The ASOS phone doesn't seem to be connected yet though. Just keeps ringing.

http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2016/03/s ... -back.html

Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Stampede Pass Weather Station is Back!
There was delightful and important news today: Stampede Pass weather station in the central Washington Cascades is back online after being unavailable for much of the past few years.

Sweet!. Only reporting station for weather on the top of the Cascades. Critical planning element for E-W travel over those big white bumps in the road.

Ya, I still look at it, but largely superseded by highway webcams at Snoqualmie and Stevens.

One morning trying to punch through the Cascades I bounced off every pass like a fly on a window. The wx report for Stampede and Snoqualmie was blotto but changeable. I tried one last time through the Howard Hanson reservoir - Green River and at Lester when I came up to the pass I could see the powerlines going up into the murk where the weather station is. Got through by going south one more valley and popping out at Easton.

Here's the route http://www.lepore.ca/aerobatics/stamp6.pdf

Here's the link to the past 24 hrours observations from Stampede Pass (KSMP). http://raws.wrh.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/roman/ ... P&time=GMT

I used to fly my Aeronca L-3 from Seattle over the mountains to Ephrata every weekend to fly gliders. I usually stopped at Ellensburg on the way home mostly to hit on a cute blonde counter girl and,oh yea, get gas. One day there were a lot of people milling around the FBO. Turned out the AWOS station at Stampede was showing very low IFR and then an ob of open VFR and then the next ob of IFR. After 3 hours of watching it change abruptly every 15 minutes, I went up to take a look and sure enough it was wide open VFR with one little cloud hanging right over the station. All of those people waiting got hotel rooms that night thinking the pass was socked in. I heard that the station used to be manned.....

Yes, the weather station was manned and there was a Forest service Lookout tower that was also manned. The only time time I was ever up there was the summer of 1970. The Weather people lived in a house and the Forest Service Lookout lived in the tower.

The Forest Service had a contract with Olympic Helicopters for a couple Hughes 500s they used as helitack ships. One of the pilots was also in the Washington National Guard Chinook unit. He lifted the Lookout tower and flew it to a conservation school over on the west side somewhere. I think it is still there. Here's a link to some photos http://www.willhiteweb.com/hiking/cle_e ... ut_194.htm

The old panoramic photos from the lookout are interesting. They were taken in 1934 with a Transit camera set on the roof of the lookout. It rotated 360 degrees. The compass azimuth is at the top of the photos and the vertical angle on the sides. There would be a set of photos at the lookout with the names of landmarks on them for the lookout to reference. Another set was in the fire office at the Ranger station. When the lookout spotted a fire he or she...mostly she back then...would crank up the ranger station on the phone and give the azimuth and vertical angle to the fire along with other information. The dispatcher had a clear plastic templet with the vertical angles and azimuths on it that they placed on the photo. A small red dot on the templet showed where the fire was so the dispatcher could see the same location on the photo that the lookout was looking at through the Osborn fire finder.

By the way, the ASOS phone is working now. It sounds like it's talking through a tunnel though. 360-886-2758.

More Stampede trivia and history.
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2016/04/6 ... -toes.html