DOLORES Eight thousand fire lookouts once towered across America, at least a dozen in the San Juan National Forest. Now only one is staffed in the forest during the five-month fire season from May to September.
At 9,265 feet high, the live-in Benchmark Lookout provides veteran firewatcher Barbara Zinn with 120-mile views across western Colorado and eastern Utah. She spots lightning strikes on Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs lands. She works 10 days on and four days off. Amenities include 100 stairs to climb, an outhouse, lights, running water, sponge baths, a small garden hothouse and views that most of us only dream about.
July could be an exciting month. Fire Management Officer Scott McDermid of the Dolores Public Lands Office says were very dry below 8,000 feet with a big cheat grass crop. Up higher, fuel conditions are more moderate. He cautions, Weve got the same fuel load as Arizona and New Mexico, but so far, we havent had the ignition.
For Zinn, its all about the weather.
Now that the lightning strikes start to come, this is our critical time, she says. Were fortunate because almost all of our fires are started by lightning not human-caused.
Erected in 1970 to replace the Glade Mountain tower built in 1941, the 16-by-16-foot Benchmark Lookout has the spartan furnishings of a classic fire tower bed, sink, stove, table, refrigerator and catwalk. From her peregrines perch, Zinn can see the west side of the La Platas, the Wilson peaks, Ute Mountain, Mesa Verde, Lone Cone, the Uncompahgre Plateau and Disappointment Valley, the La Sal and Abajo mountains, Cedar Mesa and even Monument Valley and Navajo Mountain. As winds increase and storms roll in, she scans the horizon looking for telltale smoke plumes from lightning strikes, and smiles, You also get to watch the clouds.
24th season as lookout
Zinn is a veteran in her ninth season at Benchmark and in her 24th season as a lookout who has worked on the Kaibab National Forest, Glacier National Park, Mesa Verde National Park and Dinosaur National Monument. It takes a special person to savor the solitude and the stretches of quiet punctuated by intense action when lightning flashes from dark clouds. With her bachelors in physics and graduate work in atmospheric physics, shes a natural.
Zinn coordinates with the lookout at Park Point in Mesa Verde. When the two lookouts cross their azimuth lines on their large, round firefinders and triangulate together they can pinpoint a smoldering fire before it gets out of control.
The Benchmark Lookout has a classic 1930s brass Osborne Firefinder made in Portland, Ore., that has been carefully leveled and oriented. The siting line has two cross hairs, upper and lower, and the spotter marks with a grease pencil onto plexiglass the locations of fires based on the legal coordinates of township, range and section. A report is filled out for each smoke detected.
At twilight, the Mesa Verde lookout heads home while Zinn stays on the job where all metal items are tied to a lightning rod so you dont get a side flash.
Shes always scanning, always looking over the country, watching for storms that build from Lizard Head all the way to the La Platas.
I like the solitude and having a huge view and being in the sky. Its the kind of job you either love or hate, Zinn says nonchalantly. It takes a certain kind of temperament. Some people run screaming after two weeks.
Volunteer lookouts help share the work.
Once youve been in the tower for a while, you notice anything different, and then I reach for binoculars, she says. One of the challenges is to find fires precisely.
In 2003, she spotted more than 200 fires.
Nothing is typical anymore with weather. What we watch for is when the monsoons come in with lightning but not much rain, Zinn says.
Fire towers once were thought obsolete because of airplane spotters, but aircraft are expensive to maintain and towers are cheaper to staff.
If we can keep a fire growing from a single tree to only 50 acres, we can save the government money, Zinn says. Now lookouts are being put back into service because of the value of early detection.
Fires natural role
McDermid says that fire has a natural role in the ecosystem, so some fires are observed but not immediately extinguished.
We have different management responses to the same incident, he says. We manage fires to first protect human life and property. We also manage fire to restore and maintain the health of forest ecosystems. This management will include both fire suppression and allowing fires to burn for resource benefits under appropriate conditions.
Zinn says, I turn in a smoke (report), and managers decide what to do. After a century of suppression now were trying to play catch-up with nice understory burns. In some places across the West we have too many trees in the forest.
The wildcard is wind. Fire is like a natural reset button for certain plant species, and it can clear out oak brush and other understory shrubs or what are called ladder fuels, but strong wind gusts change everything. What no one wants are crown fires when fire hits the tops of ancient ponderosas and trees explode like Roman candles, creating fast-moving, catastrophic fires instead of slow-moving, low-to-the-ground, cool fires.
Zinn carefully records the weather each day with a firefighters belt weather kit that includes a sling psychrometer or two thermometers and a chart for dew point, relative humidity and wind. A smoke report can be white or smoldering; black, where an entire tree is torching or crowning; blue/grey, grey or open flame.
You spot a smoke, swing the firefinder on it, get a legal description, fill out a smoke report, then call dispatch, Zinn says.
To concentrate, she needs the time alone without visitors.
In 24 years on the job, Zinn has been close to lightning three times. At Zenobia Peak in Dinosaur National Monument, lightning struck a Douglas fir eight feet away. Mantles blew out of propane lights. All her pens dried up. She conked her head against the desk and made it to bed but could not leave for an hour because her muscles wouldnt move. Shed been leaning against the towers glass windows when a strong magnetic pulse came instantaneously with the strike.
Zinn, 55, is heir to a long tradition of primarily women fire lookouts across the American West.
Being a stormwatcher is not for the faint of heart, especially at night, she says. Sometimes Im in bed with the covers over my head, but I love it when the storms pass by.
How long will she keep it up?
She smiles.
Until I cant climb the stairs anymore, she says.
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Andrew Gulliford is a professor of history at Fort Lewis College.
