DREAMS do come true

 



 For the last twelve years or so, in the back of my mind I have wanted to be a fire lookout.  A person who sits on a remote or not so remote mountaintop in a fire tower or building searching the rolling hills and valleys for fires.  The fires can either be lightning strikes or person-caused.  Fire lookouts have a great responsibility to fire-management in helping to locate forest fires and in protecting the wild land interface; communities and towns that abut wild lands from fires that get out of control.

      First of all, I don't want to come across that I am anti-fire and we must do everything to stop it like it is EVIL or something like how American mythology has painted the big, bad wolf.  I believe both fire and wolves are necessary to keep an ecosystem healthy and vital and working the way it should.  Many trees (especially conifers) need fire to crack their cones and get them to start growing after the cones have been dropped on the forest floor.  Many trees, grasses and wildflowers and even insects, birds and mammals and everything else since it is connected like interlocking spiderwebs has evolved with fire and they need each to keep growing.  Many wildflower seeds are known to lie dormant in the ground for hundreds of years waiting for that fire to come ripping through a landscape, cracking the seeds to allow germination and releasing carbon and burning fuels on the ground.

     Fire also helps to clean out and clear away a forest that has overgrown too much to the extent of almost being impenetrable to move through for animals and humans.  The reason forests have overgrown to this extent is because humans in the last hundred years did not understand the positive role of fire in a landscape and tried successfully to ban it from happening by fighting them aggressively.  Meanwhile, Native Americans used to use fire to their benefit to clear out underbrush and to help maintain meadows and prairies by burning them frequently to burn saplings and small trees from becoming big ones.  Those park like forests you hear about in the the northeast that the early European immigrants first came across in the "New World" that have giant trees but did not have underbrush is from Native Americans using fire to their benefit and it helped with hunting practices.  Grasses grow back in the understory allowing and attracting ungulates of all sizes and species to feed there, which attract predators who hunt the prey making it a moving, breathing living ecosystem.

      Needless to say, my dreams came true today after giving up on the notion, but I received a call to be a fire lookout in the Bob Marshall Wilderness at Prairie Reef Lookout.  It is the highest lookout in the whole state at an elevation of 8858.  It is eighteen miles back from the trailhead and sits on a reef or ridge that allows lookouts like myself to go walking and hiking stretching the legs out after sitting all day in the lookout.  This lookout is closest to the towns of Choteau and Augusta Montana along the eastern Rocky Mountain Front.  I will be working ten days on at lookout with four days off.   I am stoked (fired up and psyched).  This lookout also sits near to some sweet mountain loops to hike to like the legendary Chinese Wall (a rock formation that is a limestone ridge for 17 miles long).  Big-sheep, goats, lynx, bears, lions, wolves and wolverines live in the area.  I might be moving away from Glacier National Park, but then again the arbitrary boundaries that separate these the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex and Glacier is just arbitrary lines on a map and highway 2.  The geology and ecology is practically the same.  I can't wait.

 

I am taking a huge pay-cut from my old job of a back-country trail crew leader to follow my dreams, but than again you cannot put a price tag on following one's dreams.  I start working out of August in the last week of May, but won't be up to the lookout for good until beginning of July and be up there through mid-September.

A bit of serendipity happened the day I was offered this job.  That night I was listening to Montana NPR and there was interview with a friend of mine and long time (18 year) lookout Leif Haugen.  The interview discussed what it was like being a lookout and having all that solitude and grandeur to oneself on top of mountain.  It was also about an award-winning short documentary that profiles Flathead National Forest Service Lookout titled, "THE LOOKOUT", which spends several days with Leif at Thoma Lookout near the Canadian Border.  Leif was a lookout in the park for over a decade plus years and use to stay at the lookout that Edward Abby was stationed at called Numa Lookout in Glacier National Park.  This film I look forward to seeing when I have a chance to.  This film just won awards at the BIG SKY film festival.