Rustic Rooms With a View

Standing in the fire tower high above the city in Angeles Crest Forest, volunteer George Morey is no longer looking for smoke. He is looking for conversation.

“There is no place on earth I’d rather be,” said Morey, 59, a volunteer on the Vetter Mountain Lookout.

The fire tower, 5,908 feet above sea level, recently reopened after 17 years in mothballs. For half a century, more than 30 towers dotted the forest, with spotters keeping vigil for fires each summer until satellites, increased air patrols and smog made them obsolete.

Today, Vetter Mountain is getting a second wind as a site where visitors on weekends can learn about the 600,000-acre forest and the tower’s role in its story, thanks to volunteer docents such as Morey.

Morey, a trucker whose looks would blend into a Clint Eastwood western, began making the trek to lookouts four years ago. He is part of the U.S. Forest Service’s Lookout Host Program that is breathing new life into these dinosaurs on stilts.

After refurbishing by the Forest Service, lookouts on half a dozen peaks of the San Bernardino Forest reopened several years ago with volunteer hosts to greet weekend visitors. On Memorial Day weekend, the program moved into Los Angeles County with the reopening of Vetter Mountain Lookout.

Its lure, according to some of the 25 volunteers who have signed up, is simple.

“On a clear day, you can see from Catalina to Ojai and over to [Mt.] Baldy,” said Bruce Lemen, 49, a newly recruited volunteer.

“I came up here one weekend to just look around, and it grabbed me,” added Lemen, a property assets manager from La Canada Flintridge.

Volunteers are there primarily to welcome the public, but their training includes the use of a radio and ways to spot smoke.

“In the San Bernardino Forest we’ve called in eight ‘first reports’ on fires in recent years,” said Morey, who lives in the Lake Arrowhead area. “If we can call in a first report, we can make a real difference.”

Nestled above Charlton Flat just off the Angeles Crest Highway, Vetter can be found up a mile-long dirt trail, lined with Coulter pines and scattered with the trees’ giant pine cones. Known as “widow makers” because of the damage one can do if it falls on a hiker’s head, the cones are among the largest in the world and unique to the region.

The short hike makes the lookout one of most accessible 360-degree panoramas in Southern California. “Maximum view for minimum effort,” as historian and author John W. Robinson put it.

At the top, visitors find a one-room cabin on stilts with windows and a veranda on all sides. Inside is an instrument called an Osborne Fire Finder, surrounded by a bed, a map table and a stool with glass insulator feet to protect its occupant in a lightning storm.

Time has stood still in this tower. Little seems changed in 50 years, apart from the addition of a radio and cellular phone. There is no electricity.

Morey and his wife know every inch of the tower.

To get Vetter ready for its Memorial Day opening, the pair spent a week in May outfitting the place--and got marooned by a late-season snowstorm.

“Luckily, we brought the camper up with us,” he said.

On weekends when he is on duty, Morey often sleeps overnight in the lookout, dazzled by the stars until the sun sneaks over the mountaintop.

Some mornings he awakens to surprise breakfast guests. One morning in July, a black bear came up on the veranda, placed its paws on the window and peeked in at Morey.

“Maybe he was applying to be the new Smokey the Bear,” Morey said, pointing to a photograph he took of the bear and hung above the map table.

The map table was part of the original lookout built by the Civil Conservation Corps in 1935 and named after Victor P. Vetter, a former forest ranger.

During its recent reopening ceremonies, Ramona Merwin, 81, reminisced about her job during summers there, from 1955 to 1980, as a paid fire lookout. Her children, and then her grandchildren, came along.

“In May we’d pack everything--dishes, clothes, bedding, folding cots and food,” she told The Times in an interview a decade ago.

“All day you stood on your feet and watched for fires, and you learned to do chores at the same time.”

Atop Vetter there are few reminders of the hectic world below.

“Sometimes there are moments of pure silence,” said volunteer Kermit Eller, 70, a retired engineer from Glendale.

Despite the peace and the spectacular view, Morey said, his favorite part of the job is talking with visitors about the forest and its storied lookout towers.

“Their comments in the visitors register mean so much to those like me,” Morey said. “You meet a lot of different people here. Last week, we had a woman from Poland--she was amazed at the vastness of it all.”

As the volunteer program grows, officials hope to open the lookout on some weekdays. By next summer, officials hope to have restored another rundown lookout at Mt. South Hawkins, near Crystal Lake above Azusa.

A proposal to rent out a lookout at Slide Mountain as a weekend getaway is also being considered.

About 20 to 25 people visit the Vetter lookout when it is open, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays.