Colorado Voices
Life on top of a fire lookout
Clip | 5m 42sVideo has Closed Captions
Rick Freimuth has occupied the Benchmark Lookout every summer since 2016.
Rick Freimuth and his wife, Linda, have occupied the Benchmark Lookout every summer since 2016. Now retired, the couple can’t help but come back to staff the lookout each year, relishing the solitude it provides them.
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Colorado Voices is a local public television program presented by RMPBS
Colorado Voices
Life on top of a fire lookout
Clip | 5m 42sVideo has Closed Captions
Rick Freimuth and his wife, Linda, have occupied the Benchmark Lookout every summer since 2016. Now retired, the couple can’t help but come back to staff the lookout each year, relishing the solitude it provides them.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipFire lookouts are an asset to the National Forest.
[Music] Lookouts, traditionally are people who seek solitude.
[Walking up steps] A lot of lookouts are past wildland firefighters.
Many are artists.
Many are writers, photographers.
And I believe those people, 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.
[Radio static] - Mostly sunny, 20-30%.
Isolated showers, isolated thunderstorms after 1200.
Max temperatures 72 to 82.
Minimum humidity, 17 to 27%.
[Uninteligible radio announcement] - Our location is here on the ma Benchmark Lookout.
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 point it at wherever the smoke may be and locate it.
I'm a fire lookout for the United States Forest Service on the San Juan National Forest.
I staff Benchmark Lookout.
Our primary objective here is to find fires to report to dispatch.
In the mornings we'll wake up roughly 6, 6:30 in the morning and make a quick scan of the terrain and start making coffee.
By around 8:00, I'll have already taken the weather.
I'll report in to service at 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 the landscape.
At their heyday, there were about 8000 fire lookouts in the United States from Maine to California.
That was roughly in the thirties and forties.
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 a hundred, 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 U.S. All of these yellow stickies, our previous smokes from this summer, I will get the azimuth off of the fire finder and then move that on the compass rows to locate the smoke.
And on this particular dropdown map, I tape the string on there and that gives me the location of the smoke on the bigger map.
[Yarn spinning] Well, the solitude is important to us.
[Music] - And then I do what's called ply.
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.
[Music] I work on photography.
I'm interested in flowers and wildflowers and birds.
There's a lot of observational things with that.
[Music] 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.
[Music] And I know they appreciate it.
They know we're out here looking for them, looking out for them.
[Music]
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Colorado Voices is a local public television program presented by RMPBS