Lower Fletcher Lake

There is a tower above Dorset that was built to watch for fire. It stopped being useful in 1962, so they put up a taller one.

The original went up in 1922. Twenty five metres of steel with an enclosed ladder up the inside, and a towerman who sat at the top through the summer looking for smoke over the Lake of Bays country. Aircraft took the job over four decades later, and the tower should have come down.

People kept climbing it. The view from the deck runs a full circle, a hundred and forty two metres above the lake, and once the fire watching ended that was the only reason left to go up. So in 1967 the township replaced it with a taller tower, thirty metres, with a proper staircase, built for nothing but looking.

Around sixty thousand people a year now make the climb. On a good weekend in October, six hundred cars will come up the hill in a single day.