Building an observatory on a mountain in the 1870s meant solving a problem that had nothing to do with optics: getting there. Every beam, every lens, every brick had to travel by horse and mule-drawn wagon up a road that did not yet exist. Lick negotiated with Santa Clara County to construct a "first-class road" to the summit, completed in 1876. Because the wagons could not handle steep grades, the road had to maintain a slope below 6.5 percent, which forced it into an extraordinary series of switchbacks. From Smith Creek to the summit, the road makes 367 complete turns in seven miles. The modern highway -- California State Route 130 -- still follows that same winding path, and it still closes when snow falls. Construction of the Classical Revival observatory complex stretched from 1876 to 1887, all of it funded by Lick's $700,000 bequest. He died before the telescope saw first light, but his instructions were followed to the letter, including the one about his burial.

The Great Lick Refractor saw first light on January 3, 1888, and it was, at that moment, the largest refracting telescope on Earth. It held that title until the Yerkes Observatory opened in 1897. Edward S. Holden served as the first director, and the location proved exceptional: the summit air was calm, the coastal fog that crept into the valley below actually helped by blocking light pollution from the towns beneath. The observatory's defining discovery came in 1892, when astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard turned the telescope toward Jupiter and found Amalthea -- the planet's fifth moon and the first new Jovian moon identified since Galileo had spotted the original four through his parchment tube nearly three centuries earlier. The telescope also provided the spectral data for W. W. Campbell's pioneering work on the radial velocities of stars, measurements that would prove essential to understanding how the universe moves.

As San Jose and the rest of Silicon Valley exploded in population, light pollution crept up the mountain. By the 1970s, the situation was serious enough that the University of California evaluated relocating the telescopes to Junipero Serra Peak in the Santa Lucia Range, southeast of Monterey. Funding for the move never materialized. What happened instead was remarkable: in 1980, San Jose began systematically replacing its streetlamps with low-pressure sodium-vapor lamps, whose narrow-spectrum light is far easier for astronomers to filter out. The effort worked well enough that Mount Hamilton remained viable as a major research site. The International Astronomical Union recognized San Jose's commitment by naming Asteroid 6216 after the city -- one of the few places on Earth honored by the astronomical community for choosing darkness over brightness.

Survival has become part of the observatory's story. In August 2020, the SCU Lightning Complex fires swept onto observatory property, moving so fast that firefighters staged on-site to defend the buildings. Residences sustained damage, but the telescopes and domes survived. Then, in the early hours of Christmas Day 2025, winds reaching 114 miles per hour tore half the shutter off the Great Refractor dome. The telescope itself, remarkably, was unharmed. Between these crises, the observatory faced a slower threat: in 2013, a key funding source was scheduled for elimination, and many feared the entire facility would close. The University of California announced in 2014 that it would continue support, and in 2015, Google donated $1 million over two years. Today, Lick's nine telescopes -- from the original Great Refractor to the Automated Planet Finder, which hunts for exoplanets -- serve researchers across the UC system, studying everything from supernovae to adaptive optics.

For most of its history, Lick Observatory was not just a research facility but a tiny community. As recently as 2006, twenty-three families lived on the summit alongside visiting astronomers who bunked in dormitories. The little town of Mount Hamilton had a post office, its own police force, and a one-room K-8 school that operated until 2005. The swimming pool has since closed. By 2013, most observers had switched to remote stations rather than make the drive, partly because the business office had raised dormitory rates. The mountaintop is quieter now. But the telescopes still turn, the discoveries still accumulate -- exoplanets, active galactic nuclei, the jet emerging from the heart of Messier 87 -- and the road still winds its 367 turns up through the oaks and grasslands, as improbable and stubborn as the carpenter who paid for it all.