This huge log structure with notched corners has a side-gable roof that extends low over a front porch and an open-rafter interior hovering over a massive stone fireplace. It is all that materialized from numerous plans to erect a shrine and pilgrimage center to commercialize the Mount of the Holy Cross. President Herbert Hoover declared the mountain a national monument in 1929, but in 1950 it was demoted to become again part of the White River National Forest. Notch-Top Mountain offers the best view of Holy Cross, a 13,976-foot granite peak with a cross-shaped crevasse immortalized by photographer William Henry Jackson, painter Thomas Moran, and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “There is a mountain in the distant west / That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines / Reveals a cross of snow upon its side.…”