Excerpts
In a forest under proper protection there is some one man or corps of men responsible for detecting fires and for attacking them before they have time to do much damage or to develop beyond control.
Henry Graves, Second Chief Forest Service
1910
Peering thru the drift of smoke, sighting thru the haze,
Blinking at the lightning on the stormy days,
Here to guard the forests from the Red Wolf s tongue
I stay until they take me down when the fall snow comes.
Robin Adair, California District News Letter
1927
Most forest fires are discovered and handled in their early stages by fire guards. In these critical early stages, the judgement and competence of the Forest Service in fire control is largely measured by the judgement and competence the fire guard puts into his work. In a very real sense, the fire guard is the Forest Service at such times…
C.M. Granger, Acting Chief, Forest Service
1937
Considerable research and study have been made on the use of airplanes versus lookouts. The agencies that have made these studies generally agree that the most economical detection system is a combination of the two. As a general guide they recommend one lookout per 100,000 acres, with air detection supplementing the lookout during periods of bad burning conditions or after lightning storms.
Handbook for Fire Lookouts, National Park Service
1958
Is anything burning?
The sun itself! Dying
Pooping out, exhausted
Having produced brontosaurus, Heraclitus
This rock, me,
To no purpose
I tell you anyway (as a kind of loving) . . .
Flies & other insects come from miles around
To listen
I also address the rock, the heather,
The alpine fir
BUDDHA: "All the constituents of being are
Transitory: Work out your salvation with diligence."
(And everything, as one eminent disciple of that master
Pointed out, had been tediously complex ever since.)
Phillip Whalen, “Sourdough Mountain Lookout”
1958
Yes, for I’d thought, in June, hitchhiking up there to Skagit Valley in northwest Washington for my fire lookout job ‘When I get to the top of Desolation Peak and everybody leaves on mules and I’m alone I will come face to face with God or Tathagata and find out once and for all what the meaning of all the existence and suffering and going to and fro’ in vain’ but instead I’d come face to face with myself, no liquor, no drugs, no chance of faking it but face to face with ole Hateful Duluoz Me…”
Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angles
1965
Men go mad in this line of work.
Ed Abbey, “Fire Lookout”
1972
But although I was fully aware of the practical aspects of my responsibility, there was another feature of my job that moved me far more deeply, namely the beauty on which my eyes were privileged to dwell continually.
Martha Hardy, Tatoosh
1980
Some of the notable characters to spend a summer in this hellhole with a view like heaven included a fellow named Kerouac, who wrote a full-length book about angels and demons that would take someone higher than the peaks to be able to follow. Another, named Kachen, was born in Russia, fled to Manchuria, then to the North Cascades where he became a Desolation lookout for a time. Yet another disoriented soul from the big city wandered around the peak naked all one summer. Finally, there was the lad from Sweeden who wore straw sandals, sported a full-circle mandarin moustache, and chanted from a book on Oriental mysticism all day long … thinking he was Chinese.
Ray Kresek, Fire Lookouts of the Northwest
1984
Nosing the wine, I picked out and inserted a cassette, and the tiny glass house was filled with a Bach cello solo. Outside the lightning flashed and a drizzle of rain ran down the panes. The warmth of the wine and the fire rose to my head. By the third glass I was slightly giddy, a cheap drunk on an empty stomach. The stark music was punctuated by the booms of thunder.
Doug Peacock, “The Lookout”
1990
Had lookouts been in existence in [Thoreau’s] time, he could have been an inspector, not of snowstorms, but thunderstorms. His life-long quest for the suitable vocation would have been satisfied, and perhaps he might have written yet another Walden-like book—casting stones at civilization from his glass house.
Don Scheese, Henry David Thoreau, Fire Lookout”
1990
Certain landscapes are those of the spirit, wild and undefined. Without them, we become strangers, alien from the forces that give us life.
Jackie Maughan, “The Telescoping Effect”
1995
When I take my things and walk down the Mountain behind a string of mules, when I drive down to the city to live and teach, my only possession will be the knowledge that each of these places is here, that they exist.
Nicole LeFavour, “Listening to Voices in the Wilderness”
1996
While certainly not created for an ornamental purpose, [lookouts] provide a remarkable juxtaposition between the natural and the man-made, representing the place of mankind within the greater environment.
Joseph Wessinger, Graduate Thesis
2013
We are moving away from having fire towers to look for fires across the landscape and are setting up a camera system that can detect smoke from long distances.
Mark Lichtenstein, Forest Service National Budgets Director
2023