DUNGENESS — A North Olympic Peninsula tower is up against stiff winds — and competition: the Plum Island Life-Saving Station at Death’s Door Passage from Green Bay to Lake Michigan, and the New Canal Lighthouse, brought to its knees by Hurricane Katrina.
And those are just a couple of the dozen finalists in Jeld-Wen Windows’ Lighthouse Restoration Initiative, a contest for some $40,000 in lighthouse improvements.
So Barry Dove, general manager of the New Dungeness Light Station — the snow-white lighthouse near the tip of Dungeness Spit — is urging Peninsula residents to vote for his favorite finalist in Jeld-Wen’s online election.
“You can poke your finger through some of the window frames” in the Dungeness Lighthouse building, Dove said Monday.
The windows were put in 104 years ago, when the edifice, annually buffeted by 80 mph winds, was a mere 47 years old.
The New Dungeness Light Station Association celebrated the beacon’s 150th anniversary last summer and continued its efforts to restore and maintain the tower, which draws some 7,000 visitors a year.
That number might be higher were it not for the fact that most people must paddle across Dungeness Bay to reach the spit or take an 11-mile round trip stroll up and down the beach.
Only the keepers, who spend a week living in the adjacent house and giving free tower tours, ride in a four-wheel-drive vehicle out to the spit’s tip.
