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THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2021
Loss of iconic lookout tower hits family
By IAN McCLUSKEY
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Don Allen III got a text
that struck him with dread.
“Looks like a ﬁ re rippin’
maybe a couple miles east of
Gold Butte,” it read. Then a
follow up text: “According to
Coﬃ n it’s further north.”
Cryptic to most people,
Allen knew exactly what the
two texts meant and what was
at stake. They had been sent
from a ﬁ re lookout tower on
Sand Mountain, a peak in the
Willamette National Forest
near Three Finger Jack and
Mount Washington. Allen
knew the lookout tower well.
He’d lived there when his dad
worked as a lookout, and he
had helped rebuild the tower
30 years ago after it had been
destroyed by ﬁ re.
To the north was the Cof-
ﬁ n Mountain Lookout where
Allen had ﬁ rst worked as a
lookout. The ranger on duty
could see exactly what Allen
feared: a plume of smoke
broiling from the south ﬂ ank
of Mount Hood.
Allen immediately texted
back, “I hope not too close to
Bull of the Woods.”
On a high peak in the mid-
dle of the Bull of the Woods
Wilderness area stood the
Bull of the Woods Lookout.
Built in 1942, it was one of
the oldest and most iconic
historic lookout towers in
the Northwest, and one of
the very last. Allen’s father
had worked at The Bull of
the Woods Lookout when he
was a young man. It shaped
his father’s life, and his. Now,
a massive wildﬁ re was grow-
ing somewhere in its vicinity.
Allen and the Sand Moun-
tain Society, a volunteer non-
proﬁ t dedicated to preserv-
ing the last of the Northwest’s
historic lookout towers, had
been waiting to resume their
restoration work on the look-
out tower for more than 15
years and had ﬁ nally gotten
permission to return.
Since the spring, Allen
had been preparing to return
to the Bull of the Woods
Lookout with his father and
the Sand Mountain crew for
a multiday work session over
Labor Day weekend.
Suddenly, those plans
were on hold as the Bull
Complex ﬁ re grew, moving
closer to the lookout tower.
Fire had threatened the tower
in the past and it had survived.
If wildland ﬁ re crews could
reach it in time and wrap it
with a ﬁ re-resistant covering,
it might have a chance. If not,
Oregon would lose one of its
great historic treasures. For
Allen, it would feel like the
undoing of his life’s work and
the end of a family legacy.
Don Allen Jr.
Don Allen with his mother
and sister at Sand Mountain
in 1966.
U.S. Forest Service
The Bull of the Woods Lookout was one of the most iconic historic lookouts in the Northwest,
looking over this vista toward Mount Hood for nearly 80 years.
Three generations of
lookouts
Allen’s connection to ﬁ re
lookout towers goes back
three generations.
His grandfather had been
one of the early U.S. Forest
Service rangers of the 1920s
and ‘30s dispatched to remote
outposts to keep watch over
the vast public forest reserves
of the Northwest.
The lookouts were the
ﬁ rst-line defense for spotting
and reporting forest ﬁ res.
There were few roads pen-
etrating the forests, and sup-
plies had to be hauled up to
the lookouts by pack ani-
mals. “The packer might be
the only person you saw that
summer,” Allen said. “It was
a solitary life.”
Allen’s grandfather spoke
fondly of his summer seasons
in a lookout. The stories he
recounted of life in the wil-
derness captured the imagina-
tion of his son, Don Allen Jr.
After graduating from
high school in 1959, Allen
Jr. followed his father’s foot-
steps and got his ﬁ rst job as
a ﬁ re lookout. He was sta-
tioned at Bull of the Woods
Lookout.
The young man found
that life at a lookout tower
suited him. When his lookout
season ended in the fall, he
started college at the Univer-
sity of Oregon, but returned to
the Bull of the Woods Look-
out for the next two summer
seasons.
After his junior year, he
moved to the Vinegar Hill
Lookout in the Malheur
National Forest. He was
joined by his new wife, who
was pregnant with their son,
Don Allen III.
“I like to say my ﬁ rst
time in a lookout was in the
womb,” Allen joked.
Allen’s earliest memo-
ries were formed at look-
outs, particularly one atop a
unique volcanic cinder cone
formation in the Willamette
National Forest called Sand
Mountain.
The family lived at the
Sand Mountain Lookout
for three summer seasons.
During their ﬁ nal year, the
1967 Big Lake Airstrip ﬁ re
threatened the lookout, forc-
ing Allen, his mother and
baby sister to be airlifted out,
while his father stayed on
duty.
The lookout survived the
wildﬁ re, only to be burned
down the following season
by an accidental ﬁ re started
by the lookout’s stove.
Legend of the bull
Just as his grandfather
had told stories of his youth-
ful years as a lookout, Allen’s
father told stories of his time
working in the Bull of the
Woods Lookout, nicknamed
“the Bull” for short.
“I always thought of the
Bull of the Woods Lookout
as legendary,” Allen said.
“He made it sound like such
a great adventure to be way
up in a lookout on top of a
mountain ridge, all alone in
the middle of the wilderness.”
When Allen reached the
age that his father had started
his lookout career, his dad
took him to see the Bull.
“I had tried to visualize it
all my life, but when I saw
it in person, I understood,”
Allen said. “All of my dad’s
stories I’d heard as a kid
came together.”
At the Bull, the sense of
remoteness felt palpable to
Allen. “The more the feel-
ing settles in, it lets you feel
that feeling of real solitude,”
Allen said. “Some people
might ﬁ nd that scary. I found
it comforting.”
When he was 21, Allen
got his ﬁ rst job as a lookout,
stationed at Coﬃ n Mountain
Lookout in the Willamette
National Forest.
From his tower, Allen
could see the lookout where
his dad had gotten his start,
Bull of the Woods; turning
toward the south, he could
look back at where his story
with lookouts had started,
Sand Mountain.
After ﬁ re destroyed the
Sand Mountain Lookout in
1968, dozens of square miles
of formerly dense forest
became an open playground
for oﬀ -road recreation. When
he was 10, Allen saw a par-
ticularly rowdy group of dirt
bikers aggressively cutting
tracks in the cinderash soil.
Allen felt angry, but helpless
to stop them. After the group
rode away, Allen picked up a
scrap of lumber and used it to
try to put the soil back as it
had been.
In 1987, management
plans for Sand Mountain
came up for review. Allen saw
an opportunity to protect the
fragile ecological area. Age
24 at the time, Allen founded
the Sand Mountain Society.
Working in cooperation with
the Forest Service, the Sand
Mountain Geologic Special
Interest Area was formed.
The new designation prohib-
ited oﬀ -road recreation.
However, the new restric-
tion was not warmly wel-
comed. Signs were ripped
out and road barriers winched
aside, Allen recalled.
Allen realized that Sand
Mountain needed someone
to keep an eye on things. But
if anyone was going to stay
on site consistently, they’d
need a shelter. The future of
Sand Mountain was in its
past, Allen concluded. Sand
Mountain needed its lookout
tower back.
Lookout tower
transplant
The use of lookout tow-
ers had been waning since
Allen’s childhood. By the
1980s, many lookouts had
been abandoned. Many fell
victim to vandalism, or left to
be slowly battered by weather
to the point of collapse. See-
ing the inventory of aging
lookouts as a liability, For-
est Service districts across the
Northwest decommissioned
most of the lookout towers by
the fastest, most cost-eﬀ ec-
tive means possible: burning
them down.
Rather than simply build
a new lookout tower on Sand
Mountain, Allen and the band
of volunteers (many of them
former lookout rangers or
retired Forest Service archae-
ologists) wanted the lookout
to have historic integrity.
They went in search of a
lookout of the same age, style
and materials as the origi-
nal Sand Mountain lookout.
They found a match in the
Rogue River National Forest.
When the Sand Mountain
Society volunteers arrived
at Whisky Peak in 1989, the
lookout had been vacant for
about 15 years and was likely
facing a decommission by ﬁ re.
The Sand Mountain Soci-
ety dismantled it board by
board, and relocated it on
Sand Mountain.
In the process, they dis-
covered what would become
the Sand Mountain Soci-
ety modus operandi: salvage
vintage pieces from historic
buildings slated for destruc-
tion and repurpose the mate-
rials to repair the handful of
lookouts that had the chance
of being saved for posterity.
They completed the look-
out at Sand Mountain in
1990, then started their next
rescue mission.
Return to the bull
For the next dozen years,
the Sand Mountain Society
stayed busy, painstakingly
pulling pieces from doomed
structures to use in their res-
toration projects. Their list
of successful projects grew
slowly and steadily.
There was one look-
out they especially wanted
to restore — the Bull of the
Woods Lookout.
“It needed some work,”
Allen recalled, “but at the
core it was sound.”
In 2005, Allen and his
father hiked back to the Bull.
With them was a string of
pack mules hauling in build-
ing materials and a team of
Sand Mountain Society vol-
unteers carrying hand tools.
“Because it was in desig-
nated wilderness, we couldn’t
use power tools,” Allen
explained. “For us, it brought
us back to what it was like in
the old times, when the look-
out was ﬁ rst built.”
The crew carefully pulled
out 10 of the windows and
strapped them onto pack
mules to take back to the city
for detailed restoration. They
See Tower, Page B4
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