So I went to Bigelow on Tuesday. Great Mountain! It looks like the firetower was destroyed. I'm guessing it was recent? There was still blown out glass around. It looks like a bomb hit it. I'm thinking lightning? As far as I knew it was still standing recently, or am I wrong? Curious to know what happened to it.

I'll share some more pictures later, perhaps I'll write a TR.

Back on April 15, the Maine Forest Service burned the tower. One of the reasons was ongoing vandalism, I guess they wanted to beat them to it.

Really? That's interesting. I would have figured they would have done a better cleanup job. There's still glass and boards lying around. They should just remove the whole darn thing now. It looks terrible. Maybe now that the weather is good, they can get back up there and fix things up. There's really no need for the "firetower." It wasn't that tall anyway, and the summit has great views.

I hate to see the old fire towers going away. In the west, at least some of them are maintained as rental units for hikers and climbers.

The one on Mount Carleton in New Brunswick was horribly vandalized when I was there last year. What's the deal anyway? Sometimes I find it a pain to get my butt out of bed in the morning to go for a run and these people are climbing up mountains to find some fresh vandal territory? I think they need some redirection for that excess energy lol.

NW wrote:The one on Mount Carleton in New Brunswick was horribly vandalized when I was there last year. What's the deal anyway? Sometimes I find it a pain to get my butt out of bed in the morning to go for a run and these people are climbing up mountains to find some fresh vandal territory? I think they need some redirection for that excess energy lol.

Here in the South, the lookouts that are vandalized are generally the ones closest to roads. Most of the vandals whose work I've seen don't like to expend much energy hiking. If they can walk up a brief trail they'll do their dirty work. But the lookouts that are more than two miles or so from a road rarely suffer vandalism down here. Just neglect.

It's to bad that happens, both the neglect and vandalism. It makes it more interesting if you have kids along for there to be a bit of a historical story to go along with the hiking. Gives them something to think about instead of "are we there yet?". We didn't stay inside the tower at the top of Carleton long when we went there, I didn't want my kids to have to much time to try to read and learn any....uh... fancy new words....