the axis of my body. I then use an image stitching program to assemble the pieces into much larger images.These initial views are scaled and highly compressed so they fit your browser while still downloading quickly. Clicking on any of them brings up the full-sized image, which is huge (9-14mb). It was saved at highest resolution so you can go looking "inside" the image for closer details. If you have 2 screens, you can "stretch" the image across both of them.
If you hover your mouse pointer over the image, you'll see, either in the lower left status area or as a tooltip, the size of the full-sized image.
Don't click on these images unless you have a high-speed connection or a lot of spare time.
Squadron Map (note: North is DOWN)
Rec Hall building looking out towards Alderson Road. |
View from the height tower to the rear of the Orderly Room, along Gemini Drive. |
View of the family housing area. There is a 2nd housing area to the west of the site, off Alderson Road |
Normal Sized Photos
Click on any image to enlarge it. The enlarged images are 1280 x 675. In the interest of saving space on my webserver, these have been reduced from those produced by my camera (Canon EOS-10D, 3072 x 2048 pixels). Some have been processed in Photoshop or its equivalent and some are raw. The full-sized images are around 3mb, if you're on a dialup, it may take a minute or two to download. The enlarged images should display pretty large, and if there's one that you'd like to see at camera resolution, please end me the filename in an email. Numbers in parenthesis are building numbers referenced on the site map. Names used reflect those
used during the site's lifetime, and have no necessary relationship to current usage.
