Lookout preservation
Hidden under Napa Point and overlooking Swan Lake to the northwest, Chuck Manning and Doug Berglund are hard at work repairing the Little Napa fire lookout. The building is a small square room with windows on all sides, raised about 20 feet by wooden crossbeams and accessible via the stairs Manning and Berglund have just finished constructing.
Manning is director of the Northwest Montana chapter of the Forest Fire Lookout Association, a nonprofit dedicated to maintaining and restoring the thousands of lookouts built between 1910 and 1940. Montana once had 639 lookouts in use. Today there are 12 in the Flathead National Forest and about 130 statewide still in use, 40 of which are staffed for fire detection.
Little Napa is one of seven similar projects Manning’s FFLA chapter is tackling this summer. The group is self-funded and works with the National Park Service, the state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation and the Kootenai and Flathead national forests. Sometimes the agencies provide building materials while Manning’s group supplies the labor.
While some lookouts only need small repairs, others, like Little Napa, require structural fixes that demand more time and energy. Manning also helps assess beat-up lookout buildings to see if they’re worth fixing to later be used as rentals.
Forest fire lookouts like Little Napa have a long history in the Flathead Valley.
Following a disastrous fire season in 1910, the Flathead National Forest followed the national trend of strengthening fire observation and suppression capabilities. By 1937, 147 lookouts had been built.
Many of the historic L-4 design lookouts, like Little Napa, came from the Superior Building Company of Columbia Falls, Kathyrn McKay writes in “Trails of the Past.” The lookouts were packaged and sold in kits that two or three men could assemble in a short time.
F.H. Stoltze Land & Lumber Co., donated land for lookout sites on the forest near Whitefish, and the city of Whitefish also paid the salary of Forest Service lookouts in the late 1930s.
As World War II broke out, the era of fire lookouts began to fade away. The Flathead began using air patrol rather than manned lookouts to detect fires, and by 1954 only 40 of the original 147 lookouts were staffed. This number dropped to 21 by 1966, and by 1990 fewer than five lookouts were regularly occupied, according to McKay.
Air patrol and satellite surveillance have made the job of a lookout less necessary than it was a century ago, but Manning insists they still have a place in managing forest fires. Lookouts can still observe an area during bad weather events, when it becomes impractical for aerial observation, and lookouts are often used as radio relays to pass information through some of the more desolate wilderness.
“Of course we’re probably biased, but there’s a belief that the eyes on the forest are very important when it comes to fire,” Manning said, making note that he has his reasons for placing sentimental value on the lookouts.
Little Napa is a different design than the Thoma Lookout, located on Mount Hefty next to the Canadian border, which Manning staffed in 1963 following his graduation from Flathead High School in Kalispell.
It was his first job out of school, and he spent the fire season alone in the lookout keeping a watchful eye for smoke. Fortunately for him, it was a wet summer that year. He had no lightning strike fires to report, and the one human-caused fire on the North Fork didn’t turn out to be much of an event.
Despite it being a slow summer, Manning said he wouldn’t trade it for anything.
“It was one of those experiences that I’ll never forget. There’s nothing like that adrenaline rush when a storm comes through and there’s lightning all around you,” he said. “It’s a fantastic experience and kind of gets in your blood.”