“Nobody thought Harkness would go,” Ash Phillips told me plainly. The Mount Harkness Fire Lookout tower was, after all, built atop a sparsely vegetated peak of an ancient cinder cone volcano—not exactly an inviting location for blazes. In 2019, Phillips, serving as an historical architect for the National Park Service, spearheaded its restoration project in California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park. The historic two-story structure built in 1931 holds a couple claims to fame in the niche world of fire lookout culture—it is where Edward Abbey completed his self-described “frankly antisocial” memoir, Desert Solitaire. But after 90 years in the great outdoors, the tower was showing signs of decay. So a team of dedicated volunteers painstakingly returned it to its former glory, hiking each morning up the steep peak and using cured wood from local downed trees, airlifted via helicopter, to match the original building materials.
Only two years after the labor of love was completed, the icon of fire lookout construction was incinerated in California’s single-largest wildfire to date. The Dixie Fire, which burned nearly one million acres, left the trees surrounding the structure intact but reduced the tower to a pile of ashes. “It was just insane,” Phillips said, comparing the fire’s approach to that of a blowtorch.
Despite the fact that wildfire has become an unavoidable presence in many of our lives, fire lookout towers are slipping away. Many of these towers were built during the New Deal Era as part of the Works Progress Administration, which means that they are all nearing a century’s worth of wear and tear. But there’s little political or institutional will to invest in their renewal, given technological advancements in fire detection in recent decades. The work of fire surveillance has gone the way of most everything—increasingly automated. In Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, for instance, $20 million in funding is allocated for satellites meant to detect wildfires, and $10 million is for “real-time monitoring equipment” like sensors and cameras.
Historical fire lookouts have two purposes these days. On the one hand, those who choose to spend extended time up in these towers in remote wilderness are tasked with scanning the horizon looking for smoke and helping coordinate firefighting efforts. They also, importantly, are emissaries of the park, interacting with visitors who hike up to their stations. Some of the lookouts are equipped with an Osborne Fire Finder—a mechanical sighting device that allows the lookouts to pinpoint the approximate coordinates of a wildfire without using any electricity. When I stumbled upon Mount Harkness on a weeklong backpacking trip back in 2015, the lookout showed me how to use it, while pointing out the various different mountain ranges visible from the summit.