The history hidden in the new lives of fire lookouts

TROY — Chuck Manning, 79, took careful steps as he circled a small wooden cabin at the top of Northwest Peak, an aptly named mountaintop a few miles from Montana’s borders with Idaho and Canada.

The remote fire lookout, situated roughly 7,700 feet above sea level, appeared to be in relatively good condition, despite being abandoned since 1955 when the Forest Service last staffed the outpost. Moving against strong winds on the rocky terrain, Manning methodically scrutinized each part of the structure with a knife, notebook and phone. At times, he pressed the blade gently into the wood to assess its texture and strength, and he occasionally jotted down notes and sketched schematics, snapping photos of everything.

Manning leads the Northwest Montana Lookout Association, a nonprofit organization that supports government agencies in restoring and maintaining fire lookouts around Kootenai and Flathead national forests. Despite Northwest Peak Lookout’s remote location — the closest city is more than 40 miles south and features a sign reading “Troy: Where Montana Begins” — the 94-year-old structure has warranted continued restoration efforts from NMLA over the last eight years. Moreover, frequent visits to isolated destinations are not uncommon for members like Manning, a Montana native, who traveled to the Mount Brown Fire Lookout in Glacier National Park from his home in Lakeside on 10 separate occasions between 2015 and 2024.

According to the National Historic Lookout Register, Northwest Peak Lookout was constructed as a prototype of a gable-roofed style lookout. Unlike the Forest Service’s more-recognizable models featuring cabins constructed atop towers, Northwest Peak Lookout is a simple 14-by-14-foot residence built at ground level. Northwest Peak Lookout was once one of more than 8,700 lookouts spread across the United States. The Forest Service began building the fire-detection units en masse after the Great Fire of 1910, which burned more than 3 million acres across northern Idaho and western Montana and killed at least 85 people. Production again increased decades later when the Civilian Conservation Corps and other government agencies constructed thousands of lookouts as a product of the New Deal investments.

State and federal workers built more than 650 lookouts in Montana over the course of the 20th century, but by 2024, roughly one in four of Montana’s lookouts remained standing. Nearly 470 collapsed, burned or became scrapwood.

“It’s just like a car. It’s just like a house. If it’s not being used, it’s not being maintained,” Manning said.

Peter Kitts, who accompanied Manning on the two-mile hike to Northwest Peak, is one of roughly 30 NMLA volunteers who offer expertise and labor for ongoing restoration projects. Manning and Kitts enjoy the history and the hiking, but both also feel a personal connection to lookouts. At the top of Northwest Peak, Kitts identified a small brown speck jutting up from a distant mountaintop as a lookout he staffed decades ago.

Manning also worked as a lookout many years ago. He staffed West Glacier’s Thoma Lookout, a gable-roofed model like the one on Northwest Peak, in 1963. He was 18. Both his mother and then-girlfriend, Nancy, came to visit him during the formative summer. In 2013, Manning returned to visit Thoma Lookout with Nancy, whom he had married in the interim.

Though Thoma was one of Montana’s staffed locations in 2024, work on a fire lookout is not as prevalent as it was during the structures’ heyday in the mid-20th century. Flathead National Forest employed about three dozen lookouts in the 1950s. In the 1990s, that figure had dropped to just two. In 2024, though, it was back up to seven. 

According to Mark Hufstetler, an architectural historian who now works for the Forest Service as a fire lookout at Baptiste Lookout in the Flathead near Hungry Horse, the number of fire lookouts began to decline after World War II. Hufstetler cited the widespread introduction of two-way radios, improving the range and speed of the Forest Service’s ability to respond to fires, as one reason.

“A more important reason was the development of aviation aircraft, which were sometimes used to observe fires,” Hufstetler said. “And as the decades progressed, that became more and more common.”

The use of satellites to spot wildfires began with NASA in 1964, and today, remote cameras, often used with artificial intelligence, are also common.

But Hufstetler, who has staffed several different lookout locations in the last seven years, believes there are unique advantages to a network of human lookouts.

“I interact with visitors and provide them with probably the most positive experience that they will have with any federal agency personnel,” Hufstetler said. “They’re always in a great mood, and we can transmit that enthusiasm into an understanding of what the agency does.”

Hufstetler also believes versatility is an even more fundamental value of human lookouts. In the past three months, he was able to relay information about a missing hiker and, in a separate incident, a missing person to state authorities within seconds.

“I’ve got my radio with me at all times, it’s on all night,” Hufstetler said. “So I’m always available if things happen.”

According to Hufstetler, his vantage point offers an important perspective when crews fight wildland fires near his tower. Additionally, his comprehensive understanding of the nearby terrain adds extra value to his real-time updates. 

“The key to being a good lookout is to have an intimate knowledge of where you are and why things are happening the way that they are,” he said.

For Mark and Rhett Moak, a married couple who spend their summers working for the Forest Service in fire towers, noticing day-to-day changes in the landscape, including smoke rising from wildfires, has become a natural instinct.

“It’s like walking into your living room and a picture is crooked,” Rhett Moak said. “You’re gonna see that.”

The Moaks, who staffed Spot Mountain in Bitterroot National Forest in 2024, married in 1978 and have worked together in lookouts since 1980.

“People told us that we would get divorced, being in close proximity for that long,” Mark Moak said. “But it turned out, I think, to be just the opposite.”

Both readily admit the new age of technology, including the introduction of the internet to lookouts, has an important place in the future of the historic structures. But the Moaks believe they continue to serve a number of irreplaceable functions.

“I think that this is a tool that shouldn’t be discarded, that shouldn’t go by the wayside,” Mark Moak said. “It should continue to be a positive symbol and a useful tool for the Forest Service.”

While the number of lookouts has declined over the past 75 years, the symbol remains popular online. Mark Moak posts photos of the landscape, wildlife and starry skies on social media. Mark Hufstetler shares nature photography and his day-in-the-life pictures on Instagram. Short-form videos illustrating the unusual life of lookouts have garnered large social media followings. For example, almost 200,000 people follow lookoutformichelle, who posts drone footage and personal reflections on the lookout lifestyle. Some social media accounts, like lookoutlindquist, use Instagram to advocate for human lookouts and encourage people to visit, interact and engage with lookouts and their spotters.

The volunteer program is one of the Forest Service’s latest efforts to transform public interest into programs capable of maintaining active lookouts. 

Andy Huntsberger, a fire management officer with the Forest Service, has led the charge in his district of the Flathead National Forest. Agency employees staff four lookouts across the Flathead, but the Forest Service also coordinates with roughly 23 volunteers to staff an additional three locations. Leif Haugen, a renowned figure in the Montana lookout community, helps organize the program, and Chuck Manning was one of the program’s early participants. Volunteers go through basic training before spending seven to 10 days stationed on a lookout at some point during the summer. All three volunteer lookouts remain active throughout the fire season. Responsible for their own food and transportation, volunteers are only as expensive as the cost of educating them. And their presence, temporary as it is, keeps the space livable.

“We’re maintaining these things with the workforce that we have there,” Huntsberger said. “We’re using them administratively to detect fire and for land management purposes.”

But even shorter stays are also possible at roughly a dozen Montana lookouts available for rent. Inspired social media followers, history buffs and overnight hikers can book stays at drive-up and hike-to locations. Many of the rentable lookouts are reserved six months out.

Kyle Stetler, a historian and archivist with the Forest Fire Lookout Association, Northwestern Montana Lookout Association’s parent organization, acknowledged that the rental lookouts often don’t pay for themselves. Restoring the lookouts to a rentable standard, he said, can be costly. 

“There’s always these details to get it into the rental program.” Stetler said, referencing a project to restore Idaho’s Skookum Butte Lookout, a cabin sitting on the Montana border west of Missoula. “It needs to have basically a pit or a vault toilet, either at the trailhead or somewhat close to the lookout.” Stetler estimates installing a bathroom could cost as much as $20,000.

And even post-repair, maintenance at remote locations is a major concern.

“They almost get loved to death,” Stetler said, noting the irony that most Montana lookouts face a slow, solitary demise. “It’s the inverse. If you don’t keep up on the maintenance on some of these lookouts that are getting rented, they’d get destroyed.”

Though Manning staffed a lookout in the 1960s and volunteered at a lookout half a century later, most of NMLA’s restored lookouts enter the rental program. He wants visitors to share the unique experience he’s been enjoying for decades.

“It’s not a normal place to go to get away from things. You’re on the top of a mountain. Nobody else is around except birds and wildlife,” Manning said. “That’s their home. You’re basically planting yourself into an environment that is strictly natural. And nature calls the shots.”

The hike up Northwest Peak marked the last of Manning’s lookout assessments for the summer. He said he looks forward to traveling again in the coming spring, with hopes that NMLA can continue “preserving some of the heritage that the next generation is going to enjoy.”

In the meantime, Manning doesn’t worry about whether the next generation will continue the work of maintaining the historical structures.

“There will always be people with a passion for lookouts,” Manning said as he drove back toward Kalispell from Northwest Peak. Manning trusts other Montanans will fall in love, just as he did.

“There’s nothing greater than having a cup of coffee on any of the lookouts that we’re repairing, to go out and watch the sunrise or the sunset,” Manning said. “But my mindset is really about restoring the lookout and repairing it, getting it into a condition that others can enjoy.”