How America’s Early Fire Towers Helped Prevent Wildfires

In August 1910, a series of forest fires burned over 3 million acres of land across Idaho, Montana and Washington state. At the time, fire suppression was already a key concern for the U.S. Forest Service, which President Teddy Roosevelt had established five years before. The devastating 1910 fires, known collectively as the Big Blowup or the Big Burn, were a significant factor in the agency’s decision to build a network of fire lookout towers.

The peak of the U.S. fire lookout system was between the 1930s and 1950s, when some 8,000 fire towers dotted the country. The standard towers were 14-by-14-foot cabins that could be 10, 50 or even 100 feet off the ground. Fire lookout workers spent solitary days watching the surrounding landscape from these cabins—an experience that writer Jack Kerouac chronicled after working as a fire lookout in 1956.

After the 1950s, the use of fire lookout towers declined due to a variety of factors, including rising air pollution that made detecting fires from towers more difficult. Many former fire towers are no longer standing, but as the number of wildfires increases due to climate change, some organizations have pushed to reopen existing towers as fire lookout points.

The first fire lookout spots weren’t always towers. Sometimes they were cabins built on high peaks or small treehouses built atop tall trees. By the 1930s, many of these lookouts followed a standardized model consisting of a 14-by-14-foot cabin on stilts. The people who lived in these lookout towers during fire season scanned the horizon during the day and reported any fires they saw so that firefighters could put them out before they got too big.

Early lookouts included both men and women. The first female fire lookout was Hallie Morse Daggett, whom the Forest Service hired in 1913. Daggett monitored California’s Klamath National Forest from the Eddy Gulch Lookout, which at the time consisted of a log cabin on a mountain peak. She reportedly spotted around 40 fires during her first season, and her promptness in reporting the fires via telephone ensured that fewer than five acres burned. 

During the Great Depression, a New Deal work program known as the Civilian Conservation Corps helped expand the fire tower system by building many new lookout towers. With the outbreak of World War II, the number of women staffing these fire towers increased. During wartime, fire lookouts had the added task of reporting all airplane activity so that officials could detect enemy aircraft.

Although the fire lookouts never identified an enemy plane, “one fire lookout in Oregon did track a Japanese incendiary balloon,” says Michael Guerin, national chairman of the Forest Fire Lookout Association. During World War II, Japan launched thousands of these “balloon bombs” toward the U.S. West Coast. After a fire lookout spotted one such balloon, Guerin says the U.S. Army defused it so it wouldn’t cause a forest fire.

After World War II, the number of active fire lookout towers began to decrease as growing air pollution made it more difficult for workers to spot fires from the towers. Guerin says the Forest Service began closing fire towers that were closer to urban areas, but even remote towers could be affected by spreading air pollution.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the Forest Service sometimes burned unused fire towers down “because there were people camping out in them and squatters and vandalism, and they were considered liabilities,” he says.

Contrary to what some believe, the United States did not replace the fire tower system with a comprehensive satellite system. The primary satellite platforms that currently track fires in the United States are not designed to provide continuous monitoring of every location, so they cannot monitor specific sites as consistently as fire lookouts can, Guerin says.

In addition, these satellites cannot always differentiate fires from other heat sources. This means that humans must interpret and investigate flagged heat sources to determine what is an active fire and what is just an area generating a lot of heat. Guerin says that when he checks these publicly available satellite feeds in the morning for the Los Angeles area, where he lives, they often flag oil refineries, factories and landfills as sources of heat.

Though the Forest Service still pays employees to monitor fire lookouts today, many of the people who staff active fire towers are now volunteers. Guerin’s organization, the Forest Fire Lookout Association, worked with the Forest Service to reopen the Bald Mountain Lookout in California’s Inyo National Forest. Every year during fire season, he and other volunteers take turns staffing the lookout.

As wildfires become more frequent in the United States, Guerin says he thinks the country needs to use every tool at its disposal to address them—including human fire lookouts.