Small building, but can’t beat the view

UNION CREEK, Ore. – As a rental, the old place promises to offer the best view in the neighborhood. You can see for miles and miles, all the way from Mount Shasta’s white pate peeking up to the southeast to Mount Thielsen in the north.

“With the shutters up, you can enjoy a tremendous view from in here,” observes Jeff LaLande, who helped restore the secluded mountaintop retreat.

“It does need to be painted again, but the roof is in good shape – only about 15 years old,” he adds. “We’ll want to put in a little bit of furniture, the kind of stuff nobody will be tempted to run off with.”

He steps inside onto the wood floor. Solid as the rock the little house was built on, he’ll tell you. LaLande wasn’t making a sales pitch for the 12-foot-by-12-foot structure. He is the archaeologist and historian for the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest who has been helping restore the Hershberger Lookout in the High Cascades Ranger District.

The U.S. Forest Service plans to add the lookout to its forest rentals offered each summer. Hershberger is a little more than a dozen miles west of Union Creek and some 6,200 feet above sea level. You’ll find it just west of the Rabbit Ears, two ancient lava plugs that can be seen from Highway 230.

However, the lookout won’t be ready as a secluded rental getaway before next year, LaLande said.

“We need to do some signing and putting together a renter’s information packet,” he said. “And it has to go through a review process in the regional office over what fees we will charge.”

There is also the little matter of two trees blown down last winter across the road leading to the lookout. Access now is gained by a nearly half-mile hike up the steep road. Renters can expect to “rough it” during their stay, he said. They’ll need to pack in their own water. And the bathroom is an outhouse down a steep path about 200 feet away.

Near the outhouse is a garage/woodshed built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s when the road was punched in to the site. The shed now has solar panels to power a radio antenna.

“Hershberger still serves as an important radio repeater for the Forest Service,” LaLande explained.

The lookout is just a short but steep walk from the parking area. Visitors make their way along a path through Mother Nature’s rock garden featuring orange paintbrush, yellow sulphur flower and white phlox.

“It’s a good program,” LaLande said of the rentals. “People get to stay out in a cabin or lookout in the forest. And a good portion of the proceeds from the rent receipts goes into the maintenance and upkeep of the historic structures. We get a lot of returnees.”

Perched on the peak named for George Hershberger, a Central Point settler who hunted and trapped in the area during the late 1800s, the lookout is unique, LaLande said.

“This is one of the last cupola-style fire lookouts left in the Pacific Northwest,” LaLande said of the structure, built in 1925. “There were once scores of them.”

The only other cupola-style lookout in the forest is Dutchman Peak, circa 1927, at some 7,400 feet in the Applegate River drainage. Both lookouts are on the National Register of Historic Places as well as the National Register of Historic Fire Lookouts.

Hershberger became a fire lookout site in 1917 during World War I, but there was no building, just a camp, LaLande said. However, during World War II, the lookout was staffed year-round as an Army Air Corps observation station, he added.

It was last used full time for the fire season back in the early 1970s, although it has been used as an emergency lookout during a lightning storm since then. The last known fire to be spotted by anyone in the lookout was in the early 1990s when the restoration project was under way. LaLande noticed a wisp of smoke rising out of a point just south of Union Peak northeast of Hershberger. Sure enough, it turned out to be a wildfire.

“I got credit for the fire – so did Hershberger Lookout,” he said.

By the late 1980s, it was evident the old lookout was in dire need of restoration. It had battled too many high-altitude winters, too many blistering summer suns and unrelenting windstorms.

“The Forest Service had a volunteer project that involved a lot of district employees who worked on their weekends and some generous private citizens,” LaLande recalled. “They stripped the whole thing, took the flooring up and refinished it, removed the late addition of a catwalk that had been built around the historic lookout.

“It was refurbished from the inside out,” he added.

Inside the lookout, the fir floor has been restored, as has the original wainscoting.

“We took out the windows and reglazed them,” he said. “But some fool during hunting season down in the meadow did target practice on the lookout. We had a bullet hole through the shutters, broke the glass and who knows what would have happened if someone would have been standing here.”

Last year, the Forest Service expanded a concrete platform just outside the door and installed a new safety railing.

“This is the kind of place where, if you were to trip, you could take a real serious fall,” LaLande said. “It’s a long ways down. Pretty gnarly.”

But the dizzying heights make for the spectacular view. Magnificent peaks jut up on the northeastern horizon.

“There’s Bailey, Sawtooth, Thielsen, rim of Crater Lake,” he said.

The agency hopes the rentals increase the public’s appreciation for the forest and its historic structures.

“This is not a renewable resource,” LaLande said of the historic lookout. “It needs to be treated with respect.”