This new guide to hiking the fire lookouts of Washington’s Cascades and Olympics is the quintessential Northwest guide and will appeal to a wide range of hikers. Features of Hiking Washington’s Fire Lookouts include: 44 fire lookouts—those that feature access by trail All lookouts are accessible during the typical summer season Only lookouts that are still standing—no hiking up to a barren mound of broken concrete! Routes are not technical—hikers just need boots, trekking poles, and, probably, lunch Lookout history, anecdotes, and full-color photos throughout Each lookout description features the year it was constructed; access details, including overnight stays and winter access; location and land manager; roundtrip distance on trail; trail elevation gain; lookout’s elevation; map info; trailhead GPS coordinates; information about any permits or fees; and driving directions to the trailhead. Introductory chapters provide an overview of Washington State’s lookouts, as well as information about their upkeep, lookout architectural types, and general hiking tips, while an appendix provides an overview to a handful of additional lookouts in the state that are not hikable.

NORTHWEST.

“Fire Season both evokes and honors the great hermit celebrants of nature, from Dillard to Kerouac to Thoreau—and I loved it.” —J.R. Moehringer, author of The Tender Bar “[Connors’s] adventures in radical solitude make for profoundly absorbing, restorative reading.” —Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air Phillip Connors is a major new voice in American nonfiction, and his remarkable debut, Fire Season, is destined to become a modern classic. An absorbing chronicle of the days and nights of one of the last fire lookouts in the American West, Fire Season is a marvel of a book, as rugged and soulful as Matthew Crawford’s bestselling Shop Class as Soulcraft, and it immediately places Connors in the august company of Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, Barry Lopez, and others in the respected fraternity of hard-boiled nature writers.

The first lookouts were rustic camps on mountaintops, where men and women were stationed to keep an eye out for wildfires. As the importance of fire prevention grew, a lookout construction boom resulted in hundreds of cabins and towers being built on Oregon's high points. When aircraft and cameras became more cost-effective and efficient methods of fire detection, many old lookouts were abandoned or removed. Of the many hundreds of lookouts built in Oregon over the past 100 years, less than 175 remain, and only about half of these are still manned. However, some lookouts are being repurposed as rental cabins, and volunteers are constantly working to save endangered lookouts. This book tells the story of Oregon's fire lookouts, from their heyday to their decline, and of the effort to save the ones that are left.

This completely updated edition of the first complete guide to the cabins and fire lookouts available for rent in Oregon and Washington now covers a total of 61 properties (29 new!). Ranging from a luxurious cabin just off the road to a remote 60-foot tower deep in the wilderness, these scenic, secluded, and historic structures can be your own private place in the woods.

A page-turning memoir about a young woman's grueling, revelatory summers working alone in a remote lookout tower and her eyewitness account of the increasingly unpredictable nature of wildfire in the Canadian north. While growing up in Peace River, Alberta, Trina Moyles heard many stories of Lookout Observers--strange, eccentric types who spent five-month summers alone, climbing 100-foot high towers and watching for signs of fire in the surrounding boreal forest. How could you isolate yourself for that long? she wondered. "I could never do it," she told herself. Craving a deeper sense of purpose, she left northern Alberta to pursue a decade-long career in global humanitarian work. After three years in East Africa, and newly engaged, Trina returned to Peace River with a plan to sponsor her fiance, Akello's, immigration to Canada. Despite her fear of being alone in the woods, she applied for a seasonal lookout position and got the job. Thus begins Trina's first summer as one of a handful of lookouts scattered throughout Alberta, with only a farm dog, Holly--labeled "a domesticated wolf" by her former owners--to keep her company. While searching for smoke, Trina unravels under the pressure of a long-distance relationship--and a dawning awareness of the environmental crisis that climate change is producing in the boreal. Through megafires, lightning storms, and stunning encounters with wildlife, she learns to survive at the fire tower by forging deep connections with nature and with an extraordinary community of people dedicated to wildfire detection and combat. In isolation, she discovers a kind of self-awareness--and freedom--that only solitude can deliver. Lookout is a riveting story of loss, transformation, and belonging to oneself, layered with an eyewitness account of the destructive and regenerative power of wildfire in our northern forests.

If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature—gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to it, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us. How wild is wilderness and how wild are our experiences in it, asks Jack Turner in the pages of The Abstract Wild. His answer: not very wild. National parks and even so-called wilderness areas fall far short of offering the primal, mystic connection possible in wild places. And this is so, Turner avows, because any managed land, never mind what it's called, ceases to be wild. Moreover, what little wildness we have left is fast being destroyed by the very systems designed to preserve it. Natural resource managers, conservation biologists, environmental economists, park rangers, zoo directors, and environmental activists: Turner's new book takes aim at these and all others who labor in the name of preservation. He argues for a new conservation ethic that focuses less on preserving things and more on preserving process and "leaving things be." He takes off after zoos and wilderness tourism with a vengeance, and he cautions us to resist language that calls a tree "a resource" and wilderness "a management unit." Eloquent and fast-paced, The Abstract Wild takes a long view to ask whether ecosystem management isn't "a bit of a sham" and the control of grizzlies and wolves "at best a travesty." Next, the author might bring his readers up-close for a look at pelicans, mountain lions, or Shamu the whale. From whatever angle, Turner stirs into his arguments the words of dozens of other American writers including Thoreau, Hemingway, Faulkner, and environmentalist Doug Peacock. We hunger for a kind of experience deep enough to change our selves, our form of life, writes Turner. Readers who take his words to heart will find, if not their selves, their perspectives on the natural world recast in ways that are hard to ignore and harder to forget.

The first fire lookouts in the Glacier National Park region were simply high points atop mountain peaks with unimpeded views of the surrounding terrain. Widespread fires in the 1910s and 1920s led to the construction of more permanent lookouts, first as wooden pole structures and subsequently as a variety of one- and two-story cabin designs. Cooperating lookouts in Glacier Park, the Flathead National Forest, and the Blackfeet Indian Reservation provided coverage of forests throughout Glacier National Park. Beginning in the 1950s, many of the lookouts were decommissioned and eventually destroyed. This volume tells the story of the rise and fall of the extensive fire lookout network that protected Glacier National Park during times of high fire danger, including lookouts still operating today.

Guide includes trailhead directions, route statistics, and photos for 30 lookouts located in the Cabinet, Flathead, Mission, Salish, Swan, and Whitefish mountain ranges. Lookouts in Glacier National Park are also included.

The "Necessary House," otherwise known as an outhouse or toilet, is an essential part of the accommodations needed to set up a safe and efficient environment for the people who staff fire lookouts. They must be neither too close to nor too far from the lookout. In some areas, because of lack of space and/or rocky terrain, they are built over the edge of a cliff. While most are of wood construction, some are of stone, concrete, or man-made molded materials. This volume contains photos of outhouses along with photos of the lookouts they are paired with, and the surrounding environment. Also included is a short rhyme depicting some aspect of each site.