Fire Island National Seashore: West End Wherigo Cache
Fire Island National Seashore: West End
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(micro)
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9/8/2023: Re-enabled the cache after the lighthouse re-opened. Final coordinates are visible in the Waypoints section, in case there are issues.
Today, when visitors look east from the top of the Fire Island
Lighthouse at the area west of Kismet, they see acres of low pines
and brush, a single inhabited building, and a handful of small,
abandoned service buildings. It looks barren, undeveloped,
and uninteresting.
However, if you would have climbed the 150+ year old lighthouse
during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the landscape would have
looked much different. Depending upon when you visited, you
would have seen a large hotel that could accommodate more than 500
guests, or perhaps the eight-story Western Union Telegraph tower,
or several radio towers, nearly twice as tall as the lighthouse
itself. You would have seen activity, you would have seen
hundreds of people vacationing, sitting outside enjoying afternoon
tea watching the steamboats dropping off visitors, or playing
tennis at the hotel courts. And if your spyglass was powerful
enough, you could have seen people whose faces are still
recognizable today. People like Herman Melville, Horace
Greeley, John Jacob Astor, or perhaps even one of the three United
States presidents who visited that thriving area beneath you that
today stands desolate, austere and unassuming.
This Wherigo will tour those areas which once served as a popular
summer resort to New York’s wealthier residents, but today
are deserted. It is a tour of what once was.
You’ll visit the former sites of the Surf Hotel, the Western
Union Telegraph tower, Camp Cheerful, a camp built for
disabled boys living in New York City, and the site of New
York’s first state park on Long Island, Fire Island State
Park. You’ll also see where part of the movie Men in
Black II was filmed, and learn why the trees in the area
don’t grow very tall. If you’re interested in NGS
benchmarks, this tour offers a couple of those as well, including a
nail-head benchmark placed in 1865, if you choose to climb the
lighthouse.
This Wherigo tour will follow part of the National Park
Service’s Fire Island Trail Guide. The entire NPS tour
consists of 33 stations along a 3-mile path surrounding the
lighthouse, but this Wherigo will only cover some of the stations
in a 2½ mile round-trip walk. The station markers along the
trail, some of which are used as reference points for many of the
cartridge’s zones, were placed by Z. S. Brown as part of an
Eagle Scout project.
Download the cartridge
here.
Fees:
Visitors will need to park at Robert Moses State Park, Field 5,
which requires the standard NY State Parks entrance fee, currently
$8. The Empire State Passport is accepted.
This Wherigo will bring cachers to the base of the Fire Island
Lighthouse, but climbing the lighthouse is not required to
complete the Wherigo. The fee to climb the lighthouse is
currently $6.
Cachers may purchase the National Parks Service Fire Island Trail
Guide upon which this tour is based, however this is also not
required. The cost of the trail guide is $1 and is available
in the lighthouse gift shop.
Resources:
Information contained in the cartridge came from the following
sources:
National Park Service Fire Island Trail Guide
Fire
Island’s Surf
Hotel by Harry W. Havemeyer
published by Amereon House ISBN 0-8488-3237-X
Additional Hints
(No hints available.)