The Pyramid Peak lookout is not an impressive structure by any standard of architecture. It is a single-story frame shed, 13 by 16 feet, clad in wood shingles with a simple pitched roof covered in wood shakes. A small woodshed stands just to the north. The window openings on each side are unglazed, left permanently open to the mountain weather so that spotters could scan the sky without obstruction. There is nothing elegant about it. The Army needed eyes on the approaches to the Olympic Peninsula, and this shed provided them. Joe and Rena Shurnick, husband and wife, built it with their own hands using materials the Army supplied, working through the autumn rains on an exposed mountainside above one of the deepest lakes in Washington state.

The Aircraft Warning Service operated from stations like this one across the Pacific Coast, staffing them with volunteers and government employees who spent long hours scanning the sky with binoculars and reporting any aircraft sightings by telephone. Pyramid Peak offered a commanding view of the surrounding valleys, the lake below, and the approaches from the Pacific. Japanese aircraft never appeared over the Olympic Peninsula. By June 1944, with the threat of attack on the continental United States effectively eliminated, the AWS was abandoned. The thirteen stations within Olympic National Park were left to weather and time. Most were dismantled or collapsed. Pyramid Peak and the Dodger Point Fire Lookout are the only two that survive, quiet monuments to a brief period when Americans genuinely feared bombing raids on their own forests.

The Pyramid Peak lookout was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 13, 2007, recognized as a rare surviving example of the wartime Aircraft Warning Service infrastructure. Its significance lies not in what happened there, since no enemy aircraft were ever spotted, but in what it represents: the reach of World War II anxiety into the most remote corners of America. That the Army felt it necessary to post watchers on a mountainside in Olympic National Park, overlooking a glacial lake 17 miles from the nearest town, speaks to the scope of fear that followed Pearl Harbor. The lookout's survival is itself improbable. Built hastily of simple materials for a purpose that lasted less than two years, it has endured more than eight decades of Pacific Northwest rain, wind, and snow, outlasting every expectation its builders could have had for it.