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( How to save a lighthouse? Sleep in one.) The eight bedrooms, each one named for a different North Carolina lighthouse, are far from fully renovated, but are comfortable and sparingly decorated with nautical pieces from the tower’s past-dusty life preservers, old maps, and analog weather instruments and radios. There are two modern bathrooms with several flushing toilets, large sinks, and hot-water showers, from which wastewater is deposited deep into the ocean.

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“Everybody that comes out here and has a heart to restore the tower gets to participate.”įrying Pan exists completely off the grid, powered by solar panels (with a backup generator for heat and air conditioning). “Depending on their skillset, they may be doing some electrical work, they might be doing some welding, they might be sweeping the floor or doing laundry,” Neal says.

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In exchange they receive free room and board. They must cover their own transportation costs-usually a few hundred dollars to hitch a bouncy, two-hour boat ride with fishermen (or more for an easy 20-minute helicopter flight). Volunteers willing to help with restoration work can join Neal at Frying Pan. government for $85,000, but he has since divested his ownership, and now runs a nonprofit tasked with its preservation and renewal. In 2010, Neal bought the tower at auction from the U.S. ( America’s women lighthouse keepers are finally being seen.) An eco-adventure like none otherįrying Pan is the only one at least somewhat accessible to the public. Just three remain standing today: Diamond Shoals Light, off the coast of North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras Chesapeake Light, marking the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and Frying Pan Tower. Most were first automated, and then decommissioned, left to rust in the dark until they were declared structurally unsound and eventually dismantled. Seven of these so-called “Texas Tower” lighthouses, which look similar to offshore oil rigs, were built during the 20th century at strategic locations along the East Coast. It is an intimidating yet extraordinary place, a rare chance to spend time on-and help save-one of the few structures of its kind left in the world. Neal is the 62-year-old owner and manager of Frying Pan Tower: a hulking, 80-foot-tall lighthouse 32 miles off the coast of North Carolina that’s now being restored into a high-tech marine conservation outpost and eco-adventure lodge. “I haven’t dropped anyone-yet,” Neal says with a smile, only after he’s gotten the hoist working again a few minutes later and I’ve been safely brought into the tower’s entrance. For a moment I’m stuck in midair, dangling 60 feet above the sea. “Whoops, hang on,” Richard Neal calls out calmly from the tower’s deck. Suddenly, the hoist shudders and comes to a halt. Coast Guard light station where I’ll be staying for the weekend. A wooden plank beneath me lurches like a swing, lifting me upward, off the boat, and far above the water, towards the entrance to an old U.S. “Send him up!” a fisherman says into his radio as I sit precariously on the bow of his boat, bobbing in the cold swells of the Atlantic, more than 30 miles from shore.

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