After it fell into disrepair in the 1990s and was recommended for removal by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), which had operated the tower, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.

Local enthusiasts were able to raise money, matched by DEC, to restore the tower and adjacent observer's cabin to serve as a museum, with volunteers in the cab on some weekends.

[3] But the Forest, Fish and Game Commission, DEC's predecessor, was hopelessly understaffed and could not even begin to focus on fire prevention.

In December of the latter year, James Whipple, head of the state's Forest, Fish and Game Commission (FFGC, a predecessor agency of DEC), began looking into what could be done.

Ring, wrote back to one of his inquiries highly recommending the use of strategically placed observation towers similar to the nine his state had already installed.

The following year, forest rangers built the first Hunter Mountain fire tower, a 40-foot (12.2 m) structure made from three trees, on level ground near the summit.

[1] In 1953, it and the cabin were moved one thousand feet (305 m) northwest along the ridge to the mountain's true summit, where it remains today (footings of the original tower are still visible at the trail junction where it stood).

[1] At an elevation of 4,040 feet (1,231 m) above sea level it is the highest fire tower in the state[7] and second-highest in the entire Northeast after 4,088-foot (1,246 m) Avery Peak on Maine's Mount Bigelow.

In the 1990s, a DEC forester's recommendation in a draft planning document that another of the remaining firetowers be dismantled and removed as a nonconforming structure triggered (as he had hoped) a movement to save them.

It is surrounded on all sides by tall balsam fir and red spruce, the dominant tree species in the boreal forest found at high elevations in the Catskills.

It added a hitching rack, drinking barrel and mounting chute at the summit near the tower, corresponding with similar facilities elsewhere along the trail and at the trailhead.

Along the way it picks up traffic from the ski area, which operates its summit chairlift in the summer months, via the Colonel's Chair Trail.