In 1915, U.S. Forest Service ranger Elijah “Lige” Coalman built a fire lookout cabin on the summit of Mount Hood. The cabin served as a place to view nascent fires and as a bit of a party spot, according to the new short documentary “Cabin in the Sky: The Mount Hood Lookout.” Filmmaker Ned Thanhouser joins us to share the history of the cabin, which remained in use until 1940.
Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. For more than 20 years, there has been a fire lookout cabin at the very top of Mount Hood. It was built there in 1915 by a Forest Service ranger. The cabin served as a place to spot forest fires and as an 11,000-foot-high party destination, according to a new documentary short. The film is called “Cabin In the Sky: The Mount Hood Lookout.” Filmmaker Ned Thanhouser, joins us now to talk about it. Welcome to the show.
Ned Thanhouser: Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me on.
Miller: It’s great to have you on. Who was Elijah “Lige” Coalman?
Thanhouser: Lige Coalman was a mountaineer who had climbed Mount Hood numerous times. And he got this idea of using the summit of Mount Hood as a lookout, to track where forest fires might be showing up so that they could get resources there to put out the fire, save property and lives.
Miller: Before there was a cabin, there was a big tent there. What was that like?
Thanhouser: Well, in 1915, before the cabin was built, Lige had this idea to bring a fire finder, which is like a triangulation tool where you can look through and see where the forest fires are. He set that up outside of a cabin he built on the summit of Mount Hood, and he used that with the Forest Service, to locate fires so they could bring resources.
It was after the successful first year, before there was a cabin, he proposed to the Forest Service to build a cabin, and he got $633 allocated from the Forest Service. Over the next couple of months, they hauled 10 tons of lumber from Government Camp to the summit where they built the cabin.
Miller: And this was a volunteer effort, or this was a US Forest Service endeavor?
Thanhouser: This was a US Forest Service endeavor. Not only did they pay for building the cabin, over the next 15 to 20 years they had different rangers that would go up and staff the cabin during the fire season, like June through October. And during the winter months, it wasn’t staffed, it was sealed up.
Miller: There were some pictures in the documentary of it being almost fully covered in snow in the winter months, so it was just part of the snowy landscape in the winter and then the snow would thaw, ideally in June.
Thanhouser: Well, they had storms during the fire season, too. But none as bad as in the winter season.
Miller: How did folks at the top of the mountain communicate with 1918 first responders?
Thanhouser: They would haul every year communications cable, a telephone line, from Government Camp up to the fire lookout. They had a telephone where they could call down to the forest lookout and say, “Here are the coordinates of where a fire is.” And it turns out that their very first phone call in 1915 was to the Oregon Journal. They also had a phone call to the US Forest Service West Coast Branch, down in San Francisco. So that was a headline in the newspapers of the day, that they got a phone call from the summit of Mount Hood all the way to San Francisco.
Miller: How many fires did they spot? Is that data that has been kept?
Thanhouser: Well, we know in the first year, 1915, Lige Coalman, in a six-week period, found over 130 fires that were then responded to by the Forest Service.
Miller: All based on a dedicated phone line, just a line going miles up from Government Camp.
Thanhouser: Yeah. And there were other forest lookouts, so they could triangulate from two different points and then they could intersect those coordinates, and that’s how they would find out more precisely where the fire was.
Miller: So after the tent, Lige Coalman says, look, I’ve proven this – At 11,000-something feet, you can see a lot up here. I saw this many fires. Was there any pushback? Did anybody say, “Yes, we definitely should have fire lookouts, but not at the top of Oregon’s most iconic peak?”
Thanhouser: I don’t remember anybody saying they shouldn’t do it. I think that it was proven in 1915 before the cabin was built, and the fact that he found so many fires in the first year convinced the Forest Service to fund that effort.
Miller: And this was at a time when there was much more of a prevailing idea of, “If there’s a fire, put it out.”
Thanhouser: Correct.
Miller: And that will help everybody and everything ... a notion that is no longer the case. That’s the only way most of us think about fires.
What was it like to construct a fire tower at over 11,000 feet of elevation in 1915?
Thanhouser: Well, the Forest Service funded the acquisition of the lumber and the hardware, and they took mules from Government Camp to haul all of this material up to the base of Crater Rock, which is about 2,000 feet below the summit. It gets very steep. And then over 10 days, they had 10 people that hauled all of this lumber on foot up the steep south side of Mount Hood to build the cabin. So it took them 10 days with 10 people to haul all of this lumber and material to the summit.
Miller: What was it like inside?
Thanhouser: My understanding was it was pretty cozy. He had a little forest stove, where he could cook hot chocolate or tea or coffee. And it was known, after the cabin was built, that people who would summit the mountain, he would give them a cup of coffee or some tea to warm them up after their journey to the top.
Miller: Well, it almost seems like a celebratory destination. What did you learn about the culture of the cabin and what happened there?
Thanhouser: Well, it turned out that even in the first year, people loved to go to the summit of Mount Hood and there were some people who decided to get married on the summit. In fact, in 1915, a couple got married on the summit, and that was before the cabin was built. And they actually have a headline in the newspaper, The Oregonian, that shows the couple getting married next to the tent on the summit of Mount Hood. After the cabin was built, there were several other marriages that were recorded that took place at the cabin.
Miller: A lot of people have drives to climb mountains that have nothing to do with some kind of human infrastructure at the top of them. But do you think that this lookout encouraged more people to climb the mountain?
Thanhouser: Well, the Mazamas formed their organization on the summit of Mount Hood in 1894. And the mountain became quite a goal for people to come from Portland. They’d take the trek up to Government Camp and then they would climb all the way from Government Camp to the summit. And the Mazamas would bring up, literally, hundreds of people. They would bring up 250 people to climb the summit. So it became quite a thing to do back in the day. Nowadays, I think your party is limited to 12 people.
Miller: Why was this abandoned 19 years after it was built – 1934?
Thanhouser: Right. In 1934, it was no longer staffed and the cabin fell into disrepair, but it looks like they had other ways of detecting and fighting forest fires from other lookouts that were less arduous to maintain. The lookout, again, was built in 1915, but by 1934, it was starting to fall apart from all of the severe weather over the years. And by the 1940′s and 1950, it was just a charred pile of timbers. It had collapsed under all of the lack of maintenance and the severe weather.
Miller: You’re a retired engineer who turned to documentary filmmaking, along with your partner, Jeff Thomas, as a kind of second act. What drew you to this story in particular? You’ve done a lot of films about climbing, about mountains. What do you like about this story in particular?
Thanhouser: Well, this story came out of another film that we did last year about a dog named Ranger that we found out climbed Mount Hood 500 times from Government Camp. And that film that we did of Ranger last year, which actually took my wife and I to New York where it was shown at a film festival in New York City – believe it or not, there’s a film festival called The NY Dog Film Festival. They like this film so much. We screened it there. But in that film, we saw images of the Mount Hood lookout cabin and I talked to Jeff, again, who is my co-producer on this film, and writer. Jeff has lots of history from the mountaineering era and he has over 400 photographs of the cabin in various stages of being constructed, and how it eventually collapsed. And I said, “Jeff, there’s got to be a story here, about how that was built.” And being a storyteller, a visual storyteller, this fit perfectly with the things I enjoy doing.
Miller: How much do you wish that you had been able to visit that cabin?
Thanhouser: Well, I climbed Mount Hood, I think, a half a dozen times and I never saw any of the remnants. Apparently, some people have got pieces of wood that were on the summit that were left over from the cabin. It would have been lovely to see the cabin before it collapsed. But by the 1950′s, it was not there.
Miller: Ned Thanhouser, thanks very much.
Thanhouser: Well, thanks for having me.
Miller: You can watch Ned Thanhouser and Jeff Thomas’ new short documentary “Cabin In the Sky: The Mount Hood Lookout” online for free, right now. There is a link on our website.
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