Fire Lookout Friday

All I want is an ice cream cone.

Nearly twenty years after scribbling “Desolation” into a notebook, I finally set out for one of Washington’s most legendary fire lookouts. It took me two attempts to get there. Jack Kerouac spent 63 days up there. I got fifteen minutes. A tale of border crossings, wildfire smoke, and the realization you’re in the worst place imaginable to outrun a lightning storm.

What lightning leaves behind. For the last two weeks, I've been talking about lightning. What it's like to ride out a storm from a fire lookout, and what our eyes miss inside a lightning flash. This season, I hunted down three different trees hit by lightning strikes I witnessed from Goat Peak. Come join me to see what happens when lightning hits a tree and what it leaves behind.

What happens inside a lightning flash? During an extraordinary August 2024 storm from Goat Peak, I realized I'd been watching something far more complicated than I understood. This week, we slow lightning down to see what our eyes miss and explore everything happening inside a lightning flash in just a fraction of a second.

Visit my substack page, to see the videos and frame-by-frame sequences of some pretty incredible lightning cap...

For more than a century, fire lookouts have watched over the American West. With the rise of technology, including satellites, cameras, lightning detection, and AI, human lookouts have been called antiquated, obsolete, and destined to disappear.

This week on Fire Lookout Friday: a brief history of how fire lookouts came to be and why human fire lookouts are still relevant and important today.

Fire lookout work requires you to pay attention. As it turns out, so do horses and living off-grid. After another intense summer at Goat Peak, I've been thinking about the strange life I've assembled and why all of it seems to ask the same thing of me.

This week on Fire Lookout Friday: some end-of-season musings about presence, ponies, and scooping manure.

Once upon a time, hundreds of fire lookouts stood on mountaintops across Washington. Many are long gone, including the fire lookout on War Creek Ridge, high above the Twisp River. Join me on a steep climb up a nearly vanished trail, following breadcrumbs of history along the way, including the story of a tough-as-nails Methow cowboy named Cliff Libby.

Fire lookout life isn't just smoke on the horizon, bearings on the fire finder, and radio traffic. It's also about developing a relationship with a place. And with the neighbors who share the summit.

This is a story about a threatened tree, a raucous corvid with an extraordinary memory, and what happens when you stay in one place long enough to notice the relationships between things.

When I unlock the Goat Peak fire lookout each summer, I'm not just opening a fire lookout. I'm stepping into nearly a century of stories. Log books. Historical photographs. Osborne panoramas. Names scratched into the ceiling hatch by generations of lookouts.

Join me for a walk through Goat Peak's remarkable living history, and discover the surprising ways today's lookouts still share the same mountain with the people who kept watch ...

Six seasons on the same mountain, and the questions don't really change. What do you actually do up there? Don't you get bored? How does a thousand pounds of groceries get to a 7,000-foot summit?

This week, straight from the catwalk at Goat Peak, I'm answering the questions I hear most from visitors, including what nobody ever thinks to ask about: the sleepless nights, the Murphy's Law of mountain breaks, and why staffing Goat Peak ...

Some places stay with you because of the destination. Others stay with you because of everything in between. Dodger Point turned into one of those rare adventures where the fire lookout almost became secondary to the journey itself.

This week's story is about a 40-mile odyssey into the Olympics, the remarkable rebirth of one of the Pacific Northwest's greatest rivers, and why some places have a magic all their own.

For five summers at Goat Peak, Slate Peak has been a familiar silhouette on my northwest horizon. Fifteen miles away, but always there. This past winter, the 70-year-old tower collapsed, and the ridgeline has been empty ever since.

This week's story is about what it feels like to lose a place you didn't realize you depended on. A full moon visit in 2017, a sea of clouds in 2019, the gutting reality of standing in the wreckage two we...

By the summer of 2022, Lookout Mountain had spent several years sitting quietly above the Methow Valley. Shutters closed. Doors locked. This is a story about what happens when an old fire lookout wakes up again. Four unforgettable days over the Fourth of July weekend filled with old logbooks, northern lights, spectacular thunderstorms, more than a hundred visitors, and the simple joy of watching a historic fire lookout remember wha...

A few weeks ago, vandals severely damaged the historic High Rock fire lookout just as a decade-long restoration project was nearing completion. But this week's story isn't really about the vandalism. It's about what happened next.

This week, I'm sharing stories of High Rock, Lookout Mountain, Columbia Breaks, and the remarkable community of volunteers who quietly spend thousands of hours keeping Washington's historic fire lookouts s...

Washington's lowest elevation standing fire lookout sits hidden on one of the largest military installations in the world. The problem? Almost nobody on base seems to know it’s there. This week's story is about a fire lookout that took me two attempts, three trips to Range Control, a drive through artillery fields, and a military police escort to prove it actually existed.

North Twentymile is the Washington fire lookout that took me more failed attempts to reach than any other. Fire. Smoke. Heat. Snow. All caused four years of failure before I finally stood on the summit. And now, I keep returning. 

This week’s story is about one of Washington’s most unique fire lookout sites, it’s rare D-6 cupola, a young mustang’s first fire lookout, and the strange way certain places ge...

A cattle dog who grew up on a mountain. A one-eyed Mustang from Oregon. A Quarab mare who doesn't have time for your produce aisle. And a five-year-old South Steens Mustang who could pass for his big brother's mini-me. Eight episodes in, it's time to properly introduce the herd—and the story of how horses and fire lookouts turned out to be more intertwined than I ever expected.

A Montana-based watchdog group. A federal judge. An 80-year-old fire lookout listed on the National Register of Historic Places, restored and then ordered removed. This is the story of Green Mountain, the lawsuit that nearly took it down, and the larger question underneath all of it: what does wilderness actually mean? And who gets the last word?