Gore Mountain Summit Cabin

The word "gore" — surviving in a handful of Vermont and Maine place names — describes a remnant of the survey era, a sliver of land that fell between township boundaries when mapmakers’ geometry didn’t quite add up. Avery’s Gore, in the far northeast corner of Vermont, is one of those remnants: an uninhabited, unincorporated strip of Essex County land about six miles south of the Quebec border, tucked between the townships of Norton to the north and Lewis to the east. It has no town meeting, no selectboard, and no permanent residents. Its governance, such as it is, falls to the county. Its name on the map outlasts whatever Avery once did there.

What Avery’s Gore has always had, and what makes it a destination rather than a curiosity, is Gore Mountain — a rounded summit rising to 3,332 feet, the forty-fifth highest peak in the New England Fifty Finest ranking, commanding a broad position above the Nulhegan Basin. The mountain’s watershed drains in two directions. To the north and northwest, short brooks feed into the Coaticook River, which works its way through Quebec to the Saint Lawrence. To the south, the mountain drains into the North Branch of the Nulhegan River and eventually into the Connecticut. Gore Mountain sits precisely at the hydrological edge of two great river systems, and its summit, though now forested to the treeline with dense spruce and fir, once looked out across tens of thousands of acres of working forest that extended from the Quebec border to the Connecticut River watershed below.

For much of the twentieth century, that forest — some of it owned by St. Regis Paper, then by Champion International — was the economic engine of northern Essex County. Logging camps and railroads moved through these valleys; the trees were cut and floated and hauled and milled. And on the summit of Gore Mountain, for more than half a century, someone was paid to watch over all of it.

The Third Lookout, 1912

The chain of events that put a fire lookout on Gore Mountain began with a string of catastrophic forest fires in Vermont’s early twentieth century. Dry logging slash, wood-burning locomotive sparks, and periods of drought combined to create conditions where fires could spread across thousands of acres before anyone could do much about them. A fire in 1903 burned more than 1,200 acres in the Essex County towns of Lewis, Ferdinand, Bloomfield, Brunswick, and Brighton — the very region that would eventually be watched from Gore Mountain’s summit. By 1904 the Vermont legislature had appointed a Commissioner of Forestry; by 1909 the state forester, Austin Hawes, was actively advocating for a system of mountaintop observation towers modeled on the successful networks then operating in Maine and elsewhere.

What Hawes understood, and what his correspondence with Maine timberland owners confirmed, was that the towers worked best when the people who stood most to lose from fire paid for them. The first tower in Vermont had gone up on Burke Mountain around 1912, financed entirely by Elmer Darling, a wealthy landowner who wanted to protect his timber. The second established lookout was on Camel’s Hump, where a warden worked the 1911 fire season with a cement table, a county map, a compass, and a telephone line for company.

Gore Mountain was the third such lookout in Vermont. In 1912 the Vermont Timberland Owners Association — the same organization of private large-acreage landowners whose self-taxation had funded tower construction across the state — built the first fire tower and cabin on the Gore summit. The station joined the Essex County network at Burke, West, and Monadnock Mountains in relaying fire detection information to a dispatcher in Maidstone. The four towers together were linked by a communications system — eventually encompassing eighty-eight miles of telegraph line — that allowed reported smoke bearings to be triangulated into precise fire locations and conveyed to suppression crews on the ground.

The system the wardens used was simple in principle and exacting in practice. From the tower cab, the observer used a rotating sighting device called an alidade to measure the bearing of a smoke plume from true north. That single bearing was not enough to locate a fire; it required a second observer, sighting the same smoke from a different summit, to triangulate. The two bearings, plotted on a map by the dispatcher in Maidstone, crossed at the fire’s location. On a clear day with good visibility, the system could put suppression crews onto a fire within an hour of its first appearance as smoke on the horizon.

The Cabin at the Top

The warden’s cabin built alongside the original 1912 tower was a working structure, functional rather than comfortable: a shelter for the person whose job required spending the fire season — April through October — on an exposed summit far from any road. The isolation was part of the assignment. A fire warden on Gore Mountain in the second decade of the twentieth century was connected to the outside world by a single telephone line strung across miles of rough terrain. On clear fire days, that line was busy with bearings and reports; between fires, it was the only human voice reaching the summit.

The summit of Gore Mountain in the 1910s and 1920s looked out across a landscape that was still recovering from the logging era. The clearcutting that had stripped much of northern Essex County through the late nineteenth century had left a brushy, second-growth terrain — precisely the kind of dry, open landscape that carried fire most readily. The warden’s view covered farms, woodlots, logging camps, and the low ridges that separated the Nulhegan Basin from the Canadian border. Twenty towns fell within the station’s coverage area. A fire spotted from Gore Mountain might be in Vermont, or it might be just across the Quebec line; the warden’s bearing didn’t care about political boundaries.

The land surrounding the mountain passed through several corporate owners through the first half of the twentieth century. St. Regis Paper held extensive timberlands in northern Essex County through the mid-century decades; the company was later succeeded by Brown and then by Champion International, which assembled a holding of some 132,000 acres in the Northeast Kingdom by the 1990s. Through all these ownership transitions, the fire lookout infrastructure on Gore Mountain’s summit remained an operating asset: the tower and the cabin continued to serve the detection function they had been built for, their maintenance a shared interest of the private owners below and the state fire management system they supported.

Rebuilt, 1935

By the mid-1930s, the original 1912 tower had reached the end of its serviceable life. The tower was replaced in 1935, and the current cabin dates to the same rebuilding. This second-generation station reflected both improved construction techniques and the institutional investment that Vermont’s fire protection infrastructure had received through the decade: the New Deal era brought the Civilian Conservation Corps into Vermont’s forests, and CCC work parties and the related New England Forest Emergency program expanded and modernized fire tower networks across the state. The aermotor-style steel towers that characterized the CCC and NEFE construction programs became the standard for Vermont summits in this period, replacing the earlier wooden or open-platform observation structures.

On Gore Mountain, the rebuilt cabin provided the fire warden with a shelter that would remain standing through the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The tower that stood adjacent to it served as the observation post through the subsequent decades of the fire lookout era — a steel structure rising above the summit spruce, its cab offering clear sightlines in every direction during the fire season and a perch for whoever was assigned to watch this particular corner of Essex County.

The Tower Comes Down, 1968

Vermont moved faster than any other state in New England to close its fire tower network. Small aircraft proved both cheaper and more effective than fixed mountaintop observers: a single patrol plane during fire season could cover the territory of a dozen towers in a fraction of the time, without the cost of manning remote stations for six months a year or maintaining miles of telephone line through difficult terrain. By the 1960s the economic and operational case for staffed towers had collapsed.

The fire tower on Gore Mountain was dismantled in 1968. The cement foundation blocks that held its legs to the summit bedrock remain visible to hikers today — the most durable artifact of the six-decade lookout operation that the mountain hosted. The cabin, sturdier than the tower and requiring no active dismantling decision, was simply left standing.

Vermont’s approach to its now-redundant towers was pragmatic and, for preservationists, disheartening: the state offered the structures for a dollar apiece, on the condition that buyers dismantle and remove them. Many towers found no takers. They were abandoned where they stood, and decades of northeastern winters did the rest. Of the thirty-eight towers that had once dotted Vermont’s high summits, roughly twenty remain standing in some form. On Gore Mountain, only the foundation blocks survive; the 1935 cabin endures beside them as the last standing structure of the original fire lookout station.

The Trail Returns, 2000

For decades after the tower’s dismantlement, the Gore Mountain summit sat without a maintained access trail. The fire warden’s path — which had originally been cut to service the tower and cabin, not to serve recreational hikers — had fallen into disuse and was largely overgrown by the late twentieth century. The summit was accessible to determined bushwhackers, but it was not on any trail map.

In 1996, the Champion International Corporation put its 132,000-acre Northeast Kingdom holding up for sale. The transaction that followed involved the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Vermont Land Trust, the State of Vermont, the Conservation Fund, and private investors, who together pieced together a conservation outcome: 26,000 acres became the Nulhegan Basin Division of the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge in 1997, and adjacent acreage was acquired by the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources as the West Mountain Wildlife Management Area. The Gore Mountain summit, on Weyerhaeuser-owned land adjacent to these public lands, found itself suddenly at the center of a conservation landscape rather than an industrial one.

In 2000, the NorthWoods Stewardship Center, based in East Charleston, re-established the Gore Mountain Trail. A trail crew recut the historic fire warden’s route, which the new trail follows for much of its length. Evidence of the old telegraph line — wire, poles, and ceramic insulators — remains visible in places along the trail, physical testimony to the communications infrastructure the fire lookout system had once required. The trail runs 3.9 miles from the Vermont Route 114 trailhead at the north end of Norton Pond to the summit, climbing through hardwood forest before entering the upper-elevation softwood zone of spruce and fir that characterized Gore Mountain’s summit.

The Kingdom Heritage Trail and the GMC

The same August 2000 that saw the Gore Mountain Trail re-established also saw the formal chartering of the Green Mountain Club’s Northeast Kingdom Section. Drawn from hikers across northern Vermont and southern New Hampshire, the sixteen charter members of the new section included Luke O’Brien of East Charleston, who would become one of the most consistent voices for the Gore Mountain trail system over the following two decades. O’Brien worked variously as Trail Director at NorthWoods Stewardship Center and later as a Forest Recreation Specialist with the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation, maintaining a connection to the Gore Mountain corridor throughout.

In 2001, the Green Mountain Club became the official corridor manager for a proposed network of hiking trails on the former Champion lands — a management role that formalized the club’s relationship to the Kingdom Heritage Trail system that NorthWoods and its partners were developing. A corridor management plan, developed in 2007 and approved by Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources Secretary and the GMC Executive Director in 2009, laid out the framework for a network connecting existing trails on Gore and Bluff Mountains with new connecting trails across the former Champion lands. NorthWoods Stewardship Center began cutting the connecting trail in 2010.

The completed Kingdom Heritage Trail, formally opened in June 2019, runs some twenty miles connecting trails on Gore Mountain with trails on Middle Mountain, Bluff Ridge, and Bluff Mountain, eventually reaching community trails in Island Pond. For through-hikers on the Kingdom Heritage Trail, Gore Mountain’s summit cabin — the last surviving structure of the 1912 fire lookout station — is a landmark and, in recent years, an available shelter.

The Gore Mountain Trail (from its mid-trail junction to the summit) is maintained as a GMC adopt-a-trail by Luke O’Brien. The lower section (from the trailhead to the junction) is maintained by Steve. The Gore Mountain East Trail — the eastern approach from the Lewis Pond Overlook in the Silvio O. Conte National Wildlife Refuge, 2.6 miles to the summit — is maintained by John.

The Cabin Restored

By the time hikers re-established a regular presence on the Gore summit after 2000, the 1935 cabin was still standing — a survivor of six decades of abandonment and Vermont winters. Its condition was significant but sound; the structure had settled into the ground and required substantial work, but it had not collapsed. A group of volunteers, coordinated in the years following the trail’s re-establishment, undertook the restoration of the cabin. A new metal roof went on, replacing whatever weathered original covering had protected the structure, and new porch floorboards followed. By the time the NorthStar Monthly published Gordon DuBois’s hiking account of the summit in 2023, stacks of lumber inside the cabin indicated that the restoration was still ongoing — more work planned, the building being returned to serviceable condition season by season.

The cabin sits on the boundary between two private properties: Weyerhaeuser, the major timberland company that now owns the bulk of the former Champion lands in this area, and Sweet Tree Holdings, the largest maple products producer in the United States. That the cabin straddles both ownerships is a physical reminder of the land’s corporate history and of the kind of cooperation between public recreation interests and private landowners that the Kingdom Heritage Trail corridor depends on.

On Gore and Spruce Mountains, Luke O’Brien noted in 2013, the towers have been removed but the cabins still stand — distinguishing these two summits from others in northern Vermont where the complete lookout infrastructure has been lost. The Gore Mountain cabin’s persistence is the result of its solid 1935 construction, its fortunate escape from the deliberate dismantlement campaigns that cleared other summits, and the sustained volunteer attention it has received since the trail’s re-establishment. No dramatic rescue; just the slow accumulation of work parties, nail by nail and board by board, on the summit of an uninhabited gore in Essex County.

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