Brief history of Fire Lookouts and Snoqualmie Ranger District Lookouts
The real start of establishing Fire Lookouts began with the Great Fire of 1910, also known as the Big Burn. This huge fire burned 3,000,000 acres (12,000 km2) through the states of Washington, Idaho, and Montana and was still arguably the largest forest fire ever in recorded history. The smoke from this fire drifted across the entire country to Washington D.C. — both physically and politically — and it challenged the five-year-old Forest Service to address new policies regarding fire suppression. One of the resulting efforts was the establishment of a series of Fire Lookouts across the US.
The relatively new U.S. Forest Service was placed in high gear in the wake of this fire and fire detection and suppression become key missions. One element of this new strategy was the establishment of manned “fire lookouts” on high peaks across forested areas.
Lookouts were placed approximately every 15-20 mile apart—mostly on high points or peaks. Many of the early lookouts were just camps with tents or cabins. Later the Forest Service built towers to get the lookouts above the trees surrounding them.
Lookout personnel would come up to take their stations around the end of June and serve until mid-September in most years. They would generally work 6 days a week and would be required to record and report weather 3 times a day and scan for fires every 2 hours—including during the night. They also had to cut and split firewood, carry water to their lookout, wash windows regularly, maintain trails—and if they spotted a fire, they used to have to go and try to put it out themselves.
Lookout Gordon Hearing making a meal at Kelly Butte in 1939
Initially the lookouts were connected to the ranger stations by a network of old, crank telephones that used heavy galvanized wire. They could also talk to nearby lookouts to compare notes or coordinate locating fires.
If they spotted a fire, they would coordinate with other nearby lookout towers and triangulate the fire. A fire crew would be then dispatched-- or the lookouts themselves would be the “first responders”—often alone!
During WWII many lookouts were used as air raid warning sites to spot potential enemy bombers.
By the 1950’s the lookouts were starting to staffed by many women! The crank telephones were also replaced around then by mobile radios. The lookout duties changed as well, as they no longer had to go put out fires. The creation of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness (1976) and Norse Peak and William O. Douglas Wildernesses (1984) changed the lookout duties again, as putting out fires in the wilderness became more managed and not automatic.
Today most lookouts are not staffed, but in MBSNF there are 4 lookouts that are routinely staffed, mostly by volunteers and occasionally by professional staff: Suntop, Kelly Butte, Granite Mountain, and Miner’s Ridge. Some other lookouts have been converted to rentals, but these remain in active service.
The Osborne Firefinder is the centerpiece and primary tool of the lookout—both in the past and now. It is a tool used by fire lookouts in order to find a directional bearing (azimuth) to smoke in order to alert fire crews to a wildland fire. The Osborne consists of a rotating ring with sights on it overlaying a map of the area. Note that the center of the map is where this lookout is at. If we spot a fire, we rotate the sighting ring until we line up on the smoke, then sight down the two sights. Once we have them aligned, we read the azimuth off of the sighting ring. We would then report that to our Dispatch center (PISCC), along with our best estimate of which valley (or how far) the fire is away from us.
Fire location can be determined using two or more Fire Finder-equipped towers. Each lookout uses the firefinder to obtain an azimuth to where the fire is believed to be. Using the two bearings, Dispatchers at a central facility use these bearings on a large map to quickly find where the reported bearings intersect and then dispatch firefighters to that location.
In the past reporting would have been done by a hand-cranked, battery operated field telephone. These phones used a single wire for transmission and were not terribly reliable. The invention of portable radios in WWII moved the towers over to radio communication in the 1950s, initially with huge radios the size of a microwave oven, to bag radios, to finally the Handie-Talkie radios we use today.
Sources for additional information about fire lookouts: