As the new year began, local headlines spread word of a new, offbeat contest. The State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) announced a challenge that would remain in effect throughout 2024: Anyone who could document that they’d hiked to the top of all six of the DEC’s Catskill fire towers and, preferably, submit the best photo from those experiences, would win the prize.
Contestants would have to include the newest tower, recently completed in Mt. Tremper at the Maurice Hinchey Visitors’ Center on Route 28. TçMany of us might immediately think, “Count me in!” But relatively few mid-Hudson residents know of a secret seventh tower that lurks outside the DEC’s awareness. This one has a little-known history that perfectly meshes with our region’s magical periodic crusades carried out by solitary oddballs and wizards — like Opus 40, built by the late Harvey Fite.
This time the protagonist is Barry Knight, a true native who graduated from Onteora High School before working for IBM and being a professional photographer. His secret passion, as one might have already guessed, is local towers.
Restoration of five Catskills fire towers had already begun when he joined the team of unofficial guides who’d take turns “manning” the Overlook Mountain turret just outside Woodstock. The small cabins atop such towers are no longer continuously staffed by fire-spotters, but by volunteer interpreters who remain on duty weekends and holidays from June through October to welcome hikers and answer visitors’ questions. The warm months bring a steady stream of visitors, who are welcome to ascend the towers free of charge.
What changed Knight’s life, he now recounts, was a day at that Overlook Mountain site when a fellow volunteer told him that there are many abandoned and even collapsed towers here and there throughout the Catskills and Adirondacks. “I want one!” he remembers thinking.
That lets us fast-forward the story to 2002, when he learned of a man named Al Moulin of Esperance, whose property just outside the Adirondacks had a huge, rusting pile of girders, stair treads and metal accessories: the sad remains of a once-majestic seven-story Adirondack lookout tower. After an excitedly arranged meeting, and after surveying the field of myriad steel parts covered by thick grass, Knight told the man about his dreams of reconstructing it on his own land (he still lived in the same home he’d been raised in since 1955, on the south side of the Ashokan Reservoir) and asked Moulin what price he had in mind for all this steel. Moulin’s reply: “My wife says, ‘Just get it out of here!’”
But before having the tons of parts trucked down to Ulster County, Knight recalls repeatedly visiting the field and trying to make sense of everything. There were steel pieces of many different lengths, gauges and shapes in various states of condition. He dug more pieces out of the mud, and then found a muddy mound composed of countless bolts, nuts and washers. Originally, he was told, these were contained in white buckets and tarp-covered, but someone apparently needed the buckets and simply spilled the contents into a pile. He says it required eight of his own buckets to gather and transport this “soup” of mud and metal pieces to its future home in West Hurley.
What was missing was any kind of plan, drawing or photo of what the completed tower was supposed to look like. Even the bolts and nuts came in seven different sizes, indicating that they must be necessary in various specific locations as the tower was constructed.
Of course, most of the metal parts, from huge girders down to washers, were covered with mud and rust. And after Knight located the ideal spot for the tower — a hilly ridge atop a cliff face on one of the 15 acres of his property, far from any source of electricity — he realized the entire project would have to be performed without the benefit of any power tools. So, he got to work using a wire brush to scrape the dirt and rust out of each thread of every nut and bolt.
After making eight trips to the original tower site and bringing back trunkfuls of steel parts — heavy enough that the car’s headlights had an upward slant — he started transporting the stacks of stair treads, made weighty by their 1940s-era preservative.
He recalls that throughout all these Adirondack commuter trips in 2003 lurked the question of “How, not if, was I going to put all of this back together again?” He obtained a copy of Basic Steel Tower Plans of 1937, which revealed the correct dimensions between the four massive cement piers he needed to drill and anchor to support the structure.
Then came months of elbow grease, hand-cleaning and wire-brushing all the pieces to remove years of rust and white oxidation, and then coating each piece with mineral spirits, then etching primer, then aluminum weatherproofing paint. After repeating this process 300 times, Barry located a tower west of Watkins Glen that was actually a twin of his own, and spent hours climbing it and making sketches and taking photos of all the important connection points.
At this juncture I’ll spare you, Dear Reader, the countless details, travails and months of solitary labor that carry the story to roughly its one-third point: the completion of the first two tower stages. It was then that Knight had a fateful conversation with his friend Bob Berman (who happens to be me, your writer). Knight believed that the town would never officially approve a 44-foot-tall tower, eight feet beyond the highest allowable building in the code. Meanwhile, Berman strenuously counter-argued that Knight would never successfully keep a 4 ½-story tower secret from local authorities, would be condemned to live in fear of discovery for the rest of his life and simply had to make it a legal structure. So, Knight reluctantly conferred with the building inspector, attended each monthly meeting of the zoning board of appeals and planning board and apologized abjectly for having already built it to its current level without any permit. Still, at each monthly meeting the boards required ever more information.
By the fall of 2005, construction resumed — now fully legally. Finally, he built the open-air viewing platform 44 feet in the air, with a 360-degree sweep-around view of the entire Ashokan Reservoir, many of the most famous mountains of the Catskills and even direct views that ranged from Mohonk Mountain House to the south to Olana and the Rip Van Winkle Bridge 35 miles to the north. The lofty platform became one of our region’s most breathtaking vantagepoints.
Want to see it for yourself, and experience the view from 4 ½ stories above the ridge overlooking the Reservoir? And meet this remarkable man? Barry Knight won’t charge a dime. Just call for a reservation at 845-331-1214, bring a camera and augment the DEC’s 2024 challenge by ascending our region’s little-known seventh tower!
Join the family! 
