Our neighbor Doug mentioned yesterday that one can see the old fire tower in French Creek State Park from a spot just a few feet outside of the preserve. We were talking about how hard it is to judge where a distant ridge leads, given our jumbled local valleys, twisted roads, and vistas limited by the deciduous forest. I've lived here almost 13 years and never knew you could see the tower from this direction.
Turns out it's pretty hard to see unless you're looking for it. It shows up much better in this photograph (with 12x zoom) than anything I could see when I was taking the photo. (That's it in the upper left next to the cell phone tower.)
The fire tower was built in 1935 by the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry as part of a network of towers where lookouts could watch for lightning-sparked forest fires. Nearly all of the towers have been replaced by newer technologies, but for some of us there remains a spare romance associated with the solitary vigil there. (Perhaps this was from reading Jack Kerouac's accounts of his time in towers out west.)
The tower is closed and the structure limited in what it can hold, but in 2006 Crow's Nest campers had an opportunity to climb it (two at a time) with a forester from Pennsylvania's Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
Here's a view from the top, looking north (Crow's Nest would be to the east and southeast but largely hidden by a ridge in between).
If you look very closely you might see a little bump on the far ridges that is the fire tower on Blue Mountain in Weiser State Forest between Reading and Pottsville, about 30 miles away. It's almost directly below a speck that is a hawk or vulture in the photo—and not a spot of dirt on your screen. With better optics and a lower-humidity day the tower would be more visible; this is how the network of towers provided complete coverage for spotting smoke over a very large area.
I'm just pleased that now I have a reference point to a known place and its relationship to where I am located.
