Between Hell & Heaven: Burley Mountain Fire Lookout Restoration



For a dozen or so days in August and September, a carbonic haze flows through mountains, over Seattle toward the sea from the North and East. Diffused sunlight casts an eerie Martian glow over familiar sights, sandwiched by an ombre of papaya-hued sunrises and sunsets. A bouquet of pine burning 200 miles away overshadows our usual aroma of sun-warmed cedar, fir, and saltwater.

It is easy to lose touch with wildfire or never have one. Behind the drone of dehumidifiers and air purifiers, searing images of broiling infernos stir many with what is usually a distant and unknowable fear. Omnipotence forbids, someone we know may lose a home or a life to these juggernauts, ravenous for oxygen and cellulose. The most fortunate of us will trip over our first patch of Morels during a turkey hunt, 10 Springs after a burn, or spot a young buck grazing the shrub growth in as many Septembers, room for the regeneration of both made way by the bulldozing kilns of the Mountain West.

In the last chapter of a particularly dry summer, 16 of Filson’s finest caravanned up a few thousand vertical feet through a dusty brown-out of parched, switch-backing service road. Part of Filson’s continuing partnership with the National Forest Foundation, the Terai Lookout Tower Restoration Project, we greased our elbows and took to shovel, scraper, and paintbrush to fortify a touchstone of wildfire’s legacy in the region: an 88-year-old fire lookout tower called Burley, in the northern third of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.

The Big Burn of 1910 left a smoldering wake of 4700 razed square miles of Eastern Washington, Northern Idaho, Western Montana, and Southeastern BC. The Inland Northwest (and sixty million total acres of forest in whole) was under the guidance of Gifford Pinchot, the founder and first Chief of the US Forest Service. Known for his tenacity, woodsmanship, and numerous eccentricities, Pinchot’s inherited wealth was built his grandfather’s business of clear-cutting of the mid- Atlantic. This perhaps bore his vision that forest’s pulp was worth more left standing than churned into cash, lining the pockets of Second Industrial Revolution aristocrats. This conservation ethic and affinity for extensive outdoor immersion brought him into the company of Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir. Pinchot’s scientific and utilitarian management approach informed the establishment of public forest reserves, carving his place as an integral figure in National Public Land conservation. So, it is hard to evade the sense of symmetry when reading Gifford Pinchot National Forest on the map.

Spanning the width of Washington’s Cascades, sandwiched by Mt. Rainier National Park to the North, and the Columbia River to the South, the GPNF’s 1.3 million acres (about twice the area of Yosemite National Park) hold two volcanoes, seven designated Wilderness Areas, and 60 historic Fire Lookout sites. Built in 1934, central in the heyday of these lofty sentinels, the Burley Mountain Fire Lookout is perched at 5250’ above sea level and is one of the three remaining fire towers in this Forest.

The GPNF wears its geological history and experience with human and non-human life boldly on its face. Like four compass posts, gray and white heaps of veined ice and rock are visible from Burley. Tahoma (Rainier) marks North, Wy’east (Hood) to the South, Klickitat (Adams) and Loowit (St. Helens) are the shoulders sitting just south of true West and East, the last of which slumps mesmerizingly sunken, over a tenth shorter than its size when named.

The day we arrived, the evaporated haze of late summer heat powdered over the most distant peaks and the shadows of the sun’s succumbing to the tug of the Western horizon leaves the more subtle dimensions of the landscape visible only with magnification. From the position chosen for its unhindered, sweeping sight picture, the delicately serpentine Cispus River is visible over 4000 vertical feet below. Among the ten-odd most prominent ridgelines we can’t spot a single funnel of smoke rising from the trees, like the eyes of tens of fire lookouts have sought to do from where we stand. On a day crisply domed by a lapis sky, on a ridge crowned with huckleberries, one’s gut sinks to imagine the valleys below in a blackened robe of smoke: paradise charred.

Our team’s first glimpse of the lookout found it stripped to its dry, wooden bones by members of the US Forest Service’s Anthropology Team. Our worksite hosts for the weekend, they prepped the structure to receive a much-needed lacquer of fresh, weather resistant paint. Decades of bludgeoning sun, wind, and snow aren’t easy on the complexion. Juxtaposing the poetry of the landscape, graffiti decorates the walls, floor, ceiling and now naked central podium, former throne of an Osbourne Fire Finder (a rotating map with a compass and peep site that lookouts use to get a bearing on a fire’s location). Our restoration crew is equally marveled by the inventiveness of the declarations of love and celebrity conspiracies and frustrated with the effort and intention now scratched on the beautiful and heroic history here.

Two hours of paint scraping and window removal pass and a white pickup coughs a dust cloud tail as it rounds the narrow elbow of the service road that leads to the lookout. Pinchot fought ardently to embolden the USFS’s Fire Service Branch, and the contemporary descendants of that eventually successful campaign join our workforce. Three slim but sturdy members of the GPNF’s wildfire crew step out of the truck, earthtone-clad with chocolate t-shirts tucked into holly green cargo pants, bloused over the tops of stack-heeled boots, handmade within a six-hour drive of where we stand. The influx of foresters and firefighters to the region in the first half of the 20^th century made Spokane, Washington a hub for the few bootmakers trusted to cut and sew this leather foot armor by hand, some outfitting even longer than Filson.

With resources accessible, our crew couldn’t resist throwing a helluva camp party after our first day’s seasoning of dirt and sweat. As an appetizer to impeccable camp-cooked dinner, some opted for a few fly casts or a much-needed wash in the brisk Cispus.

In the chiaroscuro light of the campfire, we learned that, like Pinchot and me, Manifest Wonder pulled these three firefighters West from the Northeast and Northern Midwest. From states with limited public wild spaces, many are stricken with thirst for the infinite wilderness that the West promises to quench. Wanderlust aside, there’s a despite-the-odds grit and ambition to work for a greater, wilder cause. Peak fire season isn’t yet upon us and our mustachioed and/or mullet-donning friends are eager for opportunities to manage and, if necessary, suppress hungry blazes. Their wish will be granted in a few short weeks.

There is still an earnest optimism in the parched skeleton of Burley. After 88 years of weathering every storm, blistering or blizzarding, this lookout feels determined to see another several decades. That’s why we are here. Adjacent to our core motivations as employees of the USFS, NFF, and Filson, we are pulled to get sore and dirty to keep a legacy alive and on the job. Sealing the final few coats of paint on Burley that will see it through another unrelenting winter, the resonance with Filson’s heritage of outfitting Through Any Weather is not lost on me. Just like waxing Tin Cloth or conditioning leather, each generation’s layer does not cover up those of the past but deepens, strengthens, and enriches a mutually valued focus. This is a tangible experience of comradery, anchored by all parts equally, regardless of when the fates have staked them in time.