Gotchen Guard Station

Forest Road 8225 climbs north from Pineside Sno-Park toward Mount Adams. At its junction with Forest Road 8225060 the way turns right, and 150 yards along, on the left, stands Gotchen Creek Guard Station. It is a one-story cabin of wood drop siding under a side-gabled shake roof, set in a grove of aspen at the edge of a meadow. Mount Adams rises behind it at 12,276 feet, the second highest peak in Washington, and the Mt. Adams Wilderness lies a few miles off. The Oregonian placed the cabin nine miles north of the community of Trout Lake. Recreation.gov puts the drive at about 20 minutes when snow has not closed the road. The ground around it was burned over in the Cascade Fire of 2012, and fire-scarred trees and new growth stand beside the cabin.

Two rooms and a bunkhouse

The Columbian in 2014 measured the cabin at 12 by 26 feet: a kitchen, and an everything-else room holding bunk beds and a warming stove. The Gifford Pinchot National Forest now rents it by the night through the Mt. Adams Ranger District. One double bunk bed stands in the main room, and a second stands in a separate bunkhouse near the cabin. The beds would sleep eight, but the Forest Service holds the small historic cabin to six. Heat, cooking stove and refrigerator run on propane, and the living-room heater is disabled in July and August. Pots, pans, dishes and utensils are provided, along with two battery lanterns. The Forest Service suggests renters bring a headlamp as well. A vault toilet sits about 20 yards from the door. Renters let themselves in with a key from a lock box.

There is no drinking water. Renters haul in what they need for drinking, cooking and washing. In winter snow can be melted, but it must be treated or boiled first. Renters also bring their own sleeping bags, linens, towels, dish soap, matches and garbage bags. No animals are allowed. Camping, open fires and smoking are prohibited at the station.

Gotchen Creek Trail #40 and Snipes Mountain Trail #11 both start close by. The country around the cabin is used for hiking, biking, horseback riding and hunting, and in winter for skiing and snowshoeing. The Forest Service describes the wilderness above as a blend of dry east-side and moist west-side ecosystems, with glaciers, mountain streams, meadows, open alpine forest and lava flows.

In on skis from Snow King

The Forest Service rental page gives the season as mid-April through October, depending on snow level. The Recreation.gov listing also describes winter stays. After snow falls, typically in November or December, the road closes to cars through April. The Forest Service plows neither the road to the sno-park nor the road to the cabin, so guests come in on skis, snowshoes or snowmobiles. From Snow King Sno-Park the ski route follows the Lava loop to the top of the Pipeline loop, where grooming stops. From there it runs northwest on FS 181 to Forest Road 8225 and on to the cabin, 3.5 miles in all. The direct route from Pineside, straight up 8225, is 3.4 miles, “but all uphill,” and the listing does not recommend it for skiers.

The sheep driveway

The cabin was built in the summer of 1909, at a cost of $332 according to The Columbian. Gifford Pinchot had become first Chief of the new Forest Service in 1905. His rules for the reserves, published that year as The Use Book, held that “All of the resources of the forest reserves are for use...under such restrictions only as will insure the permanence of these resources.” Columbia National Forest had been cut from the southern districts of the Rainier National Forest on July 1, 1908. The Forest Service’s early history of the forest calls Gotchen Creek the first ranger station cabin the agency built on what became the Mt. Adams District, put up as summer headquarters. The state’s historic-property inventory names the builders as Homer Ross and Harrison DeVoe, with the U.S. Forest Service as architect. The Washington Trust for Historic Preservation reported in 2007 that the station may be the only surviving building in Washington based on the early standardized Forest Service plans.

Homer Ross, by the same early history, may have been the earliest ranger to work the Mt. Adams country. He began as a Forest Guard in 1904 and worked from his home at Glenwood, dealing mostly with grazing. His house served as district headquarters, connected to the new cabin by wagon road. Rangers of that era had to show at their examination that they could saddle a horse, pack a mule and tie a diamond hitch. They supplied their own horses and pack animals at their own expense. In 1909 the stations of the district lay often within a day’s ride of one another. Some, such as Ice Cave, Cultus Creek, Wicky Creek and Goose Lake, were only base camps with water and forage.

Gotchen Creek sat on the road. The route now numbered Forest Road 8225 served for many years as a stock driveway and the main entry into the forest from the east. Tens of thousands of sheep passed the station on their way to grazing allotments. Rangers based there counted them and rode horseback patrols through the surrounding country. The early history says almost all the sheep entering the forest came past Gotchen Creek, where the ranger could count them easily. The 1910 Special Fire Report for the Columbia National Forest put it at more than half of the bands that used the forest.

Fire patrolmen, a Register listing, an open house

The cabin served as district headquarters until 1916, by the Forest Service’s account, or until 1917, by the Washington Trust’s. After that it was an outpost for horseback rangers. The Washington Trust found that Forest Service people occupied it almost continuously, at least by the season, until 2001, including fire patrolmen and recreation guards. In 1949 the forest took Pinchot’s name. The cabin is the oldest historic structure on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, and the only building raised there during his administration.

C. Mack recorded the building for the state inventory on June 24, 1982. Mack noted a rectangular plan, balloon framing, a concrete-block foundation, windows and cladding intact, and only slight changes to plan and interior. The station was formally listed in the National Register of Historic Places in April 2007.

The forest marked its centennial in 2008 by opening the cabin to the public on Saturday, July 5, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with heritage staff on hand. A recent inventory of more than 1,500 historic Forest Service buildings in Washington and Oregon had found Gotchen Creek one of only four ranger stations built before 1910. Rick McClure, then the forest’s Heritage Program Manager, organized Passport in Time volunteer projects to stabilize, restore and rehabilitate the station. He retired from the Forest Service in 2014. He and his wife Cheryl, also a retired Forest Service archaeologist, live in Trout Lake, at the bottom of the road the sheep once climbed.