Suntop Lookout — Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025

Decided to risk the Forest Service road conditions and make the drive up to the Sun Top Fire Lookout this past Sunday in my early 2000s Toyota Corolla.  the vehicle is what I would call regular clearance.  More than a modern Prius and less than say a Suburu Outback.  The weather mostly cloudly but the cloud ceiling was above the top by a couple of thousand feet.  The fire lookout stands at 5280 ft elevation.  FFLA staff were onsite and the gate was open.  Kudos to the volunteer staff up there.  You are doing the good work for sure!  Facilities were in great shape even if the roads were not. 

Here's the details on the road up because honestly the amount of information I was able to pull together on this drive beforehand wasn't what I would call easy or straightforward.  Hopefully this helps clarify for some people whether they want to make this journey

FS Road 73 - the entire stretch from Hwy 410 to the turn off to FS 7315, about 1 mile, was a minefield of large potholes.  It wasn't too bad to navigate but there were in fact potholes within potholes here.  We saw a handful of large 4x4s taking their time and gingerly navigating through this stretch of road.  In my opinion, this was more difficult than anything on FS 7315 after the turnoff.

FS Road 7315 - Veer left off of FS 73 and onto 7315.  Less in the way of potholes but gets much steeper and narrower.  From the turnoff it's about 5.9 miles to the fire lookout.  The first three miles were at times narrow with low underbrush encroaching on the road but nothing terrible and we only saw one vehicle coming down on our way up.
The second 3 miles is where things got more interesting.  Lots more exposed hard pack earth and large rocks began to show up and this required some slow going as I wasn't going to risk my new tires and alignment here.
On the last 1.5 miles is where it got kind of dicey.  Just past the fire lookout gate, there was about a 150 yard stretch of road where the uphill right side of the road was gutted by a deep runoff trench that was easily enough to have caused the bottom of my vehicle to drag/high center.  I chose to stay fully to the left side of the road in this spot to avoid the obstacle.
At the last .25 miles the road became very difficult and was full of large exposed rock but really none that would risk scraping the bottom of my vehicle.  We just went slow.
We turned the corner to the final 150 yards or so to the fire lookout parking area and saw by far the worst of the rough road and this was in the form of the biggest rocks we'd seen yet.  So we parked the car well off the road on the very wide corner and walked the rest of the way.  I might have been able to make this but I just wasn't in the mood for taking that risk.