2023 Essay Contest Winner

Smoke Report

by Austin Hagwood

The fire began when lightning forked and channeled itself through bark and brush. White-hot plasma burst from a storm above the Bitterroot Mountains, burrowed into drought-dried lodgepole, and vanished with a crack that scented the air with a coppery tang. From where he stood inside Hell’s Half Acre Lookout, a watchtower eight miles from the strike, a lookout named Luke pulled back a red ponytail and affixed binoculars to his face. The circular lenses encompassed a brutal topography of canyons and cliffs, parched conifers on the border of Idaho and Montana browned from a rainless summer. Air above the treetops shimmered under mid-July heat.

Then, as if summoned toward the sky, a blue smear of smoke blurred the western landscape. Wind fanned oxygen onto coals and blew them into flames that moved like waves over the lodgepole’s limbs. The trinity of fire, fuel, and air threatened to set acres of forest ablaze. Luke bent to the Osborne Fire Finder, a rotating, cast iron compass ring oriented around a map of the forest, with his lookout in the center. He drew a bearing on the twist of smoke and radioed its location to the Bitterroot National Forest dispatch.

Within an hour, a helicopter cruised through the air and circled the smoke before the district ranger decided to leave the smoldering patch of timber and grass untouched. If managed properly, he reasoned, the blaze could smolder and creep through the understory of clotted brush, leaving behind charred, nutrient-rich ground before the flames extinguished themselves in the Selway River, a ribbon of crystalline water that flowed through the canyon. A helicopter pilot christened this smoke the Gold Pan Fire, named after the lake adjacent to its origin.

“That fire,” said the district ranger, “will never cross the river.”

A few days after its genesis, Gold Pan jumped the Selway. Constant gusts whirled the initial ignition into a larger inferno. Mountains of fire funneled into a column of smoke spread across the sky. The firestorm began to generate its own weather. Trees burned to their roots, wrenched free from soil, rolled downhill, and threw cinders into the air. As flames crept up white pines and leapt through their needled crowns, Luke stood on his tower’s catwalk and listened to the roar of a cremated forest. The fire was headed toward Hell’s Half Acre Mountain.

Luke’s phone rang. The voice on the other end was brief:
“Evacuate in half an hour. Take only essentials.” A fire crew was en route to wrap the tower in sheets of fire-resistant foil.

Luke grabbed his backpack and radio, pulled on fireproof Nomex pants, and drove down the steep road in his pickup while firefighters encased Hell’s Half Lookout in a reflective cocoon. He drove through familiar stands of lodgepole and subalpine fir, sped past them out of harm’s way, and made his escape a day before flames reached the summit.

*

Four years after the Gold Pan Fire scorched 42,000 acres of the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness, I drove toward Luke’s former tower on Hell’s Half Acre Mountain to begin my first summer as a fire lookout. I’d lucked into the job through six months on a timber crew in the Sierra Nevada and signed up to spend fire season in the northern Rocky Mountains, sight unseen. The road meandered through remnants of a forest burned to its bones. Endless rows of limbless trunks stood black as the teeth on a mountain-sized comb. Through my windows I could see basins where blazing cyclones scattered pines like toothpicks. Already the ground was slicked with runoff, the soil sandy, loose, and sterilized from bygone heat.

Luke was still a lookout in the Bitterroot National Forest. He and his wife, Rita, had moved to a tower ten miles to the north with slightly greener pastures. A hiker looking out on the view from my new home would be hard-pressed to find a scrap of unburned foliage, apart from distant stands of surviving timber. The description of my four-month job was wonderfully ambiguous: Track lightning strikes. Watch for fires. Report smoke. Relay radio messages. Greet visitors.

I became a fire watcher. Every time a tree blossomed into glowing coals and began to burn, it was my job to sound the alarm. Confined to a 14-by- 14-foot room, I started to discover strange freedom in hours studying the same landscape looking through binoculars as if they were my microscope, bearing witness to an otherworldly wonder and momentary glory. In a given week, I watched roiling flames illuminate the night and scorch acres of timber like an ancient city put to siege. I met mountain lions on footpaths, found wolf-scavenged mule bones, and glimpsed trout in forgotten streams. The Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness—the largest unroaded wildland in the Lower 48—offered an extraordinary view from the office. My window looked out into a landscape at risk of unprecedented change.

But solitude presents its own challenge. Bereft of human company, each lookout must derive entertainment from the world. Some of my fellow “freaks on the peaks” passed hours with paintbrushes and canvases, attempting to capture ephemeral sunrises as they revealed shark fin ridgelines in unhurried waves of light. Others wrote poems or took photographs, channeling their inner lives into art in the footsteps of such fire-watching forebears as Jack Kerouac, Edward Abbey, and Gary Snyder.

I started to watch a bizarre television. Though the Gold Pan Fire had incinerated many of the white pines and fir trees once found here, it left a new view in their places. Half a mile west of the tower, a new gap appeared on an east-facing slope. On this patch of young grass, I began to see animals. Rick—my neighbor at Bare Cone Lookout twelve miles away—had a similar spot near his lookout, an exposed knob he referred to as his TV. He often ended our occasional phone calls with, “Gotta go—there are seven elk on the TV right now.”

I found my TV, watched the same channel daily, and never grew tired of it.

This topographical feature also taught me to see fire through a different lens. The land was not as empty as it seemed. One morning during my first week in the tower, I woke up early and began to pace the catwalk. I started to look for signs of conscious life amid the fire scar, and this morning I could see them in russet blots against the hillside: six elk. I had two hours to spare before my morning radio check-in. Maybe I was already feeling cabin fever, or maybe the tower had shifted my longings, received me as an observer, and nudged me
to participate in the story of this place. I decided to go find the elk on foot.

Dead pines bunched together along a steep ridgeline trail, and as I trekked west from the lookout, the tower still in view but smaller with each step, a wildlife highway appeared in the dirt. Sunrise turned the slope pink as daylight warmed the back of my ears, and I stepped over piles of deer, bear, bobcat, and mountain lion scat littered over elk prints pressed into mud. Then the ridge leveled out, and the trail snaked between more burned snags.

Hunched over the Osborne Fire Finder, I had seen trails like this one dotted along one-dimensional hillsides and rivers. These lines twisted across my map in a network connecting one lookout to another, hunters to quarry, hikers to views. Cleared by the Forest Service long ago, these paths also had origins in fire.

Recent megadroughts have precipitated some of the most hellacious wildfires in human memory, but infernos mark a long history in the West. In 1910, 100 miles from Hell’s Half Acre, on the Bitterroot’s northern edge, a megafire known as the Big Burn reached unstoppable proportions. It blazed more than 3 million acres, killed towns and firefighters as it raged, and scarred itself into the consciousness of a Forest Service still in infancy.

The Big Burn also generated a fire suppression apparatus modeled on military structure and codified a combative mindset. Armed with shovels and saws, crews reported to commanders, cut trails, built lookout towers, strung telephone wires through timber, and cleared roads. Not a single tendril of smoke would go unobserved, and each new fire invited an arsenal of personnel to snuff it out. The 10 o’clock rule held that each new fire should be controlled by 10 a.m. the morning after it started. As technology advanced, airplanes, engines, chain saws, and satellites joined the armada.

At the dawn of the lookout program, my predecessors lived in a tent where the tower now stands and kept a horse picketed nearby. I thought of these hardscrabble watchers as I made my way down the trail, and the modern tower receded into the skyline. In 1912, any lookout who found a fire was expected to saddle up and ride, bedroll and shovel held aloft, to suppress the blaze until backup arrived. Nowadays crews stationed at the ranger station hiked these trails and navigated a network inscribed across the land on their way to investigate each reported smoke.

The trails also attracted two-legged visitors. As snow melted, the road cleared, and as I walked, I remembered a man from Colorado who hopped out of his truck one morning to survey the view. Gravel crunched under his flip-flops as he stepped toward the tower. I stepped onto the catwalk and greeted him.

“It’s such a bummer all this burned,” he said. “How’d it happen?”

I shared what little I knew of the Gold Pan Fire, pointed out charred ground feet from the tower, traces of where the fire burned to the lookout’s edge before favorable conditions had spared the structure.

Other queries: Why not log all the burned trees? Was I disappointed to look at this firescape every day? Why was I even up here if so much was burned? I heard this question repeated countless times from other visitors. And as he drove away, I started to wonder about these questions, too.

Why do we feel sorrow when we look upon an immolated forest? Most of my visitors expressed disappointment to find the place as it was—closer in some respects to a bomb-blasted moonscape than a lush scene worthy of calendars. But as with any view, there was what we could see and what we could not.

Evidence of Gold Pan appeared everywhere along the trail. Soft dirt muffled my boots as they stepped over wind-thrown snags and carried me closer to where I imagined the elk would wait. I walked heel-toe, tried to avoid skittering rocks, snapping burned branches, or other sounds that might startle the game.

The tower was at my back now, and I left the trail to sidehill over tangled branches still sooty from the Gold Pan Fire. Rows of snags thinned, then parted to reveal the treeless patch of bear grass and brush. Seeing no elk, I walked toward the ridge on its east-facing slope, the lookout to my right and the TV on my left seven or eight feet uphill.

To the north, the wilderness opened into a series of mountains. Some I could name: Horsejaw, Magruder, Burnt Strip, Nick Wynn, and Spot. Beyond them—what, exactly? More of the Rockies, their mysteries, and eventually, Canada. I stood there for a moment, watching light slant across this horizon, before motion tugged my gaze back to the left.

Amid the charred pines and ground-growing glacier lilies on the ridge, a twisted pair of antlers shifted and moved toward me. I was frozen when a head followed and crested the rise—a bull elk, his shaggy neck, a pink tongue flicking under his eyes as they met mine. He was no more than fifteen feet away and must have approached from the west, my scent concealed by coincidence of wind and terrain.

He turned and started to gallop, but this was a bluff. He ran a few yards, then stopped and turned to consider me again. Farther down the hill, I could see a cow elk trying to conceal herself in the stands of snags.

One step toward her—my boot crunched into grass, and the slope reverberated with a chorus of ground squirrels who chirped from their burrows, blew my cover, and sent all of the animals bolting.

*

As a construct, the concept of wilderness has a long history. Ancient Greeks and Romans conceived of the forest as a separate sphere of existence, marked apart from the public square, a conceit carried forward in Euro-American thought through Shakespeare—who distinguished woodlands as places of enchantment and escape—to Romantic and Victorian poets who sought green places as touchstones of enlightenment removed from cities they decried as wicked and corrupt. As a federal designation, though, the Wilderness Act of 1964 set apart more than 9 million acres of public land, spared it from the timber and mine development easier to launch in national forests, and restricted motorized vehicles. Yet even in the Frank Church, a road plowed through the center, campgrounds popped up along the river, and a nexus of fire suppression embedded itself in the place. The moment my lookout was built in this area, the place stopped existing as what we think of as wilderness—if indeed it ever was.

Whether people log forests for timber or set them apart for aesthetic or wildlife value, the same basic principle applies: Humans tend to believe they must get something from a forest. Fire refuses such priorities. What my visitors mourned was not the loss of an ecosystem. Indeed, species such as lodgepole pine depend on tongues of flame to release seeds, and already a waist-high nursery had started to grow on the mountains, bringing elk and deer back to the high country. Fragile fir needles reached for summer’s long light as young trees grew from the ashes.

Instead, people balked at an altered ideal. What they wanted was a wilderness that stood remote, immutable, offering them an imagined return to some innermost kernel of true human nature. What they found instead was the aftermath of fire.

I did not blame people for feeling this way. Nor was I na.ve about the future of forest fire suppression. Wildfires burned through timber a nation valued and encroached on towns and cities people valued even more. Firefighting was not going anywhere, and I was a small part of it, living atop a perch and ready to sound the alarm. Climate change has caused ever-drier summers in the Rockies since at least the late twentieth century, and megafires have followed. Yet the focus on fire as a one-dimensional enemy began to seem misguided, especially when this set of priorities ignored human factors that left forests more drought-stricken each year.

Back in the tower, I studied my TV for a while, tried to glimpse the bull again, then picked up Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire (University of Chicago Press, first published in 1992). The book was his attempt to make sense of why thirteen smoke jumpers burned to death in 1949 when the Mann Gulch Fire overtook them above the Missouri River. I flipped through pages and found the line: “Far back in the impulses to find this story is a storyteller’s belief that at times life takes on the shape of art and that the remembered remnants of these moments are largely what we come to mean by life.”

The remembered remnants of these moments. I thought of the bull elk who returned to graze on young shoots of grasses; an elk to whom I hurried when he appeared like a sentinel and to whom I looked as a sign that more life thrived here than met my eye. Did he remember the sweet scent of lilies and blooming paintbrush, the solitude of sunrise as dawn warmed his flanks after another night spent under undimmed stars?

As I returned to the tower each summer for five years, I continued to watch my hillside TV. I stared toward it when my mother called from California and told me she was packing her car and preparing to evacuate. I watched the western horizon as smoke from megafires burning along the West Coast blotted the sun and ended lives. I waited for the bull elk, thought of him, and wondered how our relation to fire might change if these glimpses could comprise our remembered remnants, the stories we tell, the places we seek.

Fire lookouts are uniquely positioned to observe climate change and its impact on a forest from one summer to the next. We can alert fire crews to symptoms of a global phenomenon, but we alone cannot reverse a fire’s cause. The tower revealed subtle changes in cloud cover and elk paths. But my view from the tower also revealed that it makes no sense to mourn a burned view while remaining blind to the fact that humans have an impact on the view via our impact on the environment. My visitor numbers increased with every summer and reached an all-time high during the COVID-19 pandemic. At a time when wildness feels more necessary than ever, what behaviors will we choose to lament? The answer may determine the forests we accept.

Austin Hagwood is a master of fine arts candidate at the University of Montana. A former fire lookout and National Geographic Explorer, he now treads both water and words as a fly-fishing guide in Missoula.

Editor’s note: The author has changed names of fire lookouts at their request.