Bald Mountain Cabin

In the Northeast Kingdom’s hierarchy of summits, Bald Mountain in Westmore occupies a particular position: the third highest peak in the region, at approximately 3,314 feet, and the only mountain in the cluster surrounding Lake Willoughby that still carries a maintained fire tower on its summit. The mountain’s name derives from the open summit condition that made it valuable as a fire observation site in the first place — a bald, treeless crown with unobstructed sightlines in every direction. From the top of the tower, on a clear day, the view spans Lake Willoughby and Seymour Lake in the valleys below, Lake Memphremagog to the north, the ridge of the Green Mountains to the west, and the full range of the White Mountains in New Hampshire to the east.

The mountain rises from Westmore, a small town on the eastern shore of Lake Willoughby whose character has long been defined by the dramatic geography of its setting. Willoughby is a glacially carved lake flanked by Mount Pisgah on the east and Mount Hor on the west, its narrow shape and steep surrounding slopes creating the appearance, from the road, of a fjord. Bald Mountain stands to the north of this formation, geographically separate from the Pisgah-Hor corridor but part of the same skyline for anyone approaching Willoughby from below. The surrounding mountains — Hor, Moose, Pisgah, Wheeler, Hedgehog, Haystack — form a family of summits around the lake, each accessible by maintained trail. Bald Mountain is the highest and most visited among them, and the only one in the group that carries both a climbable fire tower and a restored summit cabin.

The 1922 Station

Bald Mountain’s original fire lookout station dates to 1922. When the Vermont Timberland Owners Association and the state forester’s office moved to build out the Northeast Kingdom’s fire protection network in the early 1920s, they were extending an effort that had already established lookout stations at Burke Mountain in the east (personally financed by landowner Elmer Darling around 1912, the first fire tower in Vermont), Gore Mountain in Avery’s Gore (built by the VTOA in 1912 as the third lookout in Vermont), and Camel’s Hump in the central mountains. The Bald Mountain station was constructed in the same era alongside comparable stations at West Mountain in Ferdinand, Stone Mountain in Guildhall, and other Northeast Kingdom summits, as the coverage network worked its way across the remaining unprotected sections of Essex and Orleans Counties.

The mountain went by a different name in these years. It was known then as Westmore Mountain, after the town on whose approaches the trails climbed. The renaming to Bald Mountain — reflecting the open summit’s most distinctive visual feature — apparently came later, as the fire lookout site became better known to hikers and the institutional identity of the mountain shifted from a working fire station to a recreational destination.

The original installation comprised a cabin for the fire warden to live and work in during the fire season, and an open-platform observation tower that provided the elevated vantage point from which smoke could be spotted. The cabin, constructed in 1922, was a utilitarian structure — a place for the warden to sleep, cook, store the alidade and fire-finder maps that allowed precise reporting of smoke bearings, and shelter from the weather that could move across the Northeast Kingdom with very little warning. The warden’s work ran from April through October, the annual fire season, and the cabin was where he spent most of that time when he was not in the tower above.

The Warden’s Work

The fire observation system on Bald Mountain, like those elsewhere in Vermont’s network, depended on triangulation. A warden spotting smoke from the tower cab would take a bearing with the alidade — measuring the angle between true north and the smoke’s direction — and report it by telephone to the dispatcher. That single bearing described a line, not a point; a second observer at a different summit, sighting the same smoke, produced a second line. Where the two lines crossed on the dispatcher’s map was the fire’s location, accurate enough to direct suppression crews to the right terrain.

The system required reliable communication, and this was achieved through telephone lines strung across the mountains. On Bald Mountain, the Telegraph Trail — the oldest of the three routes to the summit — takes its name from the communication infrastructure that once accompanied it. Traces of the old telegraph line survive in places along the trail: wire, poles, and ceramic insulators caught in the vegetation, artifacts of the communication network that connected the summit station to the dispatch center and to the other towers in the Essex and Orleans County network.

The life of a fire warden on a remote summit in the 1920s and 1930s was characterized by long periods of solitary observation broken by intense activity when a fire appeared. Between fire alerts, the warden maintained the station, watched the horizon, and lived in the particular combination of isolation and attentiveness that such work required. The summit of Bald Mountain, surrounded by the lakes and ridges of the Northeast Kingdom, offered one of the more dramatic postings in Vermont’s lookout network — the view that rewarded the warden’s daily climbs into the tower cab was genuinely extraordinary, one of the most complete and varied panoramas available from any summit in the region.

The NEFE Tower, 1938–39

The open-platform observation tower that the 1922 station had used was replaced in 1938–39 under the New England Forest Emergency organization, following the devastating hurricane of September 1938. That storm tore through the Northeast, felling timber across hundreds of thousands of acres and knocking down a number of Vermont’s original wooden fire towers. The NEFE program, created to address the aftermath of the storm and to modernize fire detection infrastructure across the region, installed the aermotor-style steel towers that became the standard for Vermont fire lookouts in the late 1930s. The aermotor design — a prefabricated steel structure with enclosed cab and metal ladder flights — was sturdier, taller, and more weathertight than the earlier open-platform towers it replaced.

The aermotor tower installed on Bald Mountain in 1938–39 is the same structure that hikers climb today. A CCC work camp was located nearby — Camp S-55, Company 121, in Sutton, near the south end of what is now Willoughby State Forest — and while it is unknown whether CCC crews had a hand in the Bald Mountain work specifically, the context of New Deal construction investment in Vermont’s fire infrastructure ran through these years in the Northeast Kingdom.

The new tower, combined with the 1922 cabin, gave Bald Mountain a lookout station that would serve through the subsequent decades of the fire observation era. Wardens continued to work the summit through the 1940s and into the 1950s, their fire season occupancy a constant of the mountain’s annual rhythm.

Abandonment

Vermont moved faster than any other New England state to shut down its fire tower network. As aircraft-based fire detection proved more economical than fixed-summit observers through the 1960s, and as the volume of forest fires declined from the highs of the logging era’s worst decades, the case for staffing the towers year after year eroded. Vermont closed its entire fire tower network, becoming the first state in the region to do so, and the towers were left to whatever fate time and weather arranged for them.

On Bald Mountain, the tower’s decommissioning left both the steel structure and the 1922 cabin without institutional stewardship. The summit continued to attract hikers — the views from the tower were simply too good to keep people away — but the cabin deteriorated through a combination of ordinary decay, vandalism, and the relentless pressure of Northeast Kingdom winters. By the time anyone turned organized attention to the site, the cabin had settled noticeably into the ground, its floor members crumbling from dry rot. The upper framing, walls, and roof remained remarkably intact — the structure was still quite sound where wood had been protected from moisture — but the lower assembly had been compromised enough that restoration would require substantial structural intervention.

The summit’s situation changed in 2000, when the State of Vermont purchased the Bald Mountain summit from its private owners. The acquisition brought the summit into the Willoughby State Forest management framework, placing both the tower and the cabin under state stewardship and establishing the institutional basis for the restoration efforts that would follow.

The Tower Renewed: 2000–2002

The first organized work to address the physical deterioration of the Bald Mountain fire station focused on the tower rather than the cabin. Between 2000 and 2002, a collaborative effort by NorthWoods Stewardship Center, the Green Mountain Club, and the Westmore Association replaced the wooden steps and landings that allowed climbers to ascend the aermotor tower. The original wooden treads had deteriorated to the point where use of the tower was a practical safety concern; the replacement project restored climbable access to the cab and the 360-degree views that the tower provided.

The Westmore Association — the organization that has maintained community trails in and around Westmore since long before the fire station era — brought both local knowledge and volunteer labor to this first phase of renewal. The NorthWoods Stewardship Center, based in East Charleston and already active in trail and facility work across the Northeast Kingdom, provided the organizational capacity to manage a project on a remote summit. The Green Mountain Club, whose Northeast Kingdom Section had been chartered in August 2000 with sixteen charter members, contributed GMC volunteers and the club’s established trail-work infrastructure.

The tower work established the partnership that would subsequently address the cabin. It also demonstrated the logistical reality of working on Bald Mountain: materials had to be carried on foot for the full approach distance, the trail long enough and the terrain varied enough that hauling lumber, hardware, and tools required organized effort.

The Cabin Restored: 2013

The cabin restoration that returned the 1922 structure to serviceable condition was completed in the fall of 2013. The project was coordinated by Luke O’Brien, then Trail Director at NorthWoods Stewardship Center, with crews from NorthWoods and coordination support from the St. Johnsbury office of the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation. Lou Bushey, the District Forester for VT DFP&R, provided state oversight. Funding came from the Vermont Land and Facilities Trust Fund — a fund supported by timber harvest revenues from state lands — a source that connected the cabin’s restoration to the forest management revenue stream that state forestry programs rely on.

The structural approach addressed the cabin’s settled condition from the ground up. The building was jacked off its foundation, raising it back to level so that the dry stone foundation beneath it could be reset properly. With the structure elevated, workers constructed an entirely new floor system to replace the crumbling dry-rotted floor members — the restoration did not attempt to salvage what decay had made unusable, but built new framing according to the cabin’s original dimensions and construction logic. Doors, windows, and trim were added to match the building’s original framing and appearance, preserving the character of the 1922 structure while replacing what could not be saved. The project also restored the building’s original cedar shingle siding, reestablishing the material envelope that the 1922 builders had used and that decades of neglect and vandalism had damaged.

The logistics of moving restoration materials to the summit required the same ingenuity that had characterized the tower step replacement a decade earlier. The trailhead on the south side of the mountain, reached via Long Pond Road, is the easier approach; from there, crews hauled materials by trailer 1.8 miles to the mountain’s base, then carried lumber and supplies by hand — one board at a time — the remaining mile to the summit. It is the unavoidable arithmetic of backcountry construction: everything that goes up the mountain must go up on someone’s back.

Continuing Stewardship

The 2013 restoration was not the end of the maintenance attention that the cabin has required. In the summer of 2025, volunteers from the Green Mountain Club and NorthWoods Stewardship Center carried metal roofing up the mountain to replace the original roof — a further increment of a longer-running effort to keep the structure sound through Vermont winters that are particularly hard on exposed summit buildings. The cabin continues to serve as a shelter for hikers who reach the Bald Mountain summit, its interior available as a destination in all seasons.

The winter solstice tradition that Gordon DuBois has maintained for more than thirty years — climbing a mountain peak to mark the year’s darkest turning point — led him to Bald Mountain in December 2025 with a small party of friends. They found the cabin standing under deep snow, the fire tower creaking in the wind above it, and enough shelter inside to share food, read poems, and tell stories before the dropping temperatures drove them back down the trail. It is the kind of use the cabin was never designed for — fire wardens did not mark solstices — but the kind of use that mountain summit shelters seem always to attract: people finding occasion in a hard destination, gathering briefly above the treeline before the season or the weather sends them back.

Bald Mountain is recognized on the National Historic Lookout Register, one of six Vermont fire tower sites so designated — the others are Burke Mountain, Elmore Mountain, Mount Olga, Spruce Mountain, and Stratton Mountain. It is, by the assessment of Luke O’Brien and others who know Vermont’s surviving fire lookout infrastructure, the only remaining lookout in northern Vermont where both the original tower and the summit cabin still stand together — a distinction that reflects both the quality of the original 1922 construction and the sustained effort to preserve it.

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