The Hiker's Hut Backstory
Trail shelters for the benefit of hikers are common enough, but seldom do you find one as protective as the welded metal “igloo” near the summit of West Tiger #1. But why is this “Hiker’s Hut” such an impenetrable fortress? Well, some clues to its former life are readily apparent – two unused antenna masts right next to the dome and a major antenna farm a short distance away.
The West Tiger Mountain Hiker’s Hut (2017). Photo by Tom Anderson.
The local lore is that this particular enclosure housed a radio repeater station operated by a small commercial enterprise serving radio dispatch communications in the Seattle metropolitan area, and when it ceased to be used for that purpose, it was (eventually) repurposed as the Hiker’s Hut (sometime in the 1980s).
But what’s the origin story of such a peculiar shelter? It looks like it has an interesting past prior to its life as a radio equipment enclosure. Indeed, its first role was to protect guns on the decks of navy ships being mothballed post World War II. After the war, the US Navy found itself with more ships than it needed but wanted to store them for future use in case the need arose (human proclivities being such as they are). The process was referred to as “mothballing,” and for deck-mounted equipment like anti-aircraft guns, these little domes were invented. Here is an example of these domes in use on a mothballed US Navy ship:
Hundreds of ships were mothballed in the post-WWII era. A few were reactivated, but most awaited their eventual demise in the scrapyard during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The salvage companies that performed that work would sell what they could, where they could. Metallic items were generally sold for their melt value, but salvagers found a market for the domes in the radio industry as mountain-top equipment shelters. The “Hiker’s Hut” is one such instance and has at least three siblings on West Tiger #1 alone. Here is a photo of one still in use by AccelNet Inc. on the east end of the West Tiger #1 antenna complex:
Another domed hut on West Tiger Mountain still in use as a radio equipment shelter.
Maybe some day it will be turned into a bed-and-breakfast!
You can learn more about these little domes and the history of the mothballing of the post-WWII US Navy fleet here:
https://wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com/2016/03/27/mothballing-the-us-navy-after-wwii-pt-2/