For about two decades, a small wooden fire lookout stood on the highest point in Oregon. Elijah Coalman, a Mt. Hood guide known as Lige, set it up on the summit for the Forest Service in 1915 and lived on top through that fire season. His cabin became the pattern for a few hundred lookouts across the Northwest, a welcome stop for climbers, and in the end a wreck left to the summit weather.
Eyes above the forest
After the great fires of 1910, the Forest Service spread a network of lookouts across the Northwest between 1911 and 1915. Most early lookouts lived in a tent below a peak and hiked up each day to a platform in a tree or a heap of rocks. They had a compass or a crude fire finder and sent word by telephone line or by heliograph, which signals with flashes of sunlight. A new instrument, the Osborne Fire Finder, arrived in 1914. It gave a lookout the bearing and angle to a smoke, and bearings from two or more stations could be crossed on a map to pin down the fire.
Building at 11,000 feet
Coalman knew the peak as well as anyone. A south side guide who also ran a hotel at Government Camp, he had climbed Mt. Hood more than 300 times by 1914, when one Mazama writer called him the best-informed man on the mountain. In the summer of 1915 he first worked from a tent on the summit beside a fire finder. The Mazamas, Portland’s climbing club, reported that he lived on the summit for 70 days in a row that year while working for the government, and that he put up a new observatory station there.
That station was a 12-by-12-foot cabin of precut lumber. According to Ned Thanhouser, whose 2024 documentary tells the cabin’s story, the Forest Service set aside $633 for it. Mules hauled about 10 tons of lumber and hardware from Government Camp to the base of Crater Rock, some 2,000 feet below the top, and a crew of about 10 people spent 10 days carrying it the rest of the way on their backs. Steel cables, visible in photos from the 1930s, tied the finished cabin down against the wind.
A model for the Northwest
A National Register of Historic Places study of Forest Service lookouts says the building of purpose-made lookout houses in the Pacific Northwest began with this prototype on Mt. Hood. Coalman’s design became the basis of the standard D-6 lookout house, named for the Forest Service’s District 6, today’s Region 6. A D-6 cabin had windows around its upper walls, a hipped roof topped by a glassed-in observation room called a cupola, and shutters to protect the glass. A few hundred were built across Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana. Photos of the summit cabin show the same cupola on top.
Life on top
The lookout was staffed in fire season, roughly June into October, and sealed up for winter, when snow could nearly bury it. A telephone line strung up the mountain from Government Camp let the lookout report fires. Thanhouser told OPB that the first call from the summit in 1915 went to the Oregon Journal newspaper, and that Coalman spotted more than 130 fires in six weeks that first summer.
Climbers made the cabin a destination. When 83 Mazamas reached the summit on July 15, 1917, Coalman, by then the forest ranger stationed at the lookout, was their host. That autumn another Mazama party spent a moonlit night on top, ate a dinner with hot biscuits at his shelter, and watched a forest fire glow in Iron Creek canyon below. During the club’s August 1923 outing, two members who came up the rarely climbed west side found Ranger Phelps in the cabin, reading three-day-old newspapers. Several couples were even married at the cabin.
Abandoned and lost
The post did not last. The USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory dates its abandonment to 1935. Thanhouser told OPB it was no longer staffed after 1934, and that lookouts that were far easier to reach and keep up did the job instead. Climbers still stopped there: the Hood River County history museum has shared a photo of a climbing party resting at the lookout station in July 1935, its steel cables still in place.
With no one to repair it, the weather went to work. The USGS says the cabin slipped off the summit in 1941. Thanhouser describes it collapsing instead, a pile of charred timbers by the 1940s and gone by the 1950s.
See it today
Nothing of the cabin stands now. From the parking area at Timberline Lodge, look up past Crater Rock to the summit ridge where it stood. Reaching the top is a serious climb: the USGS warns of heavy rockfall above Crater Rock in summer and of avalanches and storms in winter and spring. For a lookout you can visit, Clear Lake Butte Lookout, near the northwest corner of the Warm Springs Reservation, is a 1962 R-6 Flat Top cabin, the last generation of the lookout houses that began on Mt. Hood’s summit. Its 14-by-14-foot room sits on a 40-foot tower, two feet wider each way than Coalman’s cabin.
