Bald Butte Lookout

The road runs to the top. Forest Road 450 climbs the last two miles of Bald Butte steep and rough, and the Forest Service warns that large rocks may have to be moved before a car gets through. At the summit, 7,536 feet by the National Historic Lookout Register’s figure, stands a wooden house fourteen feet square under a gable roof, with windows on every side. Nothing grows tall enough up here to cast shade. The Forest Service says the elevation and the mountain breezes hold the temperature steady, and the windows open to let the air move through.

The door is held by a combination lock, and the code comes from the Paisley Ranger District office in town. Inside are two cots, a table, a bench, storage cabinets, a propane cook stove, a heater, and lights. Outside are a vault toilet, a picnic table, and a fire ring. There is no water on the butte, so guests haul up what they need for drinking, cooking, and washing. The house sleeps two and is rented from June 15 through October 15, depending on snow levels. From the summit the view takes in forested hillsides, the Gearhart Wilderness, Dead Horse Rim, and snowcapped peaks that include Mount Shasta. The Gearhart covers 22,823 acres, with streams running through narrow meadows and Blue Lake under mixed-conifer forest. After dark the exposed summit is used for stargazing.

A house in six-foot pieces

The house came out of a box. It is an Aladdin L4 ground-mounted lookout kit, raised in the summer of 1931, with every piece pre-cut to six feet or shorter so that horses could pack the whole thing to the remote site. Assembly took only a few days. The Forest Service gives the total cost as $668.49. The Fremont National Forest records break that sum down as $558.49 for materials and $110.00 for erection.

That fall a writer for the Lake County Tribune made the drive. The account appeared on October 2, 1931:

“Just before reaching Ingram Station we turn off to Bald Butte. The Forest Service lookout towers are not built on hills convenient for automobiles and the climb takes about everything that the engine can give. Reaching the top we find a small wooden building in which the lookout lives during the summer months. Windows afford a view on all sides and the fire detector is placed in the middle of the floor. The wind has a force and a nip to it on the top of the hill.”

The writer could see Abert Rim far off. The same account noted that the brown and dead trees in the timber below were nearly as many as the live ones, and called it “the beetle destruction.” The season’s work was over by then, so the windows had been shuttered and the door locked.

The butte had been watched long before the house went up. Lester E. Elder, a Forest Guard, recorded in his journal that it served as a patrol lookout in July 1911. On July 25, 1929, the Lake County Examiner reported that Supervisor Brown was stationing an additional lookout at Bald Butte because of critical fire weather, “to intensify detection and provide extra men for prompt suppression of any fires which occur.” After a lightning storm in August 1930, the Lake County Tribune reported men placed on emergency lookouts to see into “holes in the ground” that the regular lookouts could not reach, and Bald Butte was one of those posts.

The sources disagree on how many houses of this kind survive. Recreation.gov and Travel Oregon state that hundreds once stood across the Pacific Northwest and that only two remain in Oregon. A 2020 management plan for the High Rock lookout in Washington counts Bald Butte among four surviving Oregon examples of the gable-roof design and calls that design the rarest of the type. The National Historic Lookout Register describes Bald Butte as the only L-4 gable-roof lookout left on the Fremont National Forest.

Fifty years of watching

In 1934 a 16-by-10 garage was built at the site, and lightning protection was installed the same year. In 1935 the Forest Service described the lookout house for a geodetic survey as a wood structure set on the ground on “a well-known mountain about 12 miles air line southwest of Paisley.” In August 1938 Rex Truelove, the lookout then stationed on the butte, was noted coming down for provisions.

In 1945 the observer found a Japanese incendiary balloon near the summit with five unexploded bombs still intact. In 1957 air markings were completed and the site was marked F-11. In 1960 the lookout was Mike Turner, in his third season there. He was from Texas and studied physics at the University of Texas.

On December 4, 1962, the lookout inventory listed Bald Butte as a reserve lookout. Its lightning protection consisted of two rods connected to the four corners of the house and grounded at a spring half a mile away. The last full-time staffing came in 1964. A condition report in 1972 carried the notation that the house’s useful life was gone: “emergency only, minimum maintenance.”

Shambles, and the restoration

By 1992 vandals and weather had left the house abandoned and in shambles. A number of Fremont-Winema National Forest employees took up its restoration as a Passport in Time project. Working through the summers of 1993 and 1994, they rebuilt the lookout and made period furniture from original 1930s plans. The work was finished in September 1994. The house was returned to its original specifications except for changes that made it wheelchair accessible, and a new toilet and an asphalt path were added.

The Forest Service placed the lookout in its cabin rental program in 1995. On March 1, 1998, it was entered on the National Historic Lookout Register as US 258 and OR 29, nominated by Ronald R. Johnson of the Forest Fire Lookout Association. In August 2016 the house was refurbished again, with work on the floors, roofing, and paint, and the Forest Service applies each night’s rental fee to the lookout’s maintenance and preservation.