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The Balsam Lake Mountain Fire Observation Station is located at the summit of the mountain of that name in the Town of Hardenburgh, New York, United States. It comprises a steel frame fire lookout tower, the observer's cabin and privy and the jeep road to the complex. Balsam Lake Mountain, the westernmost of the Catskill High Peaks, was the site of the first fire lookout tower in New York in 1887, when a nearby sportsmen's club built it to protect their lands below the mountain.〔 It was later taken over by the state, which built several towers culminating in the current one. The tower was manned until 1988. After being closed for much of the 1990s, the tower was proposed for demolition as one of five remaining on state-owned Forest Preserve land in the Catskill Park. Hikers and local residents rallied to save it, and after the state's Department of Environmental Conservation changed its mind, it was restored and reopened. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2001,〔 the highest-elevation property in Ulster County to be listed.〔The next two highest are the Red Hill and Mount Tremper fire towers, at and respectively.〕 ==Property== The nominated property includes a square area around the tower and the entire jeep road to the summit from Mill Brook Road between Balsam Lake Mountain and Dry Brook Ridge, now marked as a hiking trail. This gives it a total of of land, most of it owned by the state but some of it property of the descendants of Jay Gould, whose Furlow Lodge estate is in the area. The tower and road are considered contributing resources; three other buildings near the tower are related to it in function but are non-contributing.〔 The tower and other buildings are around a small clearing at the mountain's summit. On all sides are boreal forest consisting of thick balsam fir and red spruce. This is the westernmost large stand of this kind of forest in the Catskills as no peaks west of Balsam Lake rise above , the elevations where it is most commonly found.〔 The old road arrives from the east; a foot trail leaves the clearing to the south. Along much of its length the road is accompanied by old telephone poles and downed wire from the communication system that once served the tower. It follows red plastic markers down a winding course past a metal DEC gate at the boundary between public and private land to the northeast shoulder of the mountain at . There it joins and follows another old road, now with the blue markers of the Dry Brook Ridge Trail, down to where it crosses paved Mill Brook Road.〔 The tower itself is tall. It is a steel frame structure, anchored by bolts on surface plates into the exposed sedimentary bedrock at the summit, gradually sloping up to the enclosed cab at the top. Seven flights of steel stairs provide access from the ground.〔 Next to the tower, at the corner of the road and the summit clearing east of it, is the observer's cabin. It is a one-story batten-sided gable-roofed hut on a concrete foundation with a metal roof. Just inside the woods to the north is the wooden privy. In the summit clearing there is also a more contemporary wooden picnic table and, at the south end, the remains of an older foundation.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Balsam Lake Mountain Fire Observation Station」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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