Longtime fire lookout relies on trained eyes

PENDLETON, Ore. – Clayton Weir has a job that would make many people jealous. He works from home. He makes his own hours. He has a beautiful view and, most of the time, it is pretty low stress.

Weir is a fire lookout on the Umatilla National Forest. He spends the summer alone – except for his trusty dog Jack – on a high mountaintop overlooking ridge upon ridge of forested wilderness.

“I enjoy the quiet, peaceful solitude,” the 66-year-old man from Battle Ground, Wash., said. “All that is nice.”

The lookout he mans is south of Dayton, Wash., and nearly straight east from Walla Walla.

It’s called Table Rock Lookout. The U.S. Forest Service started it in 1929 with a cabin just south of where the lookout is today. The live-in cabin, which sits on top of a concrete base, was built in 1949. It sits between the Mill Creek watershed to the west and the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness to the east.

Weir can see Walla Walla and wheat fields past the ridges to the west. To the east he can see the Wallowa Mountains and, on a clear day, all the way to the Seven Devils Mountains in Idaho.

He is about 10 miles from the Bluewood ski area and an hour’s drive from Dayton. On his days off he heads to Walla Walla to wash laundry and take a shower.

His neighbors include a pack of coyotes that yip some nights, a bear down the way – Weir described him as a “little fellow” – and the occasional elk.

“People ask, ‘Aren’t you afraid to live out here by yourself?’ ” Weir said. He doesn’t think much of it. “I think the idea of living alone is foreign to most people.”

Weir isn’t totally alone. He checks in with the La Grande dispatch center four times a day. He calls his wife, Stephanie, on a cell phone about once a day – a new cell tower at Bluewood has greatly increased reception – and tourists come up to check out the lookout every so often.

Weir doesn’t mind talking to people. He was an elementary school teacher most of his life. In the fall, he used to trade his summer of silence for a frantic classroom full of fifth-graders.

“I’d get a culture shock, going from this setting to all of a sudden with kids and everything that goes along with that,” he said. “It was a change of pace.”

Weir was 21 when he first manned a fire lookout. He worked for two summers in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington while attending graduate school. One year his wife accompanied him.

Since then he has been in lookouts at Mount Hood, Kanisku National Forest in North Idaho and now the Umatilla National Forest.

During his early years as a teacher he spent the summers as a lookout. When he and his wife raised their family, child care duties took over his summers. After the kids were grown and out of the house, he returned to lookouts. Now that he is retired, he still enjoys the part-time job.

The most exciting time he ever had was during a big lightning storm in Idaho. In that storm, he spotted 21 fires.

“That was the biggest storm I’ve seen,” he said.

Those fires burned 43,000 acres.

For the most part, Weir’s job is laid back. He gets up at around 6:30 or 7 a.m., then starts work at 9:30 by calling in on the radio.

About every 10 minutes Weir takes his binoculars and walks the porch around the lookout. It is easier to see outside the five windows on each side of the square building.

Weir has trained his eyes to spot smoke in the Blue Mountains, where its namesake haze often looks like smoke.

“You spend a good part of your day just looking and watching,” Weir said.