Historic Hot Springs fire lookout tower, piece of WNC history restored

Karen Chávez | The Citizen-Times

Show Caption Hide Caption Taking in the view at Rich Mountain watchtower Cleve Fox, district fire management officer for the Appalachian Ranger District of the Pisgah National Forest, recalls the Rich Mountain lookout tower

There were once 98 fire lookout towers in WNC, most built in the 1930s.

Rich Mountain Fire Tower near Hot Springs was built in 1932. It was staffed until the mid-90s.

Rich Mountain Fire Tower was badly destroyed, including a hole in the floor from a campfire.

HOT SPRINGS - On a piercingly cool, clear November Monday morning, Cleve Fox relived his first days nearly 30 years ago as a forest fire lookout at the Rich Mountain Fire Tower.

Now the district fire management officer for the Appalachian Ranger District of the Pisgah National Forest, Fox started his career in 1991 sitting atop the 3,670-foot tower, scanning the horizon for forest fires for hours on end, plotting coordinates with a map and string and radioing other fire lookouts.

"It was quiet," said Fox, who estimates he spotted about 20 fires a year. "That was before cell phones. We used radios and we read Westerns. You had to know a lot about the landscape."

The fire tower, which straddles the Cherokee National Forest in Tennessee and the Pisgah in Madison County, and is mere yards from the Appalachian Trail, was decommissioned in the late '90s as more efficient technology - airplanes and cell phones - came into use for spotting fires.

The tower remained, but without a caretaker, it fell victim to vandals and the vagaries of mountain weather, unfit and unsafe for anyone to climb.

But on Nov. 19, Fox returned with dozens of partners, supporters and U.S. senator representatives, to his stomping grounds at the ribbon cutting for the exquisitely refurbished, mostly weather- and vandal-proof fire tower. It was the culmination of years of work among private and government partners to restore a piece of Western North Carolina's firefighting history, as well as provide a place for people to wallow in the splendor of their public lands.

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The U.S. Forest Service, Appalachian Trail Conservancy, Forest Fire Lookout Association and Carolina Mountain Club joined forces to complete restoration of Rich Mountain, the latest in an effort to restore WNC’s historic fire lookout towers.

A love affair with fire towers

Peter Barr got the fireball-like energy to restore Rich Mountain rolling about two years ago. Barr, whose day job is trails coordinator with the land conservation nonprofit Conserving Carolina, is also coordinator of the Forest Fire Lookout Association N.C. Chapter, a national nonprofit that works to preserve, restore, and interpret historic fire towers.

Barr said he fell in love with fire towers after fearing for his life one day 15 years ago while climbing Shuckstack Fire Tower, which sits on the Appalachian Trail in the Smokies. It had fallen into dangerous disrepair.

“I was so scared, I climbed each stair on my butt with my hands and arms and legs shaking. I eventually made it to the top and luckily it didn’t fall apart on me. From the top of the tower I looked out and was absolutely blown away. It was one of those life-changing moments,” Barr said, which led to a career in land conservation.

While WNC is swimming in mountain peaks, many are forested, so that a day’s hike might lead to a view-less summit. The fire tower afforded sweeping scenery above the tree line.

It wasn’t just the view, but also the cultural heritage aspect of the tower, built in 1934, that blew him away.

“This was the view from somebody’s desk for their actual job,” Barr said. “How lonely it must have been, but to think of the stories they must have been able to tell and the wonders of nature they must have been able to see.”

He started researching fire towers, finding that there were once 98 in WNC, many built in the 1930s. More than half – 48 - have been removed, and 40 are still standing. Of those, only 28 have some form of public access, although with deteriorating conditions threatening safety, this number is always in threat of decline, he said.

His research led to publication of “Hiking North Carolina’s Fire Towers,” which he wrote to bring awareness to the history, recreation opportunities and need to rehabilitate WNC’s remaining fire towers.

Over the past decade, the FFLA’s NC chapter had been involved in eight other tower restorations, including Green Knob near Mount Mitchell and Fryingpan near Mount Pisgah, both off the Blue Ridge Parkway, as well as Wayah Bald in the Nantahala National Forest.

Rich Mountain Lookout Tower was built in 1932 by the U.S. Forest Service. The 14-by-14-foot live-in “cab,” sitting 30 feet off the ground, was staffed until the mid-90s, but wasn’t actually lived in since the 1970s. After that, forest rangers would commute for daily shifts and only occasionally spend a night.

The Appalachian Trail once crossed the summit, passing right under the fire tower, but was rerouted to a couple hundred yards to the east in the 1980s. It can still be accessed from the AT by a short side trail.

The tower was renovated in 1995, including replacement of the handrails and decking on the catwalk - the deck around the cab - but the windows were removed and boarded up.

The following two decades led to rotting of the roof, floor and 41 wooden stairs, saturation with graffiti and even a hole in the floor of the cab where someone had built a fire.

Rich Mountain fire tower was deemed unsafe and closed to the public in the fall of 2017.

An ‘innovative partnership’ leads to resounding success

On his quest to save Rich Mountain, Barr and the FFLA worked with Barry Jones, the engineering, heritage, recreation, lands and special uses staff office with the U.S. Forest Service, and the ATC and CMC to apply for funding from the Appalachian Trail Conservancy’s License Plate Grant Program.

They were awarded $8,500 - $5,000 from the Tennessee’s plate program and $3,500 from North Carolina’s – and the FFLA put up another $1,000.

Morgan Sommerville, ATC Southern Regional Director, based in Asheville, said it was fitting to have the fire tower renovated during the 50th anniversary of the National Trails System Act, which made the AT the first national scenic trail.

“The ATC seeks to preserve and manage the Appalachian Trail to ensure that its vast natural beauty and priceless cultural heritage can be shared and enjoyed for centuries to come,” Sommerville said.

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“Restoring the fire tower at Rich Mountain preserves an important component of the Appalachian Trail’s cultural heritage, while making it safe for hikers to climb to enjoy the surrounding natural beauty.”

“The FFLA was elated to facilitate this collection of partnerships among agencies and nonprofits to achieve success that honors the tower’s past and makes it accessible to so many visitors who will enjoy it in the future,” Barr said. “This partnership is a resounding success story.”

Funding from the FFLA and ATC leveraged an additional $101,158 from the U.S. Forest Service.

The project was a no-brainer, said Jones, who remembers hiking in to Green Knob Fire Tower as a child to bring lunch to his grandfather, who was a fire lookout there.

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“What an innovative partnership - a federal agency partners with nonprofits, coming together to restore a structure like this,” Jones said. “The manual would say find a partner and move it off federal land. But this landscape cannot be replicated. You can’t build this landscape and this view. We wanted to cherish this tower at this site.”

The “Cadillac version” of fire tower restoration began in the spring and was completed at the end of the summer with a full structural overhaul including new roofing, wooden cab walls and deck railings, lightning rods and grounding wiring, fresh paint, and installation of durable, vandal-proof metal-grate flooring and stairs, Barr said, “made to last forever.”

The windows were unboarded but do not contain glass, which can be difficult to maintain, Barr said. Video cameras are also installed on the cell tower nearby to keep an eye on the goings-on at the tower.

The Forest Service contracted Williams Construction Inc., from Robbinsville, for the restoration work. The Carolina Mountain Club, which maintains the 93-mile section of the Appalachian Trail that includes Rich Mountain, also constructed a log staircase leading to the base of the tower and performed tree work around its perimeter to preserve the scenic view.

“Fire towers formerly played an important role in safeguarding our forests and the surrounding communities,” said Richard Thornburgh, Appalachian District Ranger of the Pisgah National Forest.

“Now they can serve as outdoor recreation destinations by offering unsurpassed views of those natural lands that they used to protect. People can step back in time and imagine what it was like to be a fire lookout.”

Visitors can hike to the tower on the AT but also drive to it on gravel roads.

Mary Kelly, a volunteer with the Hot Springs Mountain Club, has been coming up to Rich Mountain and climbing the tower for decades.

She can point out any feature on the 360-degree horizon: “That’s Bluff Mountain, and that’s Max Patch. If it were covered in snow, you could see it real well,” Kelly said.

To the east she points out Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in the Eastern United States, and on a clear day, she said, you can see southeast all the way to the Biltmore House and the smoke rising from the power plant at Lake Julian.

The fire tower used to be “scary, sad and sketchy,” Kelly said. She noted that since the summer, people had already sprayed graffiti on the new cab, which has been painted over. But she said she was excited by the overall beauty of the renovated tower.

“This will be a great resource for the town of Hot Springs and for all the thousands of hikers who come through here each year on the Appalachian Trail.”

Want to visit Rich Mountain Lookout Tower?

It is about an hour's drive from Asheville. Take I-26 west to U.S. 25/70 to the gravel FS 467/Hurricane Gap Road for 4.6 miles to the gap. Hike the AT southbound 1.1 miles to the tower, gaining 730 feet of elevation. Or for a longer and more strenuous hike, start at Tanyard Gap on U.S. 25/70 (2.8 miles east of Hot Springs by road) and hike the AT northbound 2.6 mi. from Tanyard Gap to the Rich Mountain tower, gaining 1,430 feet.