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 captures.

What It's Like to Be Inside the Storm. Lookouts and lightning go together like bread and butter, and this week, I'm taking you inside the storm with some of my favorite audio and video recorded from Goat Peak, to explore what it's actually like to sit inside a glass box on top of a mountain that acts like a lightning rod.

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.

Most of Washington's fire lookouts I reached through stubbornness, problem-solving, and a truly unreasonable number of failed attempts. Satus and Signal Peak were different. This is a story about luck, timing, and Bigfoot. And one unforgettable June day on the Yakama Reservation.

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 nearly a century ago.