Utsikten Tower has stood on the moor for one full summer now. Its most regular visitors are not tourists but the two wardens who climb it every morning with binoculars and a notebook.
The brief from the park board was modest: a lookout for walkers, built from local timber, that would not spoil the skyline. It was only at the second site meeting that Ingrid Haugland, one of the park wardens, mentioned what she actually needed. Each June and July the wild reindeer herd crosses the plateau, and the wardens count it by eye. For years they had done it from a parked car on the county road, a kilometre too far away.
So the tower changed. We lifted the top platform two metres, to see over the rise to the east where the herd usually comes through. We gave it a deep, slatted screen on the north side, so a warden can stand still for an hour out of the wind without being seen against the sky. And we added a narrow bench and a shelf at elbow height, just wide enough for a notebook and a flask.
This summer the count was done from the tower for the first time. Ingrid tells us it was quicker, and she thinks more accurate, because the herd could be followed across the whole crossing rather than glimpsed at the road. Walkers have found the bench too. On a fine evening there are usually a few of them up there, talking quietly, looking for the same animals.
The pine has already begun to darken where the rain strikes it. By next summer it will sit even more quietly on the moor, which is what everyone wanted.
Written by Tobias Lund, landscape architect.
