The Bramley Mountain Fire Tower Project
A CONVERSATION WITH ANN ROBERTI
by Noelle Martin
IN 1975, BRAMLEY MOUNTAIN’S FIRE TOWER WAS REMOVED. FIFTY YEARS AFTER BEING DECOMMISSIONED BY THE NYS DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION (DEC), THE FRIENDS OF BRAMLEY MOUNTAIN FIRE TOWER HAVE COME TOGETHER TO SEE THE ORIGINAL FIRE TOWER RECONSTRUCTED AND RETURNED TO THE TOP OF BRAMLEY MOUNTAIN.
Image courtesy of Ann Roberti
HERE IS WHAT BOARD PRESIDENT, ANN ROBERTI, HAD TO SAY ABOUT THE PROJECT
How did the Friends of Bramley Mountain Fire Tower get started?
AR The Catskill Mountain Club (CMC) built a hiking trail on Bramley Mountain, which has become very popular. When the owner of the fire tower, Tom Clark, learned about the hiking trail he reached out to us to say that he would like to see the fire tower (that has been in his barn since his father, Pete Clark, bought it in 1975) put back on Bramley Mountain. He thought because of the hiking trail we might be able to do it. So, he was the instigator of it all. And we, the Catskill Mountain Club, thought it would be really cool to get the fire tower put back up, too. The CMC, along with some residents of Delhi and Bovina, and your own Executive Director, formed a separate corporation, the Friends of Catskill Mountain Fire Tower, to concentrate on this project.
I read that the Fire Tower was decommissioned and taken down in the 1975. Why was that decided? And what do you think has changed, 45 years later, that it’s being reconstructed?
AR Fire towers went out of commission by the DEC. They stopped being used to look for fires, because they found that airplanes were traveling the region quite a bit and they could do the job rather than having individuals stationed at these different fire towers. When the DEC decommissioned all of the fire towers, they no longer had anyone manning them and watching for fires, so they were taken down. Pete Clark, a farmer in Delhi, NY at the time, thought it would be nice to have a fire tower on his property—and it was a bargain at $50—so he bought it. But his home owner’s insurer never really wanted him to put the tower up, so it has been sitting in a building on his property [now owned by his son, Tom] for all of these years. It’s the original fire tower. It was taken down with such care that all the pieces are marked and all the bolts are in buckets, although we won’t be using the original bolts; we’ll be getting new fasteners. Every piece of it is there—the map table is there—so that’s very exciting.
What’s the map table?
AR: The map table is a device that has maps on it and triangulating equipment that would help when two or three different tower observers would see a fire. They would map it with this map table, and then when you put them all together you could pinpoint the exact spot. Kind of like surveyor’s work
Why have you decided to lead this effort?
AR: Well, I got involved in trailblazing with the Catskill Mountain Club because I wanted to be able to somehow give back to the community and help economically. I was involved in a group that was against fracking and we wanted to not just be against things, we wanted to be able to contribute in a positive way. The idea of building trails was the first way that I thought I could finally do some contributing—this is an outgrowth of that. The trails that we’ve built are family friendly and near towns that bring a lot of people into the area. I think the fire tower will do even more of that. And it’s a fun project. It’s really an exciting kind of thing that will be very fun to work on.
It seems like you’re in the very early stages. How is progress going? When do you expect the tower to be completed?
AR We are. I’m hoping that it will be two years, possibly three, to get the fire tower up. That’s my goal. It certainly won’t be this year, but the first step (other than working toward Friends of the Bramley Mountain Fire Tower becoming a 503b nonprofit organization) is that we are going to do a complete inventory of the fire tower parts: lay them out and inspect them all, and then we can decide if there are any that need repair. From there, we’ll be able to come up with a much more accurate budget. This inventory check should be done by May of this year.
As you explained earlier, there is a pretty popular trail leading to the tower. Do you know how long the hike is altogether? And how tall the tower will be?
AR The tower is 80 ft tall (one of the tallest models of fire towers there is). The trail up to it is about 2 miles, so 4 miles round trip. And there is an easy trail that doesn’t go to the tower, Quarry Trail is the name of it, people can take it and get to this very interesting abandoned quarry and then if their friends want to zip up to this harder piece [the fire tower] and then meet them back, they can do that. But I’m also hoping that having a fire tower at the top will get some people to have a goal of working toward making it all the way up the mountain. This is something that we’ve found with the Andes Rail Trail: people started out just walking on the easy rail trail part, but having the Bullet Hole Spur, which is the harder part, got a lot of people thinking: "I’m going to work on being able to make it all the way up." Working toward a similar goal on Bramley Mountain is another one of the great things about this project.
How will the reconstruction of the Bramley Mountain Fire Tower positively impact the Catskills?
AR We hope this project will get some people to hike (who maybe haven’t hiked before) because they hear there is a fire tower and they want to go see it—encouraging people to try and do a bit of a harder hike than they’re used to.
Also, we think the fire tower will be a great economic benefit for the area, because it’ll get people coming here to hike that maybe wouldn’t have bothered to come all the way to our neck of the Catskills otherwise. From the top, you must be able to see basically the entire Catskill Region, right? The view must be incredible. AR Oh yeah, you can see quite a lot of the high peaks from up there. It’s beautiful. How can people get involved in helping with this effort? AR We have a donation page on the Catskill Mountain Club website catskillmountainclub.org/events/support-the-bramley-fire-tower-restoration-effort People can make tax deductible contributions and we’ll be doing a lot of fundraising and fundraising events, so people can look out for those, too.
-NM
