Red Hill Fire Observation Station - History - Preservation and Restoration

Preservation and Restoration

George Profous, a forester for what had by then become the state's Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) wrote in an early 1990s planning document that the aged, deteriorating tower should be dismantled and removed, not only due to its age but because, out of use, it was no longer permitted on state-owned Forest Preserve land, which New York's constitution requires be kept forever wild. Worried residents of Denning and the nearby hamlet of Claryville contacted the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, a regional advocacy group, to see what they could do to save it, a development Profous had been hoping for. DEC's guidelines governing the use of the Forest Preserve do allow the retention of otherwise incompatible structures within it if they enhance the public's understanding of the Forest Preserve, and many visitors and past observers wrote about how seeing the vastness of the Catskill wildlands at once helped them appreciate the importance of protecting it.

Within a few years, the campaign had gotten all five remaining Catskill fire towers listed on the Forest Fire Lookout Association's Historic Lookout Register and later the NRHP. State grants matched by money raised through local efforts such as bake sales, dances, fundraising drives, raffling of a quilt and T-shirt sales raised enough money to begin restoring the tower and cabin in 1998. Volunteers from the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference extended the path from the tower to the spring into a trail that would remain within state land down the mountain's never-logged northwestern slope to a new trailhead, avoiding the closed road. When all these efforts were complete, in 2000, the Red Hill tower became the first of the restored Catskill fire towers to be reopened to the public.