Fire lookouts are an asset to the National Forest.

Lookouts, traditionally are people who seek solitude.

A lot of lookouts are past wildland firefighters.

Many are artists.

Many are writers.

Photographers.

And I believe those people that that's what they're seeking is a solitude.

And the fire lookout is perfect for that.

Looking for smokes might be incidental for those people.

For me, it's not.

I love finding the smokes.

And, the solitude is just wonderful.

And luckily, Linda loves it as well.

Our location is here on the map.

Benchmark.

Look out.

The map scale is half inch to the mile, and from here to the edge of anywhere on the map is 20 miles.

I'll go ahead and pointed at.

Wherever the smoke may be.

And locate it.

A fire lookout for the United States Forest Service on the San Juan National Forest.

Staff benchmark lookout.

Our primary objective here is to find fires, to report, to dispatch in the mornings.

Will wake up roughly six 630 in the morning.

Make a quick scan of the terrain and start making coffee.

By around 8:00.

I'll have already taken the weather reporting to service to dispatch and give them the weather.

And then our day is just observation.

From then on, if we've had lightning or a possible person caused fire, that's what I'm looking for.

I'm looking for smoke in that in the landscape.

At their heyday, there were about 8000 fire lookouts in the United States from Maine to California.

That was roughly in the 30s and 40s.

Nowadays we've got roughly 300 staffed lookouts, 200 of which are federally staffed between BLM, BIA and the United States Forest Service, and the rest, about 100, would be state and volunteer lookouts on the San Juan National Forest.

We have one staffed lookout, which is this one benchmark lookout.

This lookout was built in 1970, so it's 53 years old now, and probably the one of the last timber lookouts built in the US.

All of these yellow stickies, our previous smokes from this, from this summer, I will get the azimuth off of the fire finder.

And then.

Move that on the compass rose to locate the smoke.

And on this particular drop down map, I taped the string on there, and that gives me the location of the smoke on the bigger map.

Well, the solitude is as important to us.

And then I do what's called plie.

So I take the ends of both these, put them together, and spin in the opposite direction.

And that makes yarn.

That's what yarn is.

We live in a small town on the western slope and on a fairly busy street.

And we just love coming back up here at the beginning of the season.

I feel very fortunate, at 68 years of age, to be able to do what I love for the resource for the Public Lands, National Forest, BLM, BIA and our local.

Our private people out here as well.

And I know they appreciate it.

They know we're out here looking for them, looking out for them.