Watchman Lookout

The Watchman is a lava flow older than the caldera, one of the high points on the west rim that survived when Mount Mazama collapsed about 7,700 years ago, and it stands at 8,013 feet directly above Wizard Island. It got its name in 1886, when William Steel's survey party used the summit as an observation station while measuring the depth of the lake.

The lookout on top went up in 1932, and it was unusual from the start. A fire lookout was a working building, a room of windows where an observer watched for smoke and radioed the dispatcher. This one was built to be a lookout and a trailside museum at once, with the observer's room above and exhibits on the park's geology and natural history for hikers below. The Park Service staffed it every fire season until 1974 and only now and then since. It has been refitted to look as it did in the 1930s, and it is on the National Register.

The trail leaves the Watchman Overlook on West Rim Drive, follows a stretch of the old rim road, then switchbacks up through mountain hemlock and whitebark pine, about 0.8 mile and 400 feet of climbing to the top. From the platform you look down into the small crater on Wizard Island's summit, which the roadside overlooks cannot quite show, and out to Mount Shasta and Mount Thielsen. Snow can cover the trail into July, and Rim Drive opens fully only in summer.