From top to bottom: Sierra Buttes Lookout on the Pacific Crest Trail in California; Watchman Lookout Station at Crater Lake, Oregon; a view from the Sierra Buttes Lookout; Huckleberry Lookout in Glacier National Park, Montana; Dickson Lookout in Lagunitas, California; Apgar Lookout in Glacier National Park, Montana; a view from Apgar Lookout; Campo Santo’s visit to the Crane Flat Lookout in Yosemite National Park, California; a view inside the currently-staffed Huckleberry Lookout; and a view inside the now-disused Sierra Buttes Lookout.
LOOKOUTS WE HAVE KNOWN
There are hundreds of fire lookout towers across the United States. Some of them are still in use, with an actual fire lookout sitting inside every day watching for fires, but that gets rarer every year. The rise of satellite communication and the Internet means most fire lookout duty in 2015 is performed digitally through webcams, and the towers themselves have been shuttered or turned into cabins for hikers.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t go visit them! When you’re making a video game that centers around a lookout tower, you go and visit them a lot, even on vacations. Over the development of Firewatch, members of the team have visited about a half dozen lookouts across the western United States, and snapped tons of reference photos. Some of them can be seen above. Hopefully we’ll share more in a future post!
Reference-material-gathering aside, the biggest thing I’ve learned is this: If you’re out on a day hike in a part of the world that has a fire lookout tower, always go to the lookout tower:
The view will be ridiculous. They usually take bit of a climb, but they were built to give the person inside watching for fires the biggest, grandest view possible. Some of the best views I’ve ever seen when out hiking, I’ve seen by taking a few hours out of a day trip to go up to a nearby fire lookout.
No two lookout towers are alike. This might sound obvious, but it’s not something I had thought about until we started making the game. Some towers are up on big wooden stilts like Henry’s lookout in Firewatch (read Jane’s blog post on building Henry’s tower here), but many are on foundations of rock, brick, or cement, some are built into the side of the mountain. Some feel like cozy log cabin bungalows, some look like small castles built into the rock, and others are metal, sparse and seem like they’d look more at home full of prison guards than fire lookouts.
Some lookouts can be rented as cabins for overnight stays. I don’t think anyone on the team has actually spent the night in a lookout yet, but we discovered that you can. Many National and State Parks with decommissioned fire lookouts have converted them into cabins or campsites which you can reserve through their website.
If you want to find a lookout tower near you, the best starting place is the Forest Fire Lookout Association website. They have a huge directory of lookout towers, a great starter list of which ones you can reserve and stay the night in, and for the truly dedicated, a list of available fire lookout jobs.