KEEPING WATCH

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:27:21

[Jack] Can you site me if I were a smoke using the fire finder?

[Pam] If you were a smoke?

[Jack] Yeah.

[Pam] Yeah. You know, so we don’t want to touch the map if we can. So I would put you… take these off before I break them. These are old, and they’re the best ones ever. I like them. From World War Two, I think. Navy. See, there’s a smoke down there right now.

00:00:27:24 - 00:01:14:16

[Pam] Sorry. I got to pay attention. I’m sorry I can’t sight, you now, cause I have to do this. So my azimuth. Then you get to see me work. 75, 76, 78, 79 and about a half. What do you think that is 76, 75. Is he still coming up? [Jack] No

[Pam] No, I see. This is. This is this is when it gets like, should I call it or not.

00:01:14:18 - 00:01:44:23

[Pam] Yeah. 279 and a half. Seven. I said, Yeah, from Sundance Mountain. I have two, seven, nine and a half. And I’m putting it kind of in 50 north five west section 30. And it’s not that far off the road, but it is in timber. Wait a minute. Not 15 yards. What am I saying? 50, not 60 North.. [Dispatcher] 60 North?

00:01:44:25 - 00:02:11:12

[Pam] Yeah.

[Dispatcher] Six zero.

[Pam] Yes, sir.

[Dispatcher] Six zero. North, five West Section 30.

[Pam] Right. My name is Pam. I’m a Sundance Mountain Lookout. I’m over here in Idaho State Forest.

So you’re in the north Zone dispatcher. You’re my dispatcher for the North Zone Dispatch?

[Dispatcher] Correct. Yes. Are you guys there tonight or.

[Dispatcher] Yeah, we’re staffed until about 20. About zero 200.

00:02:11:19 - 00:02:33:27

[Pam] Okay. Okay. Okay. I’ve been hearing some air traffic. Is that is there a fire close by?

[Dispatcher] Well, there’s a fire over in Coeur D’Alene. Oh one.

[Pam] Oh, okay. Okay. Thank you, Kevin. All of you know, it’s an up and down. I’m sure it’s. I’m pretty sure it’s a pile, so I’ll just keep watching it and I can call back if anything else happens.

00:02:34:00 - 00:03:14:27

[Pam] Thank you.

[Dispatcher] Alright you’re welcome.

[Pam] Yeah, Appreciate it. But, yeah, so, see, that’s how it goes. You see the smoke, you do that, you do that, and you write the right number down this good. And then call them on the radio or call them. In the old days, we were on the radio only. And then what would happen is you’d go calling dispatch. And even then we had local dispatch Coeur D’Alene dispatch, this is Sundance Mountain Lookout, we have a smoke report and you can just feel the ears go up and everybody’s all excited and they’re all waiting, you know, And so especially if there are the lookouts up, you want to go, okay, it’s in this area or, you know, give them

00:03:14:27 - 00:03:25:01

[Pam] a shot and then you give them your azimuth. And then they’re all looking and they’re all doing their azimuth. They’ll all chime in. It’s pretty cool. I mean, that was pretty cool. Now I’m the only one, so I got nobody.

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:40:04

[Chris] Could you just quickly describe the view from this Sundance Lookout?

[Pam] Well, so what we’re looking at are we’re in the Selkirk’s. This is the Selkirk Crest to my east, and that’s the spine of it, the crest. And it goes from south of Schweitzer into the into Canada. So it’s not a big range, but it’s a little range of Rockies and that’s where we are.

00:00:40:04 - 00:01:15:03

[Pam] And this tower is situated on the east side or sorry, on the west side of the west side of the Crest and on the east side of the Priest Lake Basin, which is situated between the Selkirk’s and the range over there, which goes down from it’s kind of similar. And why can’t I think of the name of it now? And so what we do is as lookouts, we are up here during fire season and calling, detecting and reporting smokes, and that’s what we do.

00:01:15:05 - 00:01:42:09

[Pam] So we call whatever we see. I’ll call Forest Service ground, and they’ll call state ground or private ground or where ever we see the smoke, because there’s a lot of fuel here. It’s a state forest here and there’s a national forest over there and it can go. This Sundance site is the scene of a very I guess it would be famous, notorious, probably fire that happened in 1967.

00:01:42:11 - 00:02:16:15

[Pam] And it actually it’s I think they still study it in fire behavior today because it had like the most consumption and the shortest amount of time. It was really a violent burn over. It went from right here over The Crest into the Pack River Drainage on the East side of the Selkirks. So that that was just a huge effort, that fire. And I’m sure or maybe you haven’t or you will check on the Sundance Fire history.

00:02:16:15 - 00:02:44:22

[Pam] It’s really pretty impressive. So this is Sundance Mountain fires are supposed to be named for their geographic location. So the Sundance Fire was this particular Sundance Mountain, that’s what we’re looking at. All those dead trees out there standing dead have been there for the last 50 some years. Sundance Fire. Did I answer your question.

[Chris] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

00:02:44:24 - 00:03:15:20

[Chris] They have so considering the relatively recent fire in this area, have you seen the landscape change over the course of your time here as a lookout? [Pam] Well, the state of Idaho is mandated to suppress everything. So our fire involvement is we see them, we go we suppress them. We’re done. Yeah, there’s been a lot of change in the environment.

00:03:15:20 - 00:03:38:06

[Pam] You can look up there and see some clear cuts. This forest is managed for timber harvest. So that’s been the most change that I’ve seen. And we have some fire, we have some fire scars and some places where that’s been the change, but mostly on this forest has been from timber service and managing the forest. But yeah, we have a few fires.

00:03:38:09 - 00:03:42:29

[Pam] Nothing really big since Sundance. Sundance was the big granddaddy.

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:27:06

[Pam] I always thought it would be fun to be a fire tower lookout. She said so why don’t you do that? I said they don’t have those anymore. She says, oh, yeah, they do call Buzz, which is somebody she knew. So I called Buzz and he said, I said, Buzz. Lauralee told me to call you because I told her I wanted to be a fire lookout.

00:00:27:06 - 00:00:47:17

[Pam] And she said you would know about that. Well, he was a fire manager over here on the Priest Lake Ranger District on the Forest Service side. And he said, Yeah, we do, but we’re full for the year. I really hope you do. Well, maybe I could come next year. I don’t know. You know, I was just so intrigued by the whole idea.

00:00:47:22 - 00:01:06:07

[Pam] I mean, I grew up in the Midwest. It’s pretty flat there, you know? But I like the mountains for a long time and have been out here for quite a while. And so he goes, but, you know, the state might need somebody. So he gave me the number and I called the state and I said, So Buzz told me to call you that you might have a lookout.

00:01:06:09 - 00:01:28:10

[Pam] And they said, Yeah, but we have to have an application in here by noon though. So I did my little application. I think it was a faxing then. I don’t remember. Yeah, that’s how we did it. I mean, I think we had the email, so I got it and I got an interview and I, and I came up here and was really, it was really kind of funny.

00:01:28:13 - 00:01:52:08

[Pam] And I got the job. I mean, there was more to that tale. That was pretty hilarious. And then I got the job, and I’ve been doing it ever since. Pretty much, pretty much took a few years off. And then I came back and went back to my spot, I guess you hike up there, it’s really lovely. It’s the best place on the whole basin. Really they can, you know, I don’t care what they say about that.

00:01:52:08 - 00:02:21:15

[Pam] People, a lot of people would agree up on Lookout Mountain. It’s north of here, about 15 miles air miles.

[Chris] What was it like your first summer up there?

[Pam] Well, I was pretty excited. I remember I was driving a this little red jeep. I don’t know what year was it? You know, the lookouts. We didn’t like that car down there. We get kind of they bump them down.

00:02:21:18 - 00:02:43:12

[Pam] So, you know, it was older. So this was probably in the seventies Jeep, somewhere in there. So I had a full Jeep. I would drive it up. Then we had a road all the way to the top to Lookout Mountain then. And then I remember my first I mean, I’d been up there for the interview and my friend Kathy, well, she became my friend because she worked here.

00:02:43:15 - 00:03:07:04

[Pam] She lined me out on how to do the job, right? So I had the big half an hour instruction. So I’m going up there and my first time when I get up there, it’s pretty exciting. And I guess the story is, you know, it’s really not pertinent, except it was my very first time and that night it rained, end of June.

00:03:07:04 - 00:03:40:15

[Pam] Kind of like right now. Rained. I was socked in for two days, couldn’t see anything. I mean it was just like being in soup. Well, that’s an easy job. And I’m a reader, so I’m like tearing through my books and just thinking, Wow, this is a really good job for me, you know? So the third night I was sleeping and I woke up in the middle of the night and it had cleared and I looked out and the stars, it was so awesome.

00:03:40:17 - 00:04:03:22

[Pam] I mean, I was in the stars. It was just, you know, there’s no light. There’s no ambient light. You know, they’re not lighting up the night up there on the mountain top, and that what it was I’ll just never forget that moment of just waking up in my little cot and seeing the stars and thinking, Oh, wow, this is really cool. So that, you know, that was a really kind of interesting introduction because I didn’t see anything for like two days.

00:04:03:25 - 00:04:26:18

[Pam] But then it was gangbusters. Really nice. Yeah. And then, you know, you just I had a few smokes that year and I had my goats and I had, you know, I could I hiked all over the mountain pretty much. It’s pretty nice. Nice terrain up there. To me. It’s good.

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:34:20

[Jack] I have a quick one.

[Pam] Sure.

[Jack] With the decline of the lookout tower over time, do you ever feel like you were going extinct? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we are. Well, from what I can tell, but, you know, Pennsylvania put a whole bunch of towers up because they decided we were right about the 24 seven human surveillance for fire suppression.

00:00:34:22 - 00:01:07:24

[Pam] And they just put a whole bunch of new towers into service last year, the year before. Meanwhile, Wisconsin took all the theirs out of service. So it would be interesting to talk to the people there in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. There was this one guy, he used to come over to them. I wonder if he’s still there or not. His name was Tom Wagner and I can hook you up with him, but he was from Wisconsin and he would start the season on a Wisconsin tower and then he would come over and work.

00:01:07:26 - 00:01:34:27

[Pam] I think that ranger district out of Nine Mile. I don’t know if you’ve been there, but that’s a really cool place. And he was on a tower for a long time there. I don’t know if he’s still there or not, but yeah, we do feel like that this hurts a lot of us. I think. I mean, back in the day, I mean, towers were really a priority because that’s what they depended on to get their forest…

00:01:34:27 - 00:02:02:14

[Pam] …fire detection. Now, I don’t know, maybe, maybe if I was in the Flathead near Glacier it would be different. I would really encourage you talk to some of those people because they’ve had really intense lookout programs for a long time. And as far as I know, they’re still doing it. So they have and they’ve actually this one guy, Leif, what’s Leif’s last name. Did you get Leif’s last name?

00:02:02:17 - 00:02:26:24

[Michael] I’ve been talking to him.

[Pam] Did you talk to him?

[Michael] I can’t remember his last name, but I’ve been talking to him.

[Pam] Good. He’s a really good source. I encourage you to talk to him.

[Michael] But he’s restoration, right? Restoration.

[Pam] Yeah, he’s putting. He’s been putting a bunch in service now. I don’t know if they’re staffing them or if they’re ranking them ranking them, because a lot of them, I mean, I can’t imagine that they’re telling them to make a profit.

00:02:26:27 - 00:02:37:27

[Pam] But you know that the fact that there making it available for people is to me, I think it’s great. And I don’t know if they’re.

00:02:38:00 - 00:03:10:00

[Pam] You know Leif. Hougan. Got it, see. He’s from Minnesota,

[Chris] He’s Scandinavian. Norwegian heritage.

[Pam] He’s got red hair and everything. You met him yet?

[Michael] No

[Pam] Are you going to go over and meet him?

[Michael] Uh, he’s going to be down on a lookout on the Selway, I think.

[Pam] Is he restoring it?

[Michael] Uh, yeah. He was doing some restoration work in the beginning of July and he’s going to get back to me about precise days.

00:03:10:02 - 00:03:27:16

[Michael] So he told me, so yeah, I’ve just had a couple exchanges when…

[Pam] Is he still going to staff his tower? It’s up on the Canadian border out of the Flathead?

[Michael] I don’t know. I don’t know.

[Pam] Yeah, he’d be he’d be good. He’s awesome. He’s the one that puts on that conference. No, a conference.

00:03:27:16 - 00:03:50:04

[Pam] The one for those guys. And then there’s the Lookout Association. I don’t know if they’re doing it this year or not. They didn’t do it last year because of the COVID. And this year, maybe not from the COVID. I don’t know. But it’s pretty exciting. Yeah, Let me know.