Fire lookouts have been a critical part of the story of fire suppression and exclusion in the forests of Washington since around 1910. Built by the United States Forest Service and private timber companies, lookouts occur across the state from the wettest to the driest regions of timber. They were built of wood and rock, typically on a high point that provided the biggest view possible. No one knows exactly how many were built but the number totals around 450 in the Cascades (including seven on places named Lookout), 95 on the Olympic Peninsula, 125 in Northeast Washington, and 15 in Southeast Washington. As of 2025, 93 lookouts remain.
Fire Fighters
On September 11, 1902, a fire began on forested land near Yacolt. Over a three-day period, a "roaring tempest that swept death and destruction" ("Forest Facts ...") torched at least 238,920 acres and produced so much smoke and ash that more than 100 miles north, in Seattle, headlines reported "Seattle Frightned (sic)," as a "heavy pall of smoke" shrouded the city ("Lives Lost ..."). The fire destroyed 12 billion board feet of wood; killed at least 38 people; forced at least 146 families out of their homes; ruined schools, churches, bridges, mines, and sawmills; and killed uncountable livestock and wild animals. Until the Carlton Complex fire burned 256,108 acres 2014, the Yacolt Burn was the largest and most influential fire in state history. (The Yacolt wasn’t completely out in three days. That would require the fall rains, which soon arrived.)
Prior to the Yacolt, settlers were generally fire-friendly. Primarily, they used fire to rid the trees in their yard and forests that stood in the way of cultivation and settlement. Another practical purpose was eliminating the large-scale woody debris left over from logging. Fire was so prevalent that early travelers regularly reported on the smoky haze that engulfed the region. Such fires occasionally got out of control but rarely with any long-term consequences, and the settlers were used to, and mostly tolerant of, smoldering fires that could persist until the autumn rains. With the Yacolt Burn, however, fire now became the enemy.
Leading the battle were timber interests such as the Weyerhaeuser Company, which started its first logging on forest burned around Yacolt. Working with legislators, trade journalists, and newspaper reporters, timber interests pushed for legislation to suppress and put out fire. Their first success was the the act "To Protect Forests from Fire," which Washington’s governor signed in March 1903. Two years later, the companies pushed for a stronger law with the 1905 Forest Protection Act. Under the guidance of a state fire warden and deputy wardens operating in counties, officials had the authority to establish no-burn seasons and to suppress fires. Violators could be fined and/or imprisoned.
The timber companies also began patrolling their own forest property through a variety of forest-protection associations. Funded by the lumber industry, these organizations developed, promoted, and kept in the public eye the idea that fire was the enemy of good forestry and needed to be defeated in battle at all costs.
"The Forest Fire Question"
At same time, the federal government started to get involved, initially with the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, which resulted in setting aside 15 forest reserves totaling 13 million acres. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt created the United States Forest Service and by 1910, he and his first chief forester, Gifford Pinchot had established 150 national forests covering 172 million acres. An ardent opponent of fire, Pinchot said in 1908: "The forest fire question resolves itself into one of the most important problems before the Nation in the care of its National Resources ... The one secret in fighting fires is to discover your fire as soon as possible and fight it as hard as you can and refuse to leave it until the last ember is dead" ("Fires Worst").
Pinchot’s concern about fire would become everyone’s concern about fire with the 1910 Big Burn. In two days, roughly three million acres of forest burned, primarily along the Montana/Idaho border but also into Washington and British Columbia. Caused by severe drought and lightning strikes, as well as fires started by loggers, homesteaders, campers, and the railroads, the Big Burn killed 86 people. As a result, fire became a central priority of the Forest Service.
To supplement the laws around suppression, the Forest Service, state agencies, and private land owners began to build fire lookouts in the forests. The first had been in 1902, when the Clearwater Timber Company in Clearwater County, Idaho (about 65 miles due east of Pullman), hired a cook named Mable Gray to climb a burned-out hemlock snag and look for fires from what was known as Bertha Hill. A tree-mounted viewing platform such as the one used by Gray came to be called a crow’s nest, a term applied to many subsequent lookouts built in trees. She is considered to be the first fire lookout working at the nation’s first lookout focused on forests. Other early sites began as small camps with a tent, sighting instruments, and perhaps an observation platform. The lookout had a prescribed area to protect, which required regular scanning for smoke, getting to the fire and putting it out, if possible, or seeking out or waiting for additional help.
Lookout Design
As the Forest Service become more of a dominant force in forests, it began, not surprisingly, to standardize lookout sites. According to a chapter in the 1924 The Western Fire Fighters’ Manual by William Bushnell Osborne Jr. (1884-1955): "The lookout system has come to stay because it has proved to be the most economical method of securing early discovery and prompt action upon fires which occur at random throughout a broad territory (The Western Fire ...).
As in real estate, location, location, location was the mantra for fire lookouts. "The one and only site for a lookout house is the extreme summit of the peak and where a maximum view of the surrounding country can be seen directly from the house itself" (The Western Fire ...). In 1915, Elijah "Lige" Coalman (1880-1970) built the first of what became known as the D-6 (District 6) cupola style of lookout at Mount Hood in Oregon. With windows on all sides of the 12 foot by 12 foot cabin, plus a small second level, which housed Coalman’s fire-finding equipment, he had an unparalleled view of his surroundings.
The D-6 became the standard throughout the Pacific Northwest. A 1922 Forest Service manual provided detailed instructions on how to build a D-6, noting that "all parts and materials to be done up in bundles weighing not more than forty pounds each of suitable size and shape for transportation by pack horse" ("Specifications"). Eventually around 200 were built on extreme summits. Modifications over the years led to the D-1 cupola (14 feet by 14 feet with log-cabin bottom); L-4 (gabled, shingle roof, heavy shutters, no cupola), L-5 (smaller); and L-6 (smaller still and placed on 80- to 100-foot towers). A few lookouts didn’t cotton to these more formalized plans but for the most part the L-4 plan was the most common and more than 1,000 were erected across the Western U.S. "on the rocks, above cinder block basements, or atop towers of all types ranging from 10 to 84 feet tall" ("Fire Lookouts").
In the 1930s, the establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) led to widespread construction of lookouts. The CCC built approximately 600 of the total known 5,000-plus lookouts in the United States.
Finally, in 1953, came the R-6 flat. Made of plywood, a tarpaper roof, and windows, it offered "the poorest ventilation and more blind spots than any observatory yet designed," wrote Ray Kresek in his definitive guide, Fire Lookouts of the Northwest. "It has as much class as a Chik Sayles toilet" (Fire Lookouts ...). (Chic Sale was an early vaudeville comedian who had a routine about outhouses, which led to his name being associated with them.)
Osborne Firefinder
The most important tool employed by lookouts was the Osborne firefinder. Designed by William Bushnell Osborne Jr. in 1911 and improved over the years, the final version was created in 1934. It consisted of a 24-inch round, glass-topped plane table with each of 360 degrees etched into a fixed outer rim. Under the glass was a map, precisely oriented due north, with the lookout in the center of the map. The viewer used one brass, sighting slot and one sight with horsehairs, which rotated around the glass, to fix the position of the fire. With an Osborne firefinder, a lookout could determine the azimuth, or bearing, to 1/60 of a degree and the vertical angle to 1/10 of a degree of accuracy. In 1924, an Osborne firefinder cost $65 and the Osborne Jr. was $25. All were produced by the Leupold-Volpel & Co. of Portland, Oregon, where Osborne first began to design the firefinder.
The firefinder typically sat in the center of the room on a table. It was a sacred space, reserved only for the firefinder. Along the outer walls were the bed, table, and wood-burning stove, which was used for heat and cooking. Below the windows, cupboards contained supplies. To help protect a lookout when lightning was too close or too much, the occupant could stand on a small stool that rested on glass insulators. Outside were grounded lightning rods.
In the earliest lookout stations, the lookouts used two mirrors to reflect sunlight and send Morse code messages to communicate, not always the most reliable method in the often overcast Pacific Northwest. Eventually, phones and two-way radios were the primary tools of communication. They required miles of wire to be strung through the forest and typically required constant repair.
In addition to looking for fires, lookouts helped maintain trails, had to keep their lookouts (particularly the windows) clean, chop wood, and fetch their water. They had to know their territory and be able to name the features. They had to handle loneliness. They had to cook their own meals. To supplement the latter, the Forest Service released The Lookout Cookbook in 1938. Recipes ranged from Rinctum Diddie (which required doctoring cream sauce and Welsh Rarebit) to Salmon Wiggle to Pigs in a Blanket to Doughnuts. They were designed to be prepared "from the food furnished the lookouts. The book was tried out by nearly a hundred lookouts, smokechasers, small crews, etc" (Lookout Cookbook).
Cascade Mountains
No official account exists of the first lookout in the Cascades but several sites had tent camps by 1914. These include Aeneas Mountain (25 miles north of Omak; dismantled in 2024), Dirtyface Peak (20 miles northwest of Leavenworth), Red Mountain (25 miles southeast of Mount St. Helens, established by 1910), Sugarloaf Peak (12 miles northwest of Leavenworth), Swakane Ridge (about 15 miles east-northeast of Leavenworth), Tiptop Mountain (12 miles southeast of Leavenworth), and Tumwater Mountain (2 miles northwest of Leavenworth, in use prior to 1914). One of the early lookouts on Tumwater was Iva West (later Iva Gruenewald) (1899-1984) who staffed the station from 1920 to 1922. She had graduated from the high school in Leavenworth in 1919. "There was no cabin, or lookout tower but a tent down in a sheltered place among a few trees. My 'office' was a very rocky higher peak, no shelter from wind, or sun, just a map, a phone and an alidade to locate fires in all four directions," wrote Gruenewald in a 1983 memoir.
Within another year or two several of these locations, and other sites, had more permanent structures. For example, a one-story stone cabin was built in 1916 atop Anvil Rock (9,584 feet) on the south side of Mount Rainier. A D-6 cupola on the summit of Mount St. Helens required three years (1918-1921) of work to complete. In 1913, an 8 foot by 8 foot cedar-frame cabin stood atop Red Mountain. Six years later it got the classic D-6 cupola.
One of the most ambitious lookout stations was the one atop Mount Adams (12,276 feet). After an initial planning trip in October 1916, work began in 1917 with creation of an endless line of strong telephone wire fastened to the summit. At each end was a sled, the one on the top loaded with rock and the one on the bottom (at 6,000 feet in elevation) loaded with lumber. Sending the heavier sled down pulled up the lighter one. Workers eventually hauled 7,000 pounds of bundled supplies to the summit to build a 12 by 12 D-6 cupola. Not until 1920 was all the material in place and not until 1922 was the lookout completed; delays included forest fires, which drew away workers, snow storms driving workers off the mountain, and having to anchor the building without any accessible rock on the icy summit.
Lookouts quickly realized that stations such as the ones on Mount Adams and Mount St. Helens didn’t work out as their elevation made them susceptible to bad weather, which blocked the views and made the sites challenging to inhabit. The lookout on Mount Adams was in use only until 1925; Mount St. Helens to 1929.
Olympic Mountains
The first lookout in the Olympics was built on a ridge of Finley Peak north of Lake Quinault. Erected in 1917 by the Forest Service, the one-room log cabin had a cedar-shingle, pitched roof and a pole nearby where the lookout could obtain a higher and better view. In 1921, the "Lady Lookout," as writer Agnes Lockhart Hughes (1866-1942) called her in American Magazine, Mavie Olson (1896-1972) staffed the station (A Girl). Born in 1896 near the lake, she was a schoolteacher the rest of the year. Each day from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. she took weather readings every three hours and watched for smoke. When she saw signs of fire, she determined its location and telephoned the information to rangers. Used into the 1930s, the lookout was abandoned in 1947.
The Olympics' second lookout, a temporary structure, was built in 1917 and improved in 1919. Funded by the Forest Service, the Washington Forest Fire Association, the State Forestry Department, and the James D. Lacey Company, it was a D-6 cupola structure above the Sol Duc River, about eight miles west of Lake Crescent. The lookout had several names, including Burnt Mountain, Mount Solduc, and Kloshe Nanich, the latter a Chinook Jargon term "with various sorts of 'looking after' as well as admonitory connotations" (Klahowiam). The lookout no longer exists but a viewing platform marks the location.
Northeast Washington
One of the first, if not the first, lookout in Northeast Washington was begun by a Forest Service crew on Columbia Mountain (also known as Sherman) in 1913. The observation tower was about a mile north of Sherman Pass and 11 miles east of Republic. A year later, Forest Service supervisor C. C. Reed designed a 12x12 cabin of hand-hewn timbers with a 15-foot-high overhead platform. The small structure, minus the platform, still exists due to multiple restoration projects. In 1919, a writer, Gladys Murray, staffed the lookout. She wrote of her experience in a Forest Service publication Six Twenty-Six.
"Being a lookout was quite an experience this year for it was probably the worst fire season the west has known. During July and August I located and reported fifty fires. I was provided with the standard Osborne fire finder, which can be mastered in a moment ... It is a wonderful sight to witness an electric storm about the adjacent peaks at this altitude [6782 feet] ... One night I shall well remember. A terrible wind storm came up. It roared up the canyons like a storm at sea, whipped and lashed at my tent until it blew flat, though anchored to logs with wires and ropes, and drove me into the base of the lookout tower which was solid block log building about 11x11 feet with sloping walls. To stand outside the cabin was barely possible. This storm rather frightened me but before leaving the Lookout I experienced many more equally severe so they became just one more incident to make up an adventure" ("Impressions").
World War II
During World War II, when the U.S. Army was concerned about the possibility of attacks from Japan, they created the Aircraft Warning Service (AWS). On January 1, 1942, the Secretary of Agriculture began to coordinate with the Forest Service and National Park Service land managers to use fire lookouts as observation points for enemy aircraft. Dozens of lookouts were staffed year round, which required many locations to be upgraded for winter with better heating and insulation. "Observers must be of unquestionable loyalty and physically fit to carry out the duties for which they are employed ... Man and wife may be employed, provided the wife is used for lookout or interceptor duty only and is not required to perform manual labor" ("Aircraft Warning"). They had to report every aircraft they saw, noting specific flight details. By late 1943, the AWS was on the wane.
Poets on the Peaks
Not surprisingly, lookouts have attracted a wide range of people, several of whom documented their experiences. Best known are the Beat Generation poets Phillip Whalen (1923-2002), Gary Snyder (b. 1930), and Jack Kerouac (1922-1969). Snyder was the first, spending six weeks atop Crater Mountain in the North Cascades in 1952 (about 30 miles east-northeast of Marblemount). The following year he staffed Sourdough Mountain (about 22 miles northeast of Marblemount), the same year that Whalen was lookout on Sauk Mountain (about 6 miles west of Marblemount). In 1954, Whalen staffed Sourdough but Snyder didn’t return because he had been blacklisted in the heyday of McCarthyism. Whalen was also on Sourdough in 1955, his last year. A year later Jack Kerouac spent his summer as a lookout, on Desolation Peak (about 34 miles northeast of Marblemount), which led to writing The Dharma Bums (1958) and Desolation Angels (1960).
But before any of these men arrived, Seattle schoolteacher Martha Hardy (1907-1983) staffed the Tatoosh Ridge lookout on the southeast side of Mount Rainier. In 1946, her book Tatoosh, about her three months as lookout in 1943, was published. An early review described the Lady Lookout’s book as a "very readable story of combats with weather, the wild life, and her own thoughts and fears" (Tatoosh review). "Many people, including lumbermen, loggers, taxpayers, voters and lawmakers, have little genuine knowledge of the value of forests. They do not fully realize that from towering trees to creeping moss, and even of the fine root hairs of all the plants both large and small, each member of a forest community contributes its share to the magnificent worth of the whole" (Tatoosh).
The Decline
As early as 1919, airplanes were being used to detect fire, but they had little impact until after World War II. Planes and helicopters, along with increased usage of the backcountry and the development of cargo drops and smokejumpers meant that "early detection was not as crucial ... [and] fires could be attached more quickly" ("Historic Fire ..."). Responding to the new conditions, the Forest Service began to move away from its historic reliance on staffed fire lookouts on "extreme summits." The result was a gradual loss of lookouts due to neglect, fire, removal, and vandalism. A contributing factor to the elimination of the lookouts, wrote Ira Spring (1918-2003) and Byron Fish (1908-1996) in Lookouts: Firewatchers of the Cascades and Olympics, was a congressional act passed in 1965, which "opened the way for citizens to sue a federal agency for injuries suffered on government property" (Lookouts ...). As an attractive nuisance in hard-to-reach locations where maintenance was always an issue, fire lookouts were highly susceptible to people injuring themselves and suing the government. "The word went out: if a lookout station has no further use, tear it down or burn it –just get rid of it" (Lookouts ...).
As of 2025, 93 fire lookouts still exist in Washington, though fire lookout aficionados quibble over that number and how many were actually built. They are found across the state. Eight are available to rent overnight through the Forest Service, Airbnb, and a private owner. Another seven are on a first-come, first-served basis for overnight lodging. And, around two dozen are still staffed seasonally. According to Christine Estrada, who has staffed the Goat Peak lookout near Mazama for several years, fire lookouts such as herself still serve a critical purpose. They help to ground truth fires, report on false negatives, and act as a relay between fire fighters in the field and operations crews, who may not have direct contact with the crews in remote locations. In addition, active lookouts are a front line in educating the public about fire and the role of government in fire fighting, a particularly important job in this era of climate change deniers and government restructuring.
