The Aircraft Warning Service was, in practice, a national volunteer effort: ordinary people posted on hilltops, rooftops and headlands with binoculars, a telephone line and a set of aircraft silhouettes. Radar was young, coverage was thin, and the West Coast in 1942 genuinely did not know what might appear offshore. Thirteen such stations went up within the boundaries of what is now Olympic National Park. Pyramid's watchers held their post until June 1944, when the service was wound down and the whole apparatus of amateur sky-watching quietly dissolved. Nothing ever came. That is the point of the place, really - a structure built entirely out of uncertainty, staffed through two winters of Olympic weather on the chance that the uncertainty would resolve badly. Two of those Olympic stations survive today. The Pyramid Peak lookout is one; Dodger Point is the other. It joined the National Register of Historic Places on 13 July 2007.

Look down from the summit and the geology explains itself. A vast landslide scar runs across the slope below, and where it reaches the valley floor it has plugged the drainage entirely. Roughly eight thousand years ago that slide came down, choked Indian Creek, and cut the valley in two. On one side of the debris sits Lake Crescent, long and bent and startlingly deep; on the other, Lake Sutherland, with Indian Creek running on down toward the Elwha River. The S'Klallam and Quileute peoples tell of a fight between two groups that so angered Mount Storm King that the mountain broke off a piece of his own head and threw it down on the combatants, ending the battle and dividing the water. The slide is right there in front of you, the mountain is right there to the east, and the two accounts are describing the same afternoon. Cut off from the sea, the trout in Lake Crescent went their own way and became something found nowhere else - the Beardslee, among the largest landlocked rainbows anywhere in their native range.

For years this peak was Sugarloaf Mountain, a name people all over North America gave to any hill shaped like the cones of refined sugar sold in shops. In 1928 it became Pyramid, which is not a better name so much as a more geometric one. Either way the mountain earns it from below: from Barnes Point and the lawn at Lake Crescent Lodge, it is the sharp green wedge that closes off the view up the lake. Getting to the top takes about three and a half miles of trail and roughly 2,750 feet of climbing, beginning in dense forest and opening out as the grade steepens. Partway up, the path crosses the exposed face of a slide - a football-field width of loose ground where the tread narrows to a foot or two, with a long drop below and nothing much to hold. Hikers remember that stretch more clearly than the summit.

Storms here arrive from the west with nothing in their way. Fronts form over the Pacific, run northeast, and hit the Olympic wall, where the peaks force them upward until they let go of their moisture as rain or, in winter, as snow. It is the same mechanism that makes the western Olympics one of the wettest places in the contiguous United States, and it means the summit spends much of the year inside cloud. When a front passes and the air scours clean, the payoff is enormous: the whole crescent of the lake below, the Strait of Juan de Fuca beyond it, and far to the east across Puget Sound, the white cone of Mount Baker standing clear in the Cascades. The Pleistocene did the carving - glaciers advancing and retreating over and over, grinding the ridgelines into the shapes now visible. The watchers of 1942 had the best seat in the Olympics, and hoped to see nothing at all.