Fire Lookout Friday: The Beginning
The journey to visit Washington’s last standing fire lookouts
I guess it makes sense, for my first Fire Lookout Friday, to start way back where it all began.
It was January 2014, and the Methow Valley of North Central Washington State was having an uncharacteristically low-snow winter. Only a small fraction of the normally expansive ski trail network was open, and I was a bit restless. So I did what any self-respecting map nerd does when the snow lets them down, I pulled out a map.
I should also tell you a little about my dad, because he’s somewhat responsible for all of this.
He didn’t drag me on a lot of hikes growing up, but he was always hiking. Constantly. Obsessively, some might say. He’s one of the most prolific peakbaggers in the country with 3,457 logged ascents on Peakbagger.com, putting him 58th in rank out of 34,902 users (as of April 16, 2026). If you’re not familiar with peakbagging, it’s exactly what it sounds like: hikers and climbers and others attempt to reach high points, often on a published list, then they log them, find a new list, then log those, and wonder why they have no more weekends. My dad is a map and list geek of the highest order, and I mean that with complete admiration and only a little bit of horror.
Even though I didn’t hike much with him as a kid, I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. When I graduated from Purdue and moved to Seattle in 2000, I was instantly captivated by the mountains and found myself with a new, somewhat obsessive hobby of my own. You guessed it. Peakbagging.
So there I was in January 2014, staring at a map of the Methow and the surrounding Okanogan landscape, when I started noticing something. Fire lookout icons. Lots of them. Scattered across the high points. I hadn’t thought much about them before, but I had visited a few fire lookouts in Washington State already—Granite, High Rock, and Shriner Peak—and I was curious.
My phone rang. It was my dad, calling to see what I was up to for the weekend. I had to laugh. There we both were, at that very moment, bent over our respective maps geeking for weekend destinations. I told him about the fire lookout icons and that I was thinking of heading up to the Buck Mountain fire lookout near Loup Loup Pass. He told me to be safe and to call him from the top.
On January 17th, I pointed my trusty old Jeep Cherokee toward Loup Loup Pass and made my first visit to the Buck Mountain fire lookout. With thin snow, I was able to drive to within two miles of the summit, then I donned snowshoes for the remainder of the trek. The road wound up through beautiful thick forest that hid the lookout until the very last moment, and when I finally reached the top, I called my dad.
“Right on!” he said. And then: “You should visit all of the lookouts in the Methow.”
Hmmmm…
Just like that, the seed was planted. A goal to visit the Methow Valley lookouts quickly grew into visiting all of them in Okanogan County, which is home to more still-standing historic lookouts than any other county in Washington State. And then, because I clearly inherited more than just a map obsession, the goal morphed into visiting all of the lookouts across the entire state.
I had accidentally stumbled into not only a great peakbagging project, but the epicenter of an extraordinary piece of history.
Then the fires came.
The fire seasons of 2014 and 2015 changed things. The Carlton and Okanogan Complex fires tore through the landscape, and the 2015 Beaver Lake Fire nearly took Buck Mountain with it. The beautiful forest I’d walked through that January was reduced to matchsticks. The lookout survived, barely, with a scorched leg that was later repaired. Watching those fires from the valley made something click. These structures were vulnerable. Many were 70 to 100 years old, standing quietly on remote summits. How long would they remain? What if I missed the opportunity to see them?
In July 2017, I decided in earnest to visit and photograph every remaining historic fire lookout in Washington. Along the way I met some remarkable people. Eric Willhite, who has likely visited more lookout sites than anyone in the State and documents them meticulously on his website; Craig Willis, the first documented person to complete the full list; and Paul Michelson, who followed, the two of them creating what is known in the lookout community as the SLOW list (Standing Lookouts of Washington). It’s a Peakbagger list, it’s a little controversial—as most things in the lookout community are—and it consumed the next two years of my life.
Between July 2017 and July 2019, I traveled to every corner of Washington, from the rainy Olympics to the dry Okanogan Highlands, from the North Cascades to the Blue Mountains, visiting the remaining 81 lookouts I hadn’t yet seen. When it was all done, I had tallied some impressive stats:
546.3 hiking and biking miles
18,581 driving miles
137,687 feet climbed
34 miles paddled
70 lookouts visited solo
15 bears, 1 mountain lion, 3 skunks, 1 pine marten, 2 moose
And my first adventure dog, Jake, came with me to 51 of those lookouts before he passed away at the age of 13 in January 2019, only months before I finished. I’d like to think he knew I had it from there.
The most anticlimactic finish in history.
On July 1, 2019, I was set to climb the ladder to the summit of Mount Pilchuck and become the 3rd person—and first woman—to complete Washington’s SLOW list.
You’d think this would be an epic, well-orchestrated celebration. It was not.
Pilchuck is one of the most visited fire lookouts in the entire state. Thousands of people hike it every summer. It had become something of a running joke among my friends that I, the person visiting every fire lookout in Washington, had never once been to one of the most famous ones. I’d saved it deliberately. It felt right that the last one should be the one nobody could believe I’d skipped.
Before Pilchuck, I had just a handful left. My dad, who had been following this journey with barely-contained excitement for two years, flew up from LA to join me for the final push. Together we visited the last lookouts I had remaining over on the Colville: Johnny George, Whitestone, Lynx, Grizzly, Gold, and Strawberry. I will forever hold in my heart, the memories of that trip with my dad.
I planned to finish with Pilchuck the next evening after work. Two friends would join us, including Ian, who had come along on a few of the more sufferfest-style lookout adventures with me and was eager to be part of the celebration.
My dad delayed his flight home by 24 hours. We were ready. It was going to be perfect.
I turned the key in my Jeep.
Nothing.
I turned it again. And again. My bombproof Jeep Cherokee, the vehicle that had carried me down rutted forest roads, up ridiculously rocky roads, and to every far-flung place in the state for two years without complaint, was completely, stubbornly, magnificently dead. I had just driven it 30 miles into the Colville backcountry the day before.
Well, I told it quietly. At least you did this in front of my house.
I was gutted. We just had to make it to Pilchuck while my dad was here. I called Ian. He said he’d drive.
What I did not fully appreciate, and I say this with complete affection, is that Ian is an absolutely terrible driver. He doesn’t drive much. This was evident immediately when he merged onto the freeway to the cacophony of blaring horns, and settled in at a comfortable 40 miles per hour while traffic whipped past us on both sides. My dad and I sat in the backseat, sharing the quiet, mutual horror of two people who know better than to say anything.
Ian had also entered the wrong destination. Instead of the Mount Pilchuck trailhead, we were being navigated to the Centennial Trail Pilchuck Trailhead some 30 miles to the southwest. We didn’t figure this out until we had left the highway and were winding down unfamiliar back roads, wondering where in the hell we were going. Mount Pilchuck loomed almost tauntingly, far in the distance.
Now is a good time to mention that my dad is a planner. A capital-P Planner. He does not love it when the plan changes. By this point we were nearly two hours behind schedule, it was almost 6pm, and we were nowhere near the Pilchuck trailhead. The silence in that car had texture.
Once we got pointed in the right direction, Ian drove a painstaking crawl up the rocky road to the trailhead. I could feel my dad’s anxiety. I missed my Jeep desperately.
It was after 7:30pm when we finally hit the trail. My dad was 71 at the time, but thanks to decades of hiking and legs of steel, he had zero trouble keeping pace on the 2.7-mile, 2,300-foot climb. Somehow, all four of us made it to the top by 9pm. The long summer light had saved us and we still had just enough daylight to pop a bottle of champagne, eat some snacks, take a few photos, and enjoy the distant twinkling lights of the Puget Sound spreading out below us.
There we were, finally at Mount Pilchuck. But there was no lingering. No soaking it in. We had only enough time to celebrate before turning around and hiking back down by headlamp, laughing the whole way.
We hit the trailhead around 11:30pm and made it back to Seattle just in time to squeeze through the Wendy’s drive-thru before the 2am close. My dad caught his flight back to LA a few hours later. The next day I took the Jeep to the shop. It was the starter.
Perhaps, I told myself, the Jeep just wasn’t ready for the adventure to be over.
Back to Buck Mountain
That quiet January day in 2014 on Buck Mountain set off a chain of events I never could have predicted. It led me to a remarkable community of people who care deeply about these towers. In 2021, I began staffing the Goat Peak fire lookout in Mazama, first as a volunteer and now as a USFS employee. In 2023, I formed the Methow Valley Forest Fire Lookout Association, a subchapter of the nonprofit Forest Fire Lookout Association dedicated to supporting federal agencies in the preservation of historic fire lookouts in the Methow Valley Ranger District of North Central Washington State.
I’ve returned to Buck Mountain several times since that first visit in 2014. In December 2021, I snowmobiled in with Okanogan DNR teams to help secure the lookout for winter. And in May 2025, I returned yet again, this time on horseback.
These days I still visit former fire lookout sites and I’m trying to revisit as many lookouts as possible with my horses, which feels especially meaningful given that historically, horseback was often the only way these towers could be reached. So far I’ve made it to five on horseback: Goat, Leecher, Lookout, First Butte, and Buck, with many more to come.
Buck will always be the place where it all started. Where a spark of curiosity and a phone call with my dad turned into a passion that’s defined a large piece of the last 12 years of my life.
Every Friday I’ll be sharing more stories about these lookouts and their history, some of my visits, and the ridiculous things that happened along the way. I’ve got 93 lookouts worth of material.
Welcome to Fire Lookout Friday!
A little Buck Mountain history
Buck Mountain Lookout has stood over the Okanogan since 1919, though it’s changed considerably over the years. The original crows nest and log cabin were replaced with a pole tower in 1934, and the current 14’ x 14’ DNR live-in cab on a 20’ timber tower was built in 1961.
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