fire season field notes from a wilderness lookout

Indeed, the state has already responded to more than 640 wildland fires this year alone, including 135 in the last week. The fire is a “stark reminder that shortly after the snow melts and the rain has gone away, that the fuels are still susceptible to ignitions,” he said.

“It will only be a short matter of time before all of those fuels dry out, provide the fuel loading, and potentially have large and damaging wildfires.”įor evidence, Tyler said, look no further than the Nob fire, which ignited last week in the San Bernardino National Forest and quickly grew beyond 200 acres. “Don’t let the rain and the snow fool you,” said Joe Tyler, director and fire chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. In fact, it might serve only to delay the start of fire season. Newland, James D.But while the remnants of rain and snow should help keep the state’s vegetation moist longer, there are no guarantees that it will prevent the now-lush landscape from burning, officials said. Yahr, Warren Smokechaser (memoirs – Clearwater NF, Idaho) Wood, Catherine Palomar Teepee to Telescope (history) Waite, Barbara Ann Elsie’s Mountain (memoirs – Palomar Mtn) Maclean, Norman A River Runs Through It (fiction) Kerouac, Jack Desolation Angels (fiction) Palomar Mountain Past and Present (history)Ĭollins, Phillip Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout (memoirs- Gila NF, N.M.) And Norman Maclean, in his great book A River Runs Through It, wrote a lightly fictionalized story about his one summer as a lookout on the Selway Forest in northern Idaho, over the Bitterroot Divide from his home in Missoula, Montana.įrom Fire Season – Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout by Phillip Connors – HarperCollins Publishers 2011,īecker, Marion F. He wrote two essays on the subject and made a fire lookout the main character in his novel Black Sun, the book he claimed he loved most among all his works. During the 1960s and ‘70s the old raconteur Edward Abbey worked as a lookout in various postings, from Glacier National Park to the Grand Canyon. He secured the job through a recommendation by his friend the poet Gary Snyder, who worked summers on two different lookouts in the same national forest and wrote several fine poems about the experience. Jack Kerouac worked a summer on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades in 1956, an experience he mined for parts of two novels, The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels. Nonetheless, when the last lookout tower is retired, our stories will live on.

Ninety percent of American lookout towers have been decommissioned, and only a few hundred of us remain, mostly in the West and Alaska. The work has changed remarkably little over the course of the past century, except in its increasing scarcity.

If there’s a better job anywhere on the planet, I’d like to know what it is.

Fire season field notes from a wilderness lookout