The Lookout
Mount Rainier is an active volcano in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State in the US. With a summit of 14,410 feet (4,390 m) it is the largest isolated peak in the lower United States, and on a clear day is easily seen from Seattle. It is the most prominent feature of the 369 square mile (957 square km) Mount Ranier National Park. The park is an extremely popular destination for tourists on the North American West Coast, attracting 1.6 million visitors a year.
Mount Rainier NP has 142 square miles of old-growth forest, and fires are always a concern. The National Park Service built several lookouts in the Park during the Great Depression, four of which remain. The lookout on Mount Fremont was built in 1933, and at 7150 feet is the highest in the park. The Mount Fremont Fire Lookout is a popular destination for hikers, who start at Sunrise and climb about 800 feet along a narrow 2.7 mile-long trail through meadows, across rocky ridges, and past frozen lakes.
If you are adventurous, see if you can locate the lookout from the air based on a description of its location. If you have some difficulty, you can turn on POIs and look for the POI titled “Mt Fremont Fire Lookout” hovering above the building. You can also choose this POI as your flight plan destination in the MSFS World Map.
For helicopter lovers!
For the truly adventurous, I have leveled an area near the lookout where you can attempt to land a helicopter. Look for the windsock near the end of the trail. The leveled area is fairly large, but since the building is on an exposed ridge, the winds can be tricky. I haven’t tried, but you might even be able to land an extreme STOL plane like the Zenith CH-701 up there. Let me know!
Notes
There are two other Fire Outlooks in the National Park with nearly identical buildings to the one on Mount Fremont (on Shriner and Tolmie Peaks). I will try to implement these in the near future. I will also try to build the fourth surviving outlook on Gobbler’s Knob, which has a different design but is quite beautiful as well.
To learn more about the fire lookouts around Mount Rainier, check out the web page https://visitrainier.com/fire-lookouts-of-mount-rainier/. There are also numerous videos on YouTube posted by hikers.
To install the scenery, merely unzip and place the folder titled “mulberrywing-fremont-lookout” in your community folder.
DC6Pilot
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smoothflyer
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smoothflyer
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FergusST_SDSims
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