Lightning Bill

This section is dedicated to lookout memories. If you are a former or current lookout and would like to share your story here please contact Bill at lightningbill @ genext.net.
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James A. Rea
Phil Lee

Goat Peak Lookout 1964-65

James A. Rea

My dad said, “You aren’t good for anything else once you’ve been a lookout”.  He had spent the 1939 fire season on Tyee Lookout in the Entiat USFS district.  My older sister had been on the Washington DNRS Aeneas Lookout since 1961.  That’s what he told me in 1963 when I submitted my SF-171 Federal Job Application form for a seasonal lookout fireman position with the Mazama Ranger District as I graduated from high school.  I figured he pretty much knew what he was talking about, though at the time I didn’t fully appreciate what he was getting at. 

Bob Mettlen was the Mazama District Ranger at the time.  Before he offered me the job, Bob quizzed me about how much time I had spent in the Pasayten Wilderness.  After I told him I had backpacked the Pasayten, hunted Tatoosh Buttes and fished Hidden Lakes with my dad since the fifth grade, he asked if I had been to the Parson Smith tree near Monument #83 Lookout.  I quoted the 1886 Parson Smith tree carving, “I’ve roamed in foreign parts my boys.  And many lands have seen.  But Columbia is my idol yet.  Of all lands she is queen. ”

Bob then nonchalantly inquired whether or not I believed in ghosts.  I simply replied, “No”.  I thought the question odd, but was too young to appreciate the art of the job interview.  He asked no further questions and made no commitment, but flatly said I would receive mail notification of his decision within a week or two.  The selection letter arrived two days later.  I had the job.  I was pretty pleased.  Lookouts paid for my college education.

It wasn’t until pre-season “fire camp” training at Bonaparte Ranger Station that I learned just what the ghost question was all about.  The Mazama district had trouble keeping lookout personnel on the remote Monument #83 Lookout.  The lookout was on the US-Canadian border.  Monument #83 was nearly 50 trail miles from the nearest US road.  Bunker Hill Lookout was the next lookout and just as remote, but Monument #83 had something special.  Monument #83 had “Pasayten Pete”…and Pasayten Pete was a ghost. 

The Pasayten country had been the last mining district in the Pacific Northwest near the turn of the century.  The Cascade mines provided high grade deposits, but probably yielded more in stock swindles than actual mineral quantities.  Vast numbers of miners and prospectors hurriedly came to the Pasayten country looking for the Cascade Eldorado, but left nearly as fast for more productive gold fields in British Columbia and the Yukon.

The miners brought burros with them.  One burro proved special, so the narrative goes.  That exceptional burro was named “Pete”.  When Pete was abandoned during the Dawson Creek rush, he was deeply lonesome and angered.  That’s when it happened.  The forlorn burro was Mephisto transformed into a human miner, named “Pasayten Pete”.  Pasayten Pete avenged his abandonment with mischievous tricks and sometimes malicious deeds on visitors to the Pasayten Wilderness.  

The USFS Monument #83 Lookout was the wrathful focus of Pasayten Pete’s malevolence in 1961.  The lookout fireman claimed not only was he frequently seeing Pasayten Pete, but Pete was shooting at him day and night.  The Canadian RMCP Mounties and US federal investigators traveled to Monument #83 in an earnest attempt to catch Pasayten Pete, or whomever, in the act of taking potshots at the federal installation and panicked USFS employee.  Despite finding some bullet holes in the lookout buildings, Pasayten Pete was never located by the investigators after several days of searching. 

The lookout fireman refused any further duty on Monument #83 and left.  A grave for Pasayten Pete was placed at the foot of the Monument #83 Lookout in an attempt to put the legend to rest.  Successions of lone lookout firemen were stationed on the Lookout, but for some reason none stayed very long.  Ranger Bob Mettlen had selected me for Monument #83.  After all, I had traveled the Pasayten for years, had never seen Pasayten Pete and didn’t believe in ghosts.  Old Bob Mettlen was pretty cagey.  He understood “You aren’t good for anything else once you’ve been a lookout” even if I didn’t.

I spent the entire 1963 fire season on Monument #83.  I never did see that pesky Pasayten Pete.  I did see spectacular forestlands, tremendous thunderstorms and glorious mountains, even saw some randy Basque sheepherders, but never did notice Pasayten Pete engaging in any nefarious miner misdeeds.  The Monument #83 grave is empty.  Who knows, maybe Pasayten Pete is still sulking about the wilderness.  For me, I had passed the Pasayten Pete reliability test and was reassigned to Goat Peak Lookout that next fire season.  Goat Peak Lookout was not so remote and offered a longer season with better pay…without any pouting ghosts.

The nearly 7, 000 foot high Goat Peak projects prominently over the lower Methow Valley from the leading southern edge of the North Cascades.  There was no road access to Goat Peak Lookout.  Pack mules made the first supply trip in each season.  Twin-Beech aircraft from the Winthrop smokejumper base parachuted supplies the remainder of the fire season.  

The Winthrop Evergreen grocery store maintained a running tab for each backcountry lookout, took orders relayed from the Mazama ranger station and then delivered the orders to the Winthrop smokejumper base.  Parachute supply drops were typically made every month or so.  An active fire season could divert the Twin Beech and jumpers elsewhere.  The fire diversions agonizingly prolonged the lookout supply drop intervals out to five or six weeks.  Spam, grouse and Lipton chicken noodle soup had to fill in.  

Goat Peak Lookout is not only the first fire surveillance guardian of the Mazama district, but the first lightning rod as an isolated and prominent peak.  Thunderstorm activity only requires three ingredients; moisture, instability and a trigger-lifting mechanism.  All three visibly converged as late afternoon cumulonimbus clouds over Goat Peak to make the solitary lookout a virtual lightning magnet.

  Goat Peak Lookout rarely went more than a week without any lightning strikes.  Lighting storms could last all afternoon and through most of the night.  While many of the Methow Valley fires were man-caused, the higher elevation wildfires were mostly lightning-caused.  The lightning fires were detected, located and reported by the lookouts, then suppressed by smokejumpers from the Winthrop smokejumper base.

The Goat Peak lookout fireman was protected by a Faraday cage of wire cables and lightning rods.  The Faraday cage diverted the lightning charge into a ground cable extending more than a half a mile down the ridge to the nearest permanent water source.  The lookout fireman could also climb on a “glass stool” should the Faraday cage appear less than perfect as lightning arced inside the lookout cab during particularly intense lightning activity.  The tip-off a lightning strike was about to strike nearby was when the hair on your head and arms stood on end.  Glowing St Elmo’s fire also eerily preceded the actual lightning ground strikes. 

Checking and repairing the ground cable was the first order of business of any seasoned Goat Peak lookout.  The quarter inch copper cable rarely failed, though the steel mesh mat connectors buried in the waterhole would occasionally rust.  The hand-cranked telephone and radio antenna were intentionally disconnected outside of the lookout to ensure Faraday cage integrity during lightning events. 

Safely below in the Methow Valley, Mazama Ranger Station personnel were often entertained as the lightshow of lightning flashed and arced across Goat Peak Lookout.  I didn’t find lightning entertaining.  A heavy lightning storm left you blind and deaf as the lightning and thunder were intense and simultaneous…and just as your sight and hearing would return, another blinding, deafening strike would hit.

Despite being close to the Mazama Ranger Station, Goat Peak did not get many visitors.  Monument #83 Lookout was on the Pacific Crest Trail and received more visitors than Goat Peak.  While Goat Peak Lookout was only three miles from the road, the trail was so steep few casual hikers made the punishing climb.  Visitors had to want to come to Goat Peak Lookout.  Unfortunately, a disproportionate number of those visitors were official USFS visitors.  The visits were rarely announced, so the lookout always had to be “inspection ready”.  Keeping the lookout “white glove worthy” was not always an easy task when you had to backpack all the water and firewood. 

Harold Bowers, the Mazama District Fire Control Officer (FCO), was my immediate supervisor.  Harold was a sensible gentleman.  I never heard him complain, raise his voice or use profanity.  He was a welcome, and usually unannounced, visitor at each lookout at least once a season.  Mid-season in 1965, Harold uncharacteristically announced his Goat Peak visit to me.  It was a tip-off to be ready.  I knew something different was up.

When Harold arrived several days later, the Okanogan Forest Supervisor, Harold Gustafson, was with him.  There is a keen hierarchy in the USFS…and the Forest Supervisor is supremely at the pinnacle.  A seasonal lookout fireman was far beneath the functional awareness of an exalted Forest Supervisor, but a district FCO was not.  Gustafson was there not to inspect me, but evaluate poor old Harold Bowers and scrutinize his lookout program.  As Gustafson surveyed the lookout cab, he accurately assessed the lookout as clean and in good order. Gustafson was an intellectual force of numerical wonderment, a technical “Gifford Pinchot” steel trap mind for sure

Despite being surrounded by the most exalted scenery of the North Cascades, Gustafson earnestly enumerated obscure legal details of mining and timber law regulating the wilderness forest without distraction.  The Forest Supervisor paced about the cab while effortlessly itemizing forest regulations, funding codes and cost-benefit ratios for Harold’s captive edification.  While Gustafson was amply satisfied with my detailed daily activity and radio logs, he seemed keenly impressed with my hand-calculated tangent offset tables taped to the Osborne firefinder pedestal for determining fire acreage.

Gustafson was a truly imposing intellect. He had to be an inspirational figure for all professional foresters and those working at the Okanogan Supervisor’s Office.  Gustafson offhandedly declared aircraft surveillance was most cost effective in “low fire risk” wilderness like the Pasayten.  Harold frailly countered poor flying weather and out-of-district fire activity often delayed detection which risked larger wildfires in the mountainous wilderness area.  Gustafson was dismissive and unimpressed. 

I was impressed, but not with the technical discussion.  I was stunningly impressed with the third visitor.  I was hypnotically distracted with Gustafson’s gorgeous blonde coed daughter.  I had been on the lookout for eight weeks by then.  I was trying not to openly drool while dizzily peering-up her magnificent shorts.  The brief inspection was over before I fully regained my equilibrium.  After a two hour visit, they hiked out and returned to Mazama before any afternoon thunderstorms developed.

Intense thunderstorms struck McLeod Mountain with a “lightning bust” a few hours after Gustafson’s visit.  As the thunderstorms shifted away to the northeast, I called Mazama dispatch to report a number of fire starts in the Panther Creek drainage.  Several Winthrop smokejumpers were quickly dispatched to those fires.  Harold Bowers had returned and got on the telephone as a lagging downstrike ignited an isolated Whitebark Pine on the nearby north end of the Goat Peak Ridge.  I remarked to Harold there was a Whitebark snag slowly smoldering about half a mile from the lookout, but it looked like the rain was going to put it out. 

The ancient Whitebark Pines are rugged timberline trees surviving hundreds of years of lightning, cold, drought and disease.  If there is a tree worthy of druid worship and human devotion, it’s the gnarled Whitebark Pine.  They proudly record time and events with a lucid windswept reverence.  I had often witnessed lightning explode burning limbs off the trees like murderous white phosphorous bombs, then watched the flames quickly flicker to extinction.  Whitebark Pine might have well been asbestos.  The flames were dying out in the rain as Harold talked.  Harold bleakly said, “Well, Gustafson’s numbers don’t really credit the Mazama district with all the fire suppression we really do.  Give me the legals and we’ll report it as a wildfire.  Go put it out and I’ll report it as a district suppressed fire.” 

I dutifully collected my suppression kit, a Pulaski and five gallon backpack water pump.  As I started down toward the end of the ridge, my hair stood erect in the electrical field of the nearby thunderstorms.  I ran quickly back to the safety of the lookout Faraday cage and waited about half an hour for the lightning to clear.  The walk down the ridge to the weather-beaten old tree only took ten minutes.  I knocked about on the bark and roots, finally managing to locate a tiny dark patch of smoldering root.

Yep, Harold was correct…this was a deadly wildfire in crucial need of official Mazama district suppression.  Yet water was precious.  Water had to be backpacked up from a spring nearly halfway down the mountain.  Water was not to be wasted.  I would typically use water four times: to brush my teeth, wash myself, wash my socks and then wash the lookout floors. 

“Waste Not Water” was solemnly tabulated on the biblical commandment addendum for lookouts.  I used the Pulaski to fully expose the smoldering spot, and then pissed on the dimming charcoal patch.  My one and only wildland fire suppression as a USFS lookout fireman officially joined Gustafson’s statistical repertoire for all time.  

Well, maybe my dad was right.  “You aren’t good for anything else once you’ve been a lookout.”

My Summer on the Summit Prairie Lookout
By Phil Lee

During the summer of 1954 I was fortunate to get chosen along with a friend, Forrest Couch, as fire lookout on the Summit Prairie Lookout Station. This was a two person lookout because we also maintained a portion of the Cascade Crest Trail as it crossed the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. The lookout building set on cement blocks just off the ground. We also had to fall a few trees surrounding the lookout and blocking our view. Clearing the view was a yearly job since the smaller trees would reach a height that would block our view.

The lookout was nearly perfectly centered between Mt. Hood to the south, Mt. Rainier to the north, Mt. Adams to the east and Mt. St. Helens to the west. Many mornings when we awoke we could see all four mountains sticking up out of the clouds and fog that obscured the forests below. What a sight.

We maintained trail and cut trees in the mornings during low fire danger days unless there had been a lightening storm the previous day or night. We saw lots of black bears during our trail work and several sows with cubs. One day we saw a large brown colored bear cooling itself in a snow bank about 200 yards away. We yelled and made a lot of noise so it would know we were there. Unfortunately that only made it curious and it came towards us. That ended our trail work that day.

One night we saw a campfire along the trail about a mile below the lookout. The next morning we hiked down to make sure the campers had put the fire out. When we looked around the campsite we were surprised to find several cans of unopened good including two large cans of sauerkraut. The campers were gone so we packed the food back to the lookout. These people had packed these heavy cans for many miles before discarding them.

A sheepherder working the area had packed in a few groceries for us and some mail. He also told us that he had shot a bear not far from us. The next day we found the bear and I cut the head off and took it to the lookout. I wanted the skull for a college class I would take that fall. I boiled the head in a bucket all day. Not a good smell. That night it was my turn to fix supper so I opened one of the cans of sauerkraut and put it on the stove. It smelled just like the bear head and gagged us so we had to throw it out along with the bear head.

It was a wet summer and even though we had lots of excitement sitting on our insulated stools while the lightening hit all around us there were few fires. After one storm however we spotted a tree about a mile away that had fire in it. We radioed the District Fire Control Officer and told him where the fire was. He gathered a crew and started hiking into the area from the end of a logging road. The crew hiked about two mile through rough country. Every few minutes the crew would flash a mirror at the lookout so we could tell them if they were heading in the right direction. They said they could not see any smoke. We told them we could not see any smoke either. Very mystifying. We could the fire but no smoke. Finally the crew was within just a few yards of the fire. Can’t you see we called over the radio. No they replied but we see a large snag that has been hit by lightening a few years ago. The scar is red and orange. Could that be your fire? They asked.

We sheepishly had to confess that was it. They were standing right at the base of what we thought was a fire. We were forgiven however because that was the first and last reported fire that that crew had to fight all summer. In fact fall came early and with it so much rain we had to retire from the lookout.

Forrest went on to become an Administrative Officer with the Forest Service. After four years of military service and college I spent almost 30 years in the Forest Service as Wildlife Biologist, Range Conservationist, and District Ranger. I retired in the Regional Office as the Regional Threatened and Endangered Species Biologist. During those years I got to spend time on a couple of other lookouts in Oregon.

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