Fall River Guard Station

Fall River Guard Station stands on the left side of South Century Drive, State Route 42, about eleven miles west of its junction with Century Drive. The Forest Service warns that it “is not easily seen until you are upon it.” The Bulletin put it 14 miles west of Sunriver. Lodgepole pine closes over the roof, and a few steps from the back door the Fall River rises out of springs.

The cabin under the lodgepoles

The building is a single-story cabin of 600 square feet, built in what the Forest Service calls the Cascadia style of the Pacific Northwest Region. It has two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room, with one full bed, a twin bed, and a two-person futon in the living room. Propane runs the heater, the refrigerator, the lights and the stove. There is no water on the site and, as The Bulletin noted in 2013, no plumbing. A vault toilet stands outside, and a picnic table serves for meals in the open. Guests bring their own water for drinking, cooking and washing, along with bedding, towels and matches. For the 2026 season the Forest Service supplied no pots, pans or utensils. Entry is by a combination lock box. A screened front porch is set up for sitting and reading, and there is level ground beside the cabin for tents and RVs.

The Forest Service rents the cabin by reservation from April to October, for a group of up to five. The Bulletin’s 2013 account gave the season as May through October and the rate as $90 a night, “whether there is one guest or five.” Notices posted for renters ask that the building and grounds be kept clean to discourage squirrels, mice, rats and bears.

Fly water and the river trail

The Fall River is spring-fed, clear and cold. It begins two miles northwest of Pringle Falls and winds northeast to join the Deschutes River. The river is open only to fly-fishing. The recreation.gov listing calls it an outstanding contributor of brown trout to the Deschutes and good winter habitat for many species. Brook, brown and rainbow trout live in it, and native whitefish are found below the falls. The Bulletin called the headwaters “a favorite of local fly fishers.” Summer and early fall are the seasons for fishing, swimming and hiking here.

The Fall River Trail leaves from the guard station and follows the river through lodgepole and ponderosa pine. Deer, native fish and migratory birds use the country along it.

A station on the Bend district

The Civilian Conservation Corps built the station in the 1930s as an outpost for fighting forest fires. Bend Magazine places the work in the mid-1930s. Les Joslin, a former Forest Service officer, described such stations in the Deschutes County Historical Society’s newsletter in January 2017. In his account they were seasonally staffed satellites of the ranger stations. The forest guards posted at them handled fire prevention and control, kept up recreation sites and trails, gave out information, and took any other job too far from the ranger’s office. A district ranger caught far afield at sundown could bunk at one for the night.

Three such stations survive west of Bend. From north to south they are:

• Elk Lake, on the northwest shore of Elk Lake.
• Deschutes Bridge, about eight road miles south of Elk Lake.
• Fall River, about a dozen miles south of Deschutes Bridge, at the headwaters of the river that gives it its name.

Joslin wrote that the guards at all three answered to a district ranger headquartered in La Pine until 1933. That year the district became the Bend Ranger District, with headquarters in Bend. Forest Service telephone lines, and later radio, linked the stations to each other, to the fire lookouts around them, and to the ranger’s office. Fire control or recreation crews used Fall River and Elk Lake until the middle 1990s, when that work was centralized in Bend.

Paint, volunteers, and a rental

In June 2005 a project of Passport in Time, the Forest Service’s volunteer heritage program, restored and painted the station inside and out. The following June, volunteers were scraping paint at the old Cabin Lake ranger residence near Fort Rock. Paul Claeyssens, heritage program manager for the Deschutes and Ochoco national forests, told The Bulletin then that organizers hoped to have the Fall River cabins ready to rent by the summer of 2007. “We can’t maintain all our buildings, we don’t need all our buildings, but we want to keep some that are good examples of the Forest Service, historical architecture and settings,” he said.

By January 2017 Joslin counted Fall River as “a popular recreation lodging program rental for almost a decade.” Bend Magazine wrote in 2020 that it had been a rental “for more than a decade.” The Forest Service lists the cabin as eligible for the National Register. Joslin noted that the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act lets the Forest Service put the fees paid by renters of historic ranger and guard stations back into restoring and maintaining them. At Fall River, the Forest Service says, the nightly fee goes directly to the maintenance and preservation of the guard station.