A STRANGE HOME

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 May 1938, Page 5

A STRANGE HOME

BUILT OVER HIGH CLIFF. The strangest and most dangerous home in the world is surely that of Mrs Catherine. Eastwood, of East Washington, U.S.A. Mrs Eastwood’s husband is employed by the Forest Service as a look-out, and in this capacity he spends the summer months of the year in a look-out station on Three Fingers, one of the peaks of the Cascade Range. With him goes Mrs Eastwood. The lookout station is erected on a flat surface left when the Forest Service dynamited off the topmost peak. It has only one room, and all four walls consist mainly of glass (so that fires in the far-flung forests below can be quickly observed), with huge overhanging eaves. The south wall is met by a drop of hundreds of feet, and the north side actually hangs over a sheer drop of 1000 feet. The front yard is a 4ft ledge meeting the slope up which climbers ascend, while the backyard, a few yards square, has a foot-high railing to shelter it from a fall of half a mile.

The entire house is held down by cables, otherwise it would blow away in the high winds. Even so, the occupants can feel their homes shifting when the gales are strong. Visitors are an extremely rare event, though occasionally a mountain climber has called in.

On very clear days Mrs Eastwood has seen mountain-tops in British Columbia, nearly 200 miles away; and to the west she has sighted the Pacific Ocean rolling beyond Vancouver Island, a distance of 150 miles!