Tag: lookout tower

“It’s like when you’re home and you see a spider running across the carpet, and you see it because it doesn’t belong,” Arizona fire lookout Helen Roe says. “This is my carpet, these trees. I can see when something’s not right. I know this ridge like the back of my hand.”

The Arizona Republic has a lovely feature online profiling Roe and other fire lookouts in the state. The lookout tower she mans is 14×14 feet and includes a catwalk around the edge. The news feature is a great read.

On a clear day, the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff stretch across the western horizon. To the east, rolling waves of ponderosas reach toward Show Low. On a midsummer day, banks of clouds, not quite afternoon storms, drift across the sky.

The story notes that in theory, technology should render the human lookout obsolete, incorporating remote cameras, GPS units, and satellite feeds.

The Oregon Department of Forestry, however, re-opened a fire lookout near John Day, Oregon, this year — and they staffed it because the area is a lightning hotspot for central/eastern Oregon fires. The ODF is working on implementing a new “remote camera detection system”–  and that’s part of the reason for activating this summer the Ritter Butte Lookout, which has not been staffed for something like 20 years.

[Thanks, Dick Mangan]

The Missoulian has an article about what it is like to staff the Cyclone Peak lookout tower in the Flathead National Forest in northern Montana. Here is an excerpt:

Cyclone Peak is aptly named.

On this bald, unprotected mountaintop four miles south of Polebridge, the wind whips and churns from all directions.

When it does, the peak’s high-rise fire lookout sways.

“When it’s really windy, I don’t go out on the catwalk,” explained Halle Safier, who is working this summer as a fire watcher for the first time. “You get used to it, and really, it’s kind of exciting when it really blows because it gets really loud in the lookout, the wind whistles in my stovepipe and the place comes alive.”

Safier’s summer home and office in the Cyclone Peak lookout tower is perhaps the most breathtaking place in the world to live and work.

Supported by a giant wood scaffolding, this postage-stamp-sized lookout some 50 feet above the ground takes 65 steps of ladder-like climbing to reach and offers what is truly a bird’s-eye view of Montana’s greatest treasure.

Safier sees it all from her unique vantage 6,000 feet above sea level as she conducts her primary lookout duties: collecting weather data, tracking lightning storms, and scanning the endless slopes and horizons for smoke and fire.

“I never get tired of looking at it,” Safier said. “I feel so fortunate to be able to live up here in this comfy little house in the sky.”

The wind, a visit from an occasional eagle, and daily radio conversations with Kalispell Dispatch and five other fire lookouts stationed nearby in the park, keep Safier company during her mostly solitary 10-day shifts.

A 12-volt radio, tuned to National Public Radio, allows her to keep pace with news of the world beyond the glass hut and its covered catwalk.

To fill the days when the fire danger is low, Safier attends to a long list of maintenance projects.

This season’s priority is digging post holes and building a tie rail for the mule teams that help bring in supplies at the start of the summer and when it is time to board up the lookout for the winter.

The place is in need of a fresh coat of paint, and so Safier is tackling that project as well.

In this relatively wet summer, there have been few fires to report.

“When we are busy with fire, we are really busy,” Safier said. “You are always on the radio, the cell phone is ringing, and you are always updating the coordinates. It can get a little wild.”

The U.S. Geological Survey on their web site has a virtual 360-degree tour of the view from Cyclone Peak Lookout. The photos were taken with infrared film in 1935.

Thanks Dick

In the 1980’s there were about a half-dozen staffed fire lookout towers in or around the Cleveland National Forest in southern California. Now there are only two, and one of them is staffed by volunteers. The Press-Enterprise has an interesting article about the restoration and operation of some of these towers. Below is an excerpt, but read the whole article HERE.

With a spanking-new visitors book full of fresh, blank pages, the High Point Lookout fire tower in the Cleveland National Forest is beginning a new chapter in its nearly 75-year history.

After a painstaking restoration, the lookout is about to join nine other towers in area forests from which volunteers watch for smoke.

With the 2009 fire season ramping up, High Point just became the second staffed lookout in the Cleveland National Forest when volunteer fire-spotters began regular shifts in June.

The comeback of the High Point Lookout, which had sat vacant since 1992, is part of a larger resurgence of interest in saving and staffing historic fire lookouts.

More than 8,000 lookout towers once dotted the country.

A sort of early-warning system for remote areas, many were built in the 1930s for the U.S. Forest Service on mountains or other elevated spots where people could search for signs of fires.

Up in their perches and armed with binoculars, trained spotters can see a blaze as small as a campfire.

But budget cuts and technological advances led the U.S. government to abandon the lookouts in the 1970s.

While not all the technology has lived up to expectations, experts say, people who peer from the lookouts searching for smoke remain reliable.

Also, a series of major fires has led officials in California to seek every available means of stopping them.

“We’ve had some horrendous fires” in the region, said Pam Morey, a Southern California director for the national nonprofit Forest Fire Lookout Association. “I think it’s gone in a circle and we’re back to the (place) where we’re needed again.”