Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

DEADWOOD LOOKOUT EXTERIOR, COURTESY NATIONAL FOREST SERVICE

The History of Fire Lookouts

Bertha Hill, 30 miles northeast of Orofino, was named by some college boys working for the Clearwater Timber Protective Association. The rounded mountain reminded them of a girl they knew in Moscow in the way the Tetons reminded French trappers of certain women they knew.

The hill might better be named Mable Mountain and not for a sophomoric anatomical joke. Mable Gray spent many hours on that mountain in 1902, sitting on a tree limb looking for smoke. For her vigilance, Gray is remembered as the first fire lookout working strictly to protect a forest in the Western states.

Mable Gray’s days started early, making breakfast for the timber camp and cleaning up the dishes. If thunderstorms had rolled in overnight, Mable cleaned up quickly, hopped on a pony, and rode to the top of Bertha Mountain. It wasn’t enough for her just to stand there gazing out over the million-acre Clearwater-Potlatch private forest looking for smoke. She’d tie up her horse and climb a crude ladder—two rough-cut poles with severed limbs nailed on them—to the beckoning branch of a hemlock snag 12 or 15 feet up. She sat in a makeshift seat on that limb for hours, protecting the company’s investment. If she spotted smoke, Mable scrambled down the ladder and back onto the horse to alert the crew to the fire.

Mable Gray got a little help the first time she climbed the snag where she perched on top of Bertha Hill.

Courtesy of the University of Idaho Potlatch Lumber Company Digital Collection.

Mable’s perch in that tree is long gone today, but there’s a fire lookout on Bertha Mountain, one of about 177 still operating in Idaho today. Close to 1,000 lookouts have dotted the state since that first crude perch. Most were eventually abandoned,with aerial and satellite imagery largely taking the place of on-the-ground spotters.

The U.S. Forest Service, founded in 1905, saw the wisdom of fire spotters early on. If a crew could reach a fire while it was still small, they stood a better chance of putting it out. The Forest Service unofficial firefighting motto became, “Spot Em Quick, and Hit Em Fast.”

Just spotting a fire wasn’t enough. A spotter needed to provide an accurate location to send crews. So William Osborne, a Forest Service employee, invented the Osborne Firefinder in 1915. It’s a circular table overlaid with a topographic map of the area fitted with moveable sights an operator looks through to pinpoint smoke. A spotter lines up the sights to get a horizontal reading in degrees and minutes and uses an attached tape to estimate the miles between the smoke and the lookout. You couldn’t use a sophisticated instrument like that while sitting in the crook of a tree as Mable Gray did. Lookout towers grew more complex and substantial as years went by.

DEADWOOD LOOKOUT INTERIOR

COURTESY NATIONAL FOREST SERVICE

In 1929 the Forest Service began using a design called the L-2, first implemented on Lookout Mountain above Priest Lake’s Cavanaugh Bay. The standardized model was a 12 x 14-foot building complete with framed glass. There was a sleeping and living area on the first floor. The spotter who worked in a lookout did their fire spotting from a cupola above. These structures cost only $500 to build. The L-2s started popping up on mountains and on metal towers all over the West. Some 5,000 lookouts of various designs were active in their day.

Spending days alone in a tall, windowed contraption with a 360-degree view of nature seems like a dream job for writers. So thought Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Norman Maclean, and Edward Abbey, all of whom served as fire spotters.

If a bit of solitude appeals to the writer in you, check with the Forest Service to find out what spotter jobs are available. Or try it for a weekend. You can rent some old lookouts in Idaho. Stay in the tower at the self-referential Lookout Butte lookout near Riggins for $40 a night. If mountaintops appeal to you, but you’d rather not perch on those spindly legs, try the Deadwood Lookout recreational cabin near Garden Valley, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1934. That will run you about $55 a night. Release your inner Mable Gray and find a rental at recreation.gov.