Gold Butte Lookout

The lookout on Gold Butte is a wooden room fourteen feet square, set on three-foot stilts, glassed on every side and ringed by a catwalk. The Forest Service gives the summit as 4,618 feet; the National Historic Lookout Register lists 4,477. It stands in the Willamette National Forest about five miles northeast of Detroit, Oregon, by the Sand Mountain Society’s count, above the Breitenbush River drainage. From the catwalk the Forest Service names Mount Jefferson close at hand, Three Fingered Jack, Mount Hood, the Three Sisters and the Bull of the Woods Wilderness. Wildflowers and wild huckleberries grow on the slopes below.

A glass room on three-foot stilts

The Society calls the building a hip-roofed L-4 with shutter props, a 1932 design. The bed, woodbox and firefinder stand are originals, restored. The desk and kitchen cabinet were reproduced from architectural drawings. A Forest Service plaque on the side of the firefinder stand names the volunteers who each gave more than 1,000 hours to the restoration: Tim Nidever, Don Allen III, Bill Joy and Rob Hoeye. A twin bed and three folding cots sleep four. A wood stove gives heat, and a woodshed stocked with firewood and an outhouse stand nearby. There is no electricity and no water. Guests carry in their own water for drinking, cooking and washing, along with lanterns, bedding and cookware, and they carry their trash out.

The Forest Service rents the lookout by the night from July through October, and the Sand Mountain Society opens and closes it each season. The Society says it is booked every night it is available. Zach Urness of the Salem Statesman Journal wrote in 2015 that it was almost impossible to get unless a person started trying six months ahead. Day hikers may climb to the summit, but they are asked to stay on the Gold Butte Lookout Trail and to keep away from the lookout when it is occupied.

The approach runs up the Breitenbush Road from Highway 22 and then onto Forest Service Road 4697. The Forest Service describes the last two miles as rough gravel and dirt at a 10 percent grade. “The last three miles is the worst road many people are ever going to drive,” Josh Weathers, developed sites recreation manager for the Willamette National Forest, told Urness. “We recommend a high-clearance vehicle with something better than standard street tires.” Renters receive a code for the first green gate and drive on to a second. From there, by Urness’s measure, it is 0.75 mile and about 400 feet of climb, first along the road and then up a switchback trail. Day hikers park at the first gate and walk 1.6 miles each way, climbing 800 feet.

Urness spent an October night there with his dog, Mater. He set a chair on the lookout desk and read, looking up at the view every few moments. He lit a small fire in the wood stove and ate pasta with pesto while storm clouds wrapped the surrounding mountains and blew across Gold Butte.

Watching for airplanes

The Civilian Conservation Corps built the lookout in 1934. Eight years later, in 1942, a cabin went up a few hundred feet north of it. The Register places it there, and the Society puts it midway between the old trailhead and the lookout. Gold Butte became a station of the Aircraft Warning Service. According to the Forest Service it was staffed around the clock, usually by a husband and wife, who reported every passing aircraft within sight or sound to a central filter center. The Society says the couple stayed through the winter and split the watch into two twelve-hour shifts. The cabin is gone now, and so is a garage the Register mentions.

Fire watching went on after the war. In 1959 the lookout was W.D. “Bill” Hoeye of Mill City, whose son Rob was then a toddler. His given name was Wyman Delos, and he got the name Bill because people assumed the W stood for William. He later taught woodworking at Oregon State University and helped found the North Santiam Historical Society. The family took View-Master photographs on the summit that summer. That same year Don Allen Jr. was staffing Bull of the Woods Lookout a few miles north on the Mount Hood National Forest.

The sources differ on when the watch ended. The Register says the lookout was last staffed in the late 1960s, Urness says around 1972, and the Society says the early 1970s. By the Society’s account Gold Butte was one of the last two lookouts on the district. It is still used during active lightning storms, and the Register says in periods of high fire danger.

Carpenter ants and a phone call

No Japanese attack ever reached Gold Butte, Urness noted, but carpenter ants did. “They turned the framing in the west, south and east walls into Swiss cheese,” Don Allen told him. “In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was talk of ‘disposing of’ Gold Butte Lookout.” The Society says some in the Forest Service considered burning it down. According to the Society, the building survived because of an uncoordinated band of volunteers. One was the Society’s founder, Don Allen III by OPB’s account, who began making repairs as soon as he got his driver’s license in 1979. Another was Paul Roosa, a Salem attorney. The Register credits a hiking group with saving it, and the Pacific Crest Trust Fund with raising money and providing volunteers. In 1984 Allen got his first Forest Service job, on a fire crew at the Detroit Ranger District, after offering to volunteer at Gold Butte. On November 24, 1995, the lookout entered the National Historic Lookout Register as US 134, OR 18, on the nomination of Ron Johnson of the Forest Fire Lookout Association.

The Society dates the restoration to 1998. Rob Hoeye wrote to the North Santiam Historical Society, the group his father had helped found, and asked whether it would do anything to save Gold Butte. Cara Kelly, the Detroit Ranger District archaeologist, was a member and answered him. She asked Johnson how to save the building. “You need to call the Sand Mountain Society,” he replied. Johnson died a few months later, and the Society dedicated the work to him.

“It was taken apart, piece by piece, all the way to ground level,” Allen said. “Each piece of interior siding was cataloged so it could go back in the same precise order.” The Society gives the span of the work as 1999 to 2008 in one place and 1998 to 2007 in another. More than fifty volunteers put in thousands of hours, guided largely by Pete Cecil of Bend, once a Forest Service “Master Performer” in traditional skills. In 2002 Allen, Bill Joy and Carl Munz took down Sisi Butte Lookout on the Mount Hood National Forest. Its boards replaced Gold Butte flooring too damaged to reuse and went into a replica outhouse on the original site. Bruce Hake, a mason and framer from the northern Oregon coast, came upon the project while on a hike. Between 2005 and 2008 he rebuilt the outhouse’s stone foundation and framed both it and the woodshed. The woodshed followed the Hoeye family’s 1959 View-Master photographs. Its shiplap came from the Hoeye home in Mill City and from a remodel of Johnson’s house in Oakridge, given to Allen in the early 1990s.

The lookout was dedicated in 2007. W.D. Hoeye had died in 2006 at the age of 90, after learning that his son was helping restore it. The outbuildings were finished in the 2008 field season. The work earned the Forest Service’s national Windows on the Past Award in 2007 and Oregon’s Heritage Excellence Award from the State Historic Preservation Office in 2014.

Fir needles like snow

The lookout had been rented for twelve years when a maintenance crew came up in the summer of 2020. Hake, Allen, Hoeye and Joy were on the summit when Hoeye’s NOAA weather radio warned of a “historic wind event” for the following day. The crew rose early to finish repairing and rehanging the shutters, and they finished in hard wind. At the trailhead, fir needles fell on them like snow and treetops whipped back and forth. They reached pavement before trees began coming down. Forest Service personnel were cutting one tree off the 46 Road. Another blocked Highway 22 near Niagara, and a crowd of people trapped behind it moved it off the road. Less than twelve hours later the Lionshead and Beachie Creek Fires overran much of the way they had driven out.

Gold Butte survived, but the closure kept the crew away through 2021. Then came the Bull Complex Fire. OPB reported in September 2021 that crews had wrapped Gold Butte in fire-resistant material, along with Bagby Hot Springs and Hawk Mountain Lookout Cabin. Bull of the Woods Lookout, where Don Allen Jr. had started in 1959, could not be reached in time, and it burned. Two rounds of structure blankets, put on and roughly taken off, broke many of Gold Butte’s shingles. In 2024 the lookout got a new roof on two sides, and the building and floor were repainted. A full exterior paint job was finished in July 2025, and the lookout went back on the rental list.