Wildfire watchmen: the mountain tower where lookouts spot blazes | Climate crisis
Despite advances in fire-monitoring technology, volunteers remain a crucial defense amid worsening fire seasons
by Gabrielle CanonEvery 10 minutes, when the alarm on his phone goes off, Rory Hewitt carefully scans the horizon. Perched atop the east peak of Mt Tamalpais, one of the highest points in the San Francisco Bay Area, he watches the city towers that gleam in the distance, the fog curling and coasting above the bay, and Marin county sprawling more than 2,571ft beneath him. To the south, the ancient redwood trees of Muir Woods, a blanket of green, stretch to the sea, and to the north-west, yellowing hillsides seem to poke through the canopy, bleeding all the way into Sonoma county.
Satisfied after circling a gangway and looking out in each direction, Hewitt comes back inside the small square structure built directly on to the peak where he serves as a Marin county fire lookout. For now, there were no signs of smoke amid the wispy clouds and afternoon haze.
“A boring day is a good day,” Hewitt says with a smile.
Hewitt has spent the last six summers volunteering his time to keep his eyes on the forest and coastal cities below. Stationed at the Gardner tower, he and dozens of other volunteers play an essential part in the region’s fire suppression strategy, guarding against fast-spreading flames the same way people posted atop this peak have for more than a century.
There are only a few hundred lookout programs left in the US, and, even amid advances in fire-detection technology, they are a crucial tool in battling the growing number of wildfires igniting each year across the west.
“With the watershed being so remote and being out of cell range, even in recent times, they help us pick up the fire sooner,” said Todd Overshiner, a captain in the Marin county fire department. “In the initial attack part of the fire, when we first see the fire start, having the lookouts is still a very important program.”
The Gardner tower sits atop Mt Tamalpais, one of the highest peaks in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The Gardner tower was completed in 1936 out of native stone pulled from the mountain it sits upon. Even as the cities below grew and changed, the lookout stayed almost exactly the same. Many of the tools used to spot and identify ignitions in the forests and drying chaparral are also still like those used by the first lookouts. The interior is equipped for overnight stays, complete with a small bed and a compact kitchen stocked with cookwares left behind by those who were once stationed there long term, but now most shifts end in the evening.
There are some modern conveniences – the radio, the wifi, some cameras – but the most important piece of equipment is a kind of alidade called the Osborne Firefinder that was designed in the early 1900s. The surveying tool can pinpoint a fire with precision, gives an accurate reading on how far away a fire is burning and requires no power to run.
An alidade surveying tool allows volunteers to precisely pinpoint a fire’s location.
Hewitt has spotted four fires as a lookout, all of them small. A colleague posted at Dickson, Marin’s second lookout, atop Barnabe Mountain, once helped stop a big blaze roaring over hillsides out of Lagunitas by catching it quickly, he says.
Volunteers at the watchtowers take five to 10 shifts a season, which in Marin lasts from mid-May through November. Hewitt, who works full-time in the software industry, works remotely from the lookout during his weekday shifts.
He was inspired to sign up after seeing a video online about the experience, made by the lookout Gary Yost, that captured the quiet splendor – an added perk of the job.
The volunteers scout for any sign of fire. There are often vehicle and structure fires within the cities, but the real danger lies in the vegetation and dehydrated hillsides to the north-west where fires could spread quickly without early detection. There are also concerns for those who live in the homes tucked into the mountainsides, with only tight, winding roads to enable escape should anything ignite.
“From up here you aren’t going to see fire, you are going to see smoke,” Hewitt says. “Maybe just a little puff behind a ridge.”
Top: Rory Hewitt keeps a lookout for wildfire ignitions. Bottom: wildlife on Mt Tamalpais.
If they spot something, the watchmen pass along as much detail as possible to firefighters on the ground, including where the smoke is and what it looks like. Is it black? Gray? Wispy? Billowing? Every detail makes a difference, and the volunteer crew has been trained to have a keen eye. In an environment where fog rolls along the tree tops and clouds drift low in the sky, smoke can be surprisingly hard to spot.
“When you have done it for a while, you know what things look like and you know what things should look like,” Hewitt says. “So, you are not looking – you are just seeing.”
Hewitt searches for smoke roughly the same way lookouts have for the last hundred years. Their numbers have dwindled over the decades, replaced by high-tech cameras and satellites, and many of the mountaintop stations have fallen into disrepair. Some have been consumed by the fires they once served to detect and were never rebuilt. Others have been repurposed as vacation rentals.
But the old way of doing things still serves a purpose, especially as wildfires get worse across the west every year. Most of the lookouts in the US are volunteers, but some are paid, including Philip Connors, who quit his Wall Street Journal editing job decades ago and took up the lookout life in New Mexico, working for the US Forest Service.
“The techno-fetishists always dream of replacing us [but] we can do things for firefighters on the ground that a camera attached to a drone just can’t do,” Connors told the Guardian in 2016. He’s still there. Like Connors, many lookouts commit to the work for years, learning the nuances of the landscape that help them become even more attuned to trouble than the new advances in technology are.
The tower is complete with equipment, kitchen and a bed. There are only a few hundred lookout programs left in the US.
“We have not yet found any technology that can cover what the human eye can cover,” says Christopher Rivera, a director with the Forest Fire Lookout Association who serves and organizes in northern California. “Yes, it is eye-straining and time-consuming,” he adds. “But there isn’t anything else that can cover what the human eye can see. That’s the reason human lookouts are still in service today.”
The Forest Fire Lookout Association, an organization started in the 1990s that now has chapters across the country and around the world, has fought to preserve the lookouts’ legacy and their role in fire suppression.
Rivera, a retired police officer, says there’s a great need for the lookouts but acknowledges that it’s been a battle to keep them in operation. He is working to increase the numbers of fire towers and those who are willing to watch from them.
“There are so many people from all walks of life that want to do something and we have not tapped that resource in our communities,” he says.
A view of the Bay Area spreads out below Gardner tower.
Hewitt has come to appreciate the stillness atop the mountain, even as hikers climb over rocks below the lookout and the treetops sway in the Bay Area breeze. Outside the lookout, turkey vultures glide over treetops looking for their midday meals and hikers amble over rocks to marvel at the view. Hewitt has seen wildlife – from bobcats to rattlesnakes – undisturbed in their own habitats. He pours water into the shallow divots of rocks on the peak for the butterflies, which are plentiful up there in the summer months.
Sometimes, Hewitt says, he stays through the night, and the moon shines in through the wraparound windows like a spotlight.
“It’s beautiful,” he says, noting that the work feels important and meaningful. “Yeah, I could have volunteered to pick up trash on the side of the road,” he adds. “But instead I volunteered to do this. It’s good for people, and it’s good for Marin.”
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