THE LAY OF THE LAND
The Center for Land Use Interpretation Newsletter
Spring 1999
You are not wasting your time if you are someplace where you have never been. -Damon Farragut

Monuments of Displacement:
The Aerial Photographs of Bill DuBois

The Geographical Center of the
Lower 48:
First in a Thematic Extrapolation Series Examining Centers

CLUI Hosts Visiting Austrians:
Two Day Tour Highlights Art in the Desert and Tests Clui's FM Transmitter

Fire Lookout:
Life Atop a Unique Aerial Structure

Firetowers Through Time

Books, Noted

Firetowers Through Time

The rallying cry of modernist architecture, that form should follow function, receives perhaps its greatest expression not in the works of twentieth century architects, but in the trial and error methods used to develop utilitarian buildings. Fire lookouts, built in remote high altitude locations and designed to withstand extreme winds, blizzards and earthquakes, are some of the most improbable utilitarian structures. These remote mountaintop buildings, some complete wood frame houses hoisted atop spindly towers, others little more than a seat on top of an improbably high tree, have all been defined by the landscape they rest upon and the purpose they serve.

Icicle Ridge, just west of Leavenworth, Washington.

Photo from Fire Lookouts of the Northwest


The earliest fire lookouts of the late nineteenth century consisted of little more than a tent and a tree, which the lookout would scale several times a day. Eventually, crow's nests were nailed to the top of these trees, and by the 1920s the federal government began a massive building campaign, establishing a network of more substantial structures across the hilltops of America. Since the 60s, aerial surveillance, video equipment and infrared sensing devices, as well as a "let it burn" policy has drastically reduced the number of lookouts.

The romance of living atop a lonely mountain, and the enforced solitude and contemplation of the job, has inspired a number of writers to work as fire lookouts. The season after Gary Snyder's stay in a fire lookout shack on Sourdough Mountain in the Cascades, Jack Kerouac took up residence in a tower across the lake on Desolation Peak in the summer of 1956. Kerouac's Dharma Bums, inspired by Snyder's Buddhism and mountaineering life, ends with the protagonist (Kerouac) falling to his knees on the floor of the lookout shack in a prayer of thanks for the beauty of nature that surrounds him.