Another day of work finds me and a partner hundreds of feet above the prairies of Coconino County, sweating and swearing under the desert sun. A fire lookout has called down to the Williams office and mentioned trouble he’d been having with a door. Now, eight days later, thanks to the efficiency of the federal government of the US of A, we muscle a sheet of cheap plywood into place, fastening it with screws from decades-old forest signs (our budget prohibits us from “needlessly” purchasing new hardware). My partner eyes gunmetal-gray stormy skies above, trademark of the southwestern monsoons. Off to our west, rain trails down from the thunderheads, enormous brushstrokes of gray-blue watercolor that dissipate in the mid-summer heat before they touch the ground. This storm concerns us: we’re on top of Volunteer Mountain and standing directly next to a 60-foot-tall steel lookout tower.
As time passes, the clouds draw closer and closer to our isolated mountaintop, and around the time the hairs on our arms begin to stand on end we make the call to seek refuge in the lookout tower. We climb what feels like dozens of flights of worn and rusty steel steps and are greeted by John, a good-humored, talkative man who spends eight hours of his day alone up here, staring out over Garland Prairie past Williams, far enough to know the evening’s weather by 9am. He welcomes us into his work home, a 15’ by 15’ room, perched seemingly miles above the high desert floor, and we receive a rude reminder of our dire situation: John’s lightning strike detector is going off like a fire alarm. We’re given insulated stools, made of old Forest Service signs and glass candleholders, so we can sit on the floor of the lookout tower without being unduly zapped by the bolts plummeting from the sky no more than a quarter mile away.
We gladly squat on our little stools (unnecessary, given the tower is insulated from the outside) and set about eating lunch. My partner has brought a Thermos of soup, lovingly prepared by his wife in Flagstaff, and when the first bolt slams into the tower with a sound like point-blank artillery, he promptly spills the entirety of the contents over the front of his shirt.
Through all this, John remains comfortably at ease. He’s weathered more than a handful of these storms and knows that so long as he calls out to dispatch to inform them he’ll be out of service until the storm passes, he has little to worry about. The lookout tower is insulated against the brutal and heavy-hitting strikes of lightning, it has a bed, stove, and oven for comfort and warmth, and John has his own library and DVD player to keep himself occupied in times like these.
Of course, that isn’t to say that his is a job for the lazy. Were it not for the opaque storm front now confronting us, John would spend his day scrutinizing the horizon for so much as a tendril of light gray smoke. Using the Osborne Fire Finder located in the center of the little cabin, John and so many like him across the nation locate wildfires with pinpoint accuracy, calling in cardinal direction, distance, size, and sometimes, if possible, even coordinates, using nothing more than a circular map marked with his location, azimuths, and local landmarks.
Though his situation is by no means comfortable, John surely counts himself among one of few lookouts who are in so lucky a position as this. At the end of the day, after eating a homemade lunch warmed up in the tower’s microwave, he can drive down the mountain on a rocky, four-wheel-drive road, through the tiny town of Parks, and on home to his wife and family. Though he works just as hard as every other lookout, John’s position may almost be considered by some “cushy”, even given the wrathful storms and constant danger of being cut off by a fire. Whereas he only has to spend only eight hours a day in his tower, there are other lookouts who live in their stations almost permanently.
Take the lookout stations that populate the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in southeastern Idaho. These tiny cabins rest precariously atop peaks so high that towers were deemed unnecessary. Made from age-old timbers once hauled up hair-raising mountain trails by mule teams, the cabins have essentially become the quintessence of the wilderness job. One or two people lived in these towers alone, staffing them for the entire fire season, which usually spanned up to eight months on end. Food and supplies were flown into nearby dirt airstrips and carried up in the same manner that the materials for the cabin itself were carried up decades ago. One of these cabins, the Big Baldy lookout, is perched atop the mountain that shares its name, floating up at an elevation nearing two miles above sea level.
The cabin is now boarded up, almost forgotten save the gentle care of the Pistol Creek Ranch, a nearby ranch that caters to the affluent hunter and outdoorsman. Its battered glass windows are now covered by plywood to protect from snow and hail, and the solitary mattress for its previous inhabitant hangs from paracord from the ceiling to keep the local mice population from reducing it to shreds. Even given these dreary conditions, the tower houses me and a friend quite nicely. We sleep in comfort and warmth our first night and find ourselves completely enamored with the view and the locale. After watching an Idaho sunset from folding chairs set up on the narrow porch surrounding the cabin thirty feet off the ground, we content ourselves with mixing cider mix left by the last hiker with bourbon, and settle in for the night, watching bright red lightning flashes in a far-off northern storm front.
These buildings are unique. They are completely isolated, save a radio, and scantly resupplied, and even then only with great difficulty. Their guardians are just as unique. It takes an extremely fortified mind to not only stand guard for gray-white columns of smoke scores of miles away, but also to fight off the endless loneliness that accompanies a station like this.
Lookouts like JJ in southern Oregon spend entire seasons in these isolated tin boxes in the clouds. JJ woke with the sunrise and passed days on end scanning the horizon for pencil-thin lines of gray, wispy smoke. Although his official schedule technically slated him on-duty for 40 hours a week, he often worked up to 80 hours, 13 days out of a pay period with one day off. Even given long hours, storms and rain would guarantee him breaks, hail threatening to break the glass windows of his cabin and dropping visibility to fifty feet. JJ spent his days copying government quad maps into his notebook to memorize landmarks, names, and elevations. He searched through drawers that hadn’t been opened in years, re-discovering forgotten maps, journals, and reports. At the peak of the season, when he wasn’t studying far-off anvil-shaped thunderheads or gawking at sunset light shows over the peaks of the Pacific Northwest, he was frantically radioing in coordinates, color, and height of smoke columns to the fire dispatcher, providing the engine and hand crews with a location to start hunting for a blaze. Once, a fire nearby forced him to prepare for evacuation, packing away his few belongings and planning for rescue. The second time a blaze kicked off nearby, he packed half of his things, only the most important. By the third time, he threw a few books into his day pack and called it good. Weeks and months of preparing for the worst left him wired once the fall moisture moved in and startups became fewer and further in between. For JJ, this part of the season was the hardest. He slowly settled into the idea that the manic scramble for the radio would be happening less and less and started to think of the little things outside of the tower that he missed.
Just as JJ’s season has come to an end, the era of manned lookout towers seems to be ending as well. The US government has proposed replacing the decades- or century-old towers and their grizzled pair of eyes with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could monitor a similar area for less manpower and a lower labor cost. Some drones are already in use with federal agencies like the US Forest Service and the National Parks Service. In the northwest, JJ’s country, a company called Insitu volunteers drone operators and their vehicles to use the IR-imaging equipped UAVs to fly nighttime reconnaissance flights to provide up-to-date GIS mapping of active burns. In layman’s terms, the drones are responsible for the red-slashed area on the forest maps you might see during the height of fire season on CNN. These unmanned vehicles can fly for miles or hours, running on rechargeable batteries, and provide accurate data on par with what the lookouts can do. But people like JJ don’t see UAVs as a viable replacement for lookouts.
“UAVs can be very effective”, JJ says. “However, in terms of replacing lookouts…” He isn’t quite sold. Even with their lower cost of operation and high reliability, UAVs present dangers that manned towers don’t. Lithium polymer batteries present a fire risk, which may not be a big deal if you’re just buzzing your house for some cool footage, but if you’re flying low over thousands of acres of bone-dry fine grass and chaparral primed for a blaze, even the slight chance of a spark is entirely unacceptable. Drones also can be dangerous to other air vehicles in the area. In the American West, firefighters depend heavily on air attack, planes and helicopters loaded with water or liquid fire retardant working off ground-fed coordinates for the drop zone. With small, nearly invisible drones flying around their area of operations, air tankers and helicopters would be working in an environment with another added element of danger. There are countless other issues: legislation on drone use on federal lands would have to be updated, flight times would have to be made longer to manage the constant need for forest observation, a drone doesn’t have the human feel for a land that so many lookouts do. When all the math is worked out, JJ says, “it’s still cheaper and more reliable to have a ‘natural intelligence’ system on top of the hill. Fire management overall is very costly. Lookouts are still reliable and affordable.”
Some may see unmanned drones as the future of the government’s wildland fire program, but in the grand scheme of things, the machines are just plainly missing things that are unique to the solitary fire lookout. JJ describes a winter snow falling around his cabin with summer just across the valley; pink, blue and purple lightning bolts cleaving the sky in two; the feeling of being in the cabin during a thunderstorm, like floating on a dark black sea in a life raft with shipping containers dropping all around. It isn’t just a job; being a lookout is a life of its own. Spending a season in a small cabin on the mountain, surrounded by the wilderness you’re entrusted to protect, sharing the open air with no one but the wild company of the mountain, witnessing the world and being the first step in its protection is a job that cannot be automated, and things will almost certainly stay that way.
Images provided by the author