Out here in Cascadia, we have a lot of fire lookouts. These were manned stations built on high ridges and mountain peaks to watch for forest fires. Because of the remote locations, at least in the western states, it wasn't possible to have daily shift changes, so the crews simply lived at the stations. The lockouts were equipped with special fire spotting equipment, such as the Osborne Fire Finder, as shown in Image 1. Nowadays most of the lookouts are no longer in existence, and those that are, many are no longer active.
According to
www.firetower.org:
At one time there were 8,000+ fire lookouts in 49 states according to the national inventory completed by FFLA and partners in cooperation with the U.S. Forest Service. State listings are posted on the "Towers Page" at.ffla.org. The only state without a fire lookout is Kansas, and that will soon change with the future construction of a fire tower on the Cimmaron National Grassland. Today fewer than 2,000 lookouts remain and FFLA's goal is to recognize, help maintain and restore as many as possible. Currently there are nearly 1000 lookouts registered on the National Historic Lookout Register, and most are received some kind of maintenance and about 500 are staffed by paid observers or volunteers.
Image 1 shows a view from a lookout in North Cascades National Park, a little known area of high mountains and forest, still largely wilderness despite the proximity of major cities along nearby Puget Sound.
Image 2: Helen Dowe at Devil's Head Fire Lookout,
showing Osborne Fire Finder. 1919. FHS
The key to successful fire observation was the pinpointing of the origin of smoke. Each lookout was designed around a fire spotting apparatus which was somewhat like a range finder. To permit 360 degree observation using the apparatus, the main observation deck of the lookout (called the "cab") was designed with large windows on all sides, and, typically, a wraparound observation deck outside of the cab.
The most famous of the fire spotting devices was invented by William Bushnell Osborne (1888-1955), a graduate Williams College with a master's degree in forestry from Yale. Here's a video demonstration in case you ever need to operate an Osborne fire finder. Wikipedia has a good description of how it worked:
The device is used by moving the sights until the observer can peek through the nearer sighting hole and view the cross hairs in the further sight aligned with the fire. The fire lookout notes the degrees on the graduated ring beneath the sight. The original Fire Finder was capable of a crude estimate of elevation based upon the level and elevation of the table, calculating distance and rough position of the fire by reference to any distinctive terrain features and by use of the scale shown on the map.
However, in actual practice, fire distance and location were normally established using two or more Fire Finder-equipped towers, using the intersection method to fix the precise location of the fire. Dispatchers at a central facility used a compass rose to mark lines of position from each reporting tower onto a large map to quickly find where the reported bearings intersect.
Osborne working first in Bangor, Maine and then in Oregon for the Forest Service, instituted the construction of the first fire lookout in 1911. Of course a lookout was not of much use without the ability to dispatch firefighters to the fire vicinity, and Osborne also worked to develop the first such system for forest fires in 1913. Although not widely known today, Osborne was a dedicated public servant who worked for 44 years for the Forest Service and was a key person in developing its forest fire fighting capability. (Here's a video on Osborne which I'd recommend watching except for the fact that the narrator doesn't know how to pronounce "Oregon.")
In the 1930s, many lookout towers were built by the CCCs, and in 1944, no doubt as a result of wartime conditions, women began to be regularly stationed as tower crew. Over the years a different philosophy of forest fire management has lessened the perceived urgency of fire detection. From buckrock.org:
During the 1960’s and 1970’s most fire lookouts and their dedicated watchers were phased out. With increased emphasis on using airplanes and helicopters for fire detection and suppression, a "let-burn" policy in many wilderness areas and a growing number of visitors and residents in the forests, attitudes towards staffing lookouts have changed. Fire lookouts across the country face extinction. Today there are only a few hundred in operation. Once considered a proud symbol of our nation’s conservation heritage, fire lookouts are a fading legacy.
Firetower.org has an easily accessed database of reported past lookout locations, which can be searched broken down by states, with about 20 states in the system so far. There's also an interactive map feature. In Oregon, for example, 499 past fire lookouts are reported in the database. Another good website is maintained by the National Historic Lookout Historic Register. This site has a good interactive map-linked database of existing lookout locations, and it seems to include all the existing lookouts in the United States. This is a good place to start if you're interested in visiting a fire lookout near you.
Image 3: Guy R. Emlet, Senior Forest Guard, at Baker
Butte Lookout Tower. Coconino National Forest, Arizona,
June 1939. FHS
The website
www.foresthistory.org includes a poem written back in 1948, a fire watcher in the Colville National Forest in honor of the Forest Service cuisine:
I like FS biscuits;
think they're mighty fine.
One rolled off the table
and killed a pal of mine.
I like FS coffee;
think it's mighty fine.
Good for cuts and bruises
just like iodine.
I like FS corned beef;
it really is okay.
I fed it to the squirrels;
funerals are today.
Much like the lighthouses, the fire lookouts have a hard core group of dedicated fans. Here's a
2009 report from CBS news which features a man who worked in a lookout as a youth and many years later had a small tower reconstructed in his back yard.
If you fancy yourself to be a bit of a lookout enthusiast, it's not quite necessary to go to such an extreme.
You can recreate a little slice of the lookout out life around your own stately pleasure dome with the handy Region 4 (Idaho) Lookout Cookbook (.PDF). A sample recipe suggestion:
purchase a half or a whole mutton from sheepherders in the vicinity of your station. To keep, hang up in a tree or some other high point at night, wrapped in canvas, or put in a burlap sack during the day and put between blankets and mattress of bed. (p. 6).
Bon appetit!