Fire Lookouts Suffering Towering Blow Of Nearly 300 Towers Once Staffed In Panhandle Mountains, Only 11 In Use Now

Lookout towers once topped nearly every mountain peak in North Idaho, standing silent guard over vast forests.

But after more than 60 years of service, the wooden sentinels and those who manned them have met an enemy worse than any wildfire: technology.

Computers and airplanes have taken over as the forest watchmen.

“Lookouts have long been part of the Forest Service program, but with the new technology we just don’t need that many anymore,” said Mark Vore, a Coeur d’Alene-based fire dispatcher for the Idaho Panhandle National Forest.

“And these days we can’t afford to pay someone to sit in a tower all summer.”

That’s not necessarily so at Priest Lake. Amateur fire watchers are plentiful here and can be had for 12 bucks a day. Two years ago 60 people applied to man one tower vacancy.

The Idaho Panhandle was once the mecca of lookouts with nearly 300 towers strewn across the mountains from Priest Lake to St. Maries.

“No place else in the world ever had more lookouts per square mile than the North Idaho Panhandle,” said Ray Kresek, a Spokane expert on lookout tower lore.

Today, only about 11 towers remain in use on the 2.6 million acres of the Idaho Panhandle National Forest. Six are in the Selkirk Mountains around Priest Lake.

The heyday for the lookouts began during the Depression of the 1930s, according to Kresek’s book, “Fire Lookouts of the Northwest.”

That’s when President Theodore Roosevelt sent the Civil Conservation Corps into the woods to build the towers.

Crates of lumber were packed in on mules and the towers were erected. The lookouts who manned them were also the firefighters, walking miles to extinguish blazes they spotted.

Lookouts today still rely on a tool called the Osborne Fire Finder that was perfected in 1934. The gadget looks like a giant compass, about two feet in diameter. It’s mounted in the center of the lookout tower, and has a map of the forest in the center and two view finders.

Lookouts rotate the view finders toward smoke, find the location on the map and radio the ranger district.

But forest rangers now have access to an automated lightning detection system.

The machine counts and pinpoints the thousands of lightning strikes that can occur during one storm.

“The drawback is it doesn’t tell you if there is a fire, only that there was a strike,” said Gary Weber, a Priest Lake fire officer who oversees the district’s lookouts. “Lookouts are out there 24 hours a day to monitor that. Planes aren’t.”

To save some of the historic structures, the U.S. Forest Service now rents the towers to campers.

About 19 towers in Montana and Idaho are on the rental system. One near Newport, Wash., could be available next summer.

, DataTimes