Wakely Mountain Fire Tower

On Saturday, myself and eight others from SAOAC went up Wakely Mountain, (note, link says tower is 82 feet, it’s actually 70 feet), located in the Moose River Plains, to see the fire tower and helipad. The first portion of the hike is a fairly level, some uphills, hike through the woods for almost two miles.

At the trail split, ahead is an old beaver marsh.

This is where the trail gets to be “fun”. Lots of rocks and slabs to get up to the summit.

We found a survey bolt halfway up the mountain, just sitting in the middle of the trail

And a tree that was cut to make a nice seat if you need a rest

It was a cloudy/foggy day though, so views were not that great

Eventually almost to the summit, we came across the recently rebuilt helipad.

Soon after, we arrived at the summit, with the tower, observers cabin, and picnic table

The tower originally did not have stairs, just a ladder running up the outside for the observer to get up and down, here in this pic you can see a portion of it.

You do still need to climb the last six feet or so of the old ladder to get into the cab.

Here’s the view looking down to the others on the ground

On the way back down we stopped at the helipad again, since one person hiked right by it. While there, the fog started lifting enough to start to see some distance, like the fire tower that we couldn’t see earlier from there.

Once back down to the trail split, one person in the group knew of an old camp in the woods by the beaver marsh, so we hiked over to check it out

One last look at the Beaver marsh and we headed back to the trailhead.

Another one off the list, I’m at 20 of the 29 for the Fire Tower Challenge, down to the single digits.

Specs:

• 5.69 miles
• 1741 feet elevation change
• 4 hours 47 minutes

To see all my pictures from that day, click here.