Getting to the Lookout is no easy task, though. Since then, the Skagit Alpine Club and Friends of Hidden Lake Lookout have maintained the structure, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1987. Built in 1932, the Hidden Lake Lookout was used to spot fires until the 1950s. That attraction to borders, to the earth’s twilit places, is a part of the shape of human curiosity.Yesterday's Hike-A-Thon hike found me venturing up the North Cascades Highway to climb to a decommissioned fire lookout. “The edges of any landscape – horizons, the lip of a valley, the bend of a river around a canyon wall – quicken an observer’s expectations. Most recently he wrote to share his sadness at the passing of the great nature writer Barry Lopez, signing off with a quote from Arctic Dreams: I’m delighted to report that we’re still in touch. “The motto of my battalion was Ne desit virtus – Let valor not fail.”
“The motto of my army division was ‘Rendezvous with destiny’,” he said. Watchman, medic, radio relay, army veteran, teacher, artist, raconteur … Timelord Jim, alone up in his Irish Meadow Tardis bathed in radio static, materialised here on the mountain. Kindly, craggy, lean and tall – head almost brushing the ceiling. He had something of the actor Matt Smith about him – the look of “a young man made by old men from memory”. However, Jim’s role is still vital in the great wireless-free wilderness of the Cascades and these days, as well as watching for telltale smoke trails from lightning strikes, ready to radio and direct firefighters, he acts as a radio relay for rangers and trail crews in the peaks around. There once were more than 10,000 watchers staffing more than 5,000 watch stations in the US alone, but those numbers were massively reduced with the advent of satellite imaging and mobile phones. Photograph: Alamyįire lookouts had their heyday between 19. Looking west into North Cascades national park from Desolation Peak.
“You can see right into Canada,” he gestured with his mug once we were all settled with a drink. You could see it all from that marvellous glass pagoda.
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The huge panorama of the windows – mountains shadowed blue and saturated red. The sun cut gold across the panelled room, dazzling on a central brass turntable, picking out the books on the desk, the sleeping bag neatly doubled on the mattress. We all went in and Jim set to making us tea, telling us the cabin’s history as he lit the stove and got the kettle going. But Jim was all smiles and, as if in added welcome, alpenglow suddenly flared to flood the summit hot pink and lit up the cabin. I’d had the thought then, a split second after he’d seen us but before he waved, that here was The Man come to tell us to scram, piss off back down the mountain. Would we like to come up and see the cabin? He was Jim Henterly, the Desolation Peak fire watchman.įrom afar, he’d looked forbidding. “Hello”, he said, “I was just going out for a stroll around.” We waved back and met on the path a minute later. Having set up camp, we set off for the summit, slaloming past boulders and spinneys and into snow, a granular crush on a rise from where we could see the low pyramid roof of the summit belvedere. Up and up Desolation we went until, near dusk, we emerged near the top and pitched our tent. The rest of the day, we hiked pine needle paths beneath western red cedars and ponderosa pines with trunks a couple of metres across trees so high that the Pacific silver firs below appeared as mere ankle-biters.
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Next morning, we traversed a series of dams before zooming 20 miles up Ross Lake in a powerboat driven by a taciturn lumberjack. Jim’s role is still vital in the great wireless-free wilderness of the Cascades The journey took 48 hours with a stopover in a Bates-style motel in the one-horse town of Marblemount – the last services for 70 wild miles of boscage and bears. With my longsuffering friend Colin, I drove north from Seattle on Interstate 5, then east along the Skagit River and into the densely forested Cascades. I was going to hike up to their cabin and it would be pot-luck whether they’d be an enthusiast and welcome me in or a grizzly jobsworth who’d tell me to get stuffed. So I knew that there was someone sitting on top of the mountain. Of all the outposts, Desolation Peak (1,860 metres tall, about six miles south of the Canada-US border) was perhaps the riskiest in terms of who I’d meet when I got there because, unlike Big Creek Baldy in Idaho (yes, that was its name), Desolation Peak was still staffed and in service. At the time I was writing a book about far-flung and abandoned beacons, sheds, and ghost towns.
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