If the view from the Hickory Ridge Lookout Tower isn’t the most spectacular on the Hoosier National Forest’s 204,000 acres, it’s unquestionably the most expansive.
Indeed, the 360-degree view from the tower cabin is reminiscent of our airborne approach to the Amazonian port city of Leticia Colombia — a canopy of green as far as the eye can appreciate.
Situated 21 road miles southeast from Bloomington on the southern cusp of the Charles C. Deam Wilderness, Old Hickory rises 110 feet above an 890-foot ridge top, just south of Lake Monroe’s southeastern shore. The panoramic view from the top encompasses Monroe, Lawrence, Jackson and Brown Counties.
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Built in 1939 as a remote, fire-watching outpost, the Hickory Ridge tower is the only one of the original eight on Hoosier National land that still stands. These soaring steel structures were used to spot fires on the regenerating public forestlands from the 1930s to the 1970s. This Hoosier tower was among five-thousand-plus built by the US Forest Service nationwide.
The Hickory Ridge Lookout Tower’s 133 steps and 7-foot-square cabin were built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a brigade of unemployed local workers hired by the Roosevelt-era Works Progress Administration to reclaim a landscape that had been devastated by a half century of unsustainable logging and rural development.
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I’ve been photographing the Hickory Ridge Lookout Tower for a half century, and today its parking is seldom without vehicles. During peak seasons, it’s often full and overflowing onto Tower Ridge Road, where parking is prohibited.
The tower and four connecting backcountry trails attract adventurers from the nearby Indiana University campus, Southern Indiana, Indianapolis, and as far away as Chicago and St. Louis. Climbing the increasingly narrow steel steps a few dozen feet above a mature hardwood forest is indeed an adventure.
And the view is the most spectacular in the entire state of Indiana, in my experience at least.
