In September 2020, high winds swept across Oregon, fanning the flames of the Slater fire.

It torched over 100,000 acres on the California Oregon border, destroyed 200 homes, and burned the Bolan Mountain Fire Lookout to its foundation.

It was a devastation loss for the district as well as myself personally.

My family has been here in Grants Pass vicinity multi generations.

And it was a tradition when I was a young kid, you know, four or five years old for my dad and my grandfather and I on the opening day of deer season to go road hunting.

And so I have memories of ending up at Bolan Lookout, the three of us, and have lunch at the lookout.

I have 11 year old son that at the moment I can't take to a lookout and pass those traditions on.

And what Slater has done for my family as well as many others, including tribes, is it has eliminated some of those abilities of passing on those legacies.

In house within the Forest Service, we don't have the capacity to do design and contract admin when we look at the other needs across the forest that this doesn't fit into that priority.

And having the Siskiyou Mountain Club available to us as a partner was what made this opportunity successful.

The objective for today is to get as much of the material as we can from the landing where the vehicles are parked up to the lookout construction site itself and to get the main structural beams in place.

They're quite heavy.

It's a big task.

So having as much muscle and help as we can get kind of helps sure up a good start to the project site.

I have a wonderful group of volunteers as well as our builder team and earlier was joined by some Forest Service employees.

Like a glove.

Look at this guy.

Oh my gosh.

I don't have much left.

Bowen Mountain, I think has a huge positive impact on the area recreationally.

It gives people a destination to come check out, which in turn brings people to the area and kind of helps foster that connection to place and is a structure that ends up having a lot of historic value.

And so restoring that, I think, is meaningful to the community who lives out here as well as visitors to the area.

The original Lookout was built in 1925 and had a cupola, which was a popular design in those days.

It was rebuilt in 1954 without the cupola, and for fifty years, fire lookouts manned the station.

But by the early 2000s, the lookout was no longer staffed, and it was put onto a reservation system.

Staff from the Wild Rivers Ranger District remodeled the building in 2020.

It was only weeks later that the structure burned in the Slater fire.

Putting the Lookout back on the mountain is a small but monumental piece of hope that healing is coming for the landscape.

That fire burned 100,000 acres extremely hot in the first twenty four hours.

We don't have trees left out there.

This is a sign of hope that that landscape will heal and be ready for forest users to go back out and use in soon future.

Everybody else in the middle, two strongest guys to the outside goes in or we go up and over and then left.

Nice.

Can somebody climb that side of the ladder for this?

We're gonna rotate it.

Let's rotate it counterclockwise.

There's a left and right line.

Let me get up there with Luke.

Seven seven eights.

There any more?

It's pretty impressive, didn't realize the fact that they're Yes.

This this is awesome.

Our own crews, volunteers, contractors, and staff from the Forest Service worked together for forty one days on this project.

Over the course of that period, around 15,000 pounds of material was hauled to the lookout by hand.

Volunteer project manager Li Hau spent thirty six nights on-site.

He was joined by 20 other volunteers who put more than two thousand hours into the project total.

Is that part of the Marbles Wilderness over there?

Yeah.

And then is that part of the Red Buttes over there?

Yeah.

Those peaks over there?

Yeah.

And then what big mountain is over there that you can't quite see right now?

The real big tall one.

Is it McLaughlin?

Yep.

Yep.

You're learning.

So what's the name of that lake?

Golden Lake.

Yep.

That's what it is.

Siskiyou Mountain Club is a trails organization.

So why did we rebuild the Bolan Lookout?

We believe that after a wildfire, the right thing to do is turn into the landscape.

We rebuilt Bolan because we believe in the power of community and because we seek partnerships with public servants who are passionate about the lands they serve.

This is awesome.

Being able to see a finished product of something that I was told that would never happen, Something that I was told that don't put too much effort into it because it'll break my heart, break my dreams when it doesn't happen.

So to come up here and see a finished look out and have my son with me at a sunset is just breathtaking.

Just breathtaking.