Lookouts

These photos and notes are from the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest.

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From 1934 through 1939 John (Johan) Olav Kjosness worked each summer on the Leavenworth Ranger District doing trail maintenance, Cascade Crest Trail construction and as a lookout on several different lookout stations including Lorraine Point, French Ridge, Icicle Ridge, McCue Ridge, and Chumstick Mountain lookouts. His pay was $120 per month when he had a horse to rent for patrols from the lookout station and $105 when no horse was needed. In 1936 he helped a carpenter build new stairs to the Icicle Ridge lookout house and a solid cat walk around the building. The photo is of John Kjosness at Icicle Ridge Lookout in 1934. 

Here's the lookout itself.  Built in 1929, it was removed in 1966.

Gary Snyder


[On a backpacking trip with my first wife in the
Olympic mountains, having crossed over from the
Dosewallips drainage, descended to and forded the
Elwha and the Goldie, and climbed again
to the high country. Hiking alone down the Elwha
from Queets basin, these years later, brings it
back.]

The thin blue smoke of our campfire
down in the grassy, flowery
heather meadow
two miles from your perch.
The snowmelt pond, and Alison,
half-stooped bathing like
Swan Maiden, lovely naked,
ringed with Alpine fir and
gleaming snowy peaks. We
had come miles without trails,
you had been long alone.
We talked for half an hour up
there above the foaming creeks
and forest valleys, in our
world of snow and flowers.

I don’t know where she is now;
I never asked your name.
In this burning, muddy, lying,
blood-drenched world
that quiet meeting in the mountains
cool and gentle as the muzzles of
three elk, helps keep me sane.


fromThe Back Country, 1965.

Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain   
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read   
A few friends, but they are in cities.   
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup   
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.


published in Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (1969)

This photo from "The Smokey Generation," is a  self-portrait by Ronald Stephens taken at Tola Point Lookout in 1945. Tola Point was on the Kaniksu National Forest in Idaho.

You hitched a thousand miles
             north from San Francisco
Hiked up the mountainside     a mile in the air
Thy little cabin – one room –
             walled in glass
Meadows and snowfields,     hundreds of peaks.
We lay in our sleeping bags
             talking half the night;
Wind in the guy-cables      summer mountain rain.
Next morning I went with you
             as far as the cliffs,
Loaned you my poncho –      the rain across the shale –
You down the snowfield
             flapping in the wind
Waving a last goodbye      half hidden in the clouds
To go on hitching
             clear to New York;
Me back to my mountain      and far, far, west.

from The Back Country

This is reportedly a photo taken inside the old North Ridge Lookout, in Washington State's Wenatchee National Forest.  The tower had a relatively short life, existing from 1932 to 1955.

The thoughtful-looking young man (complete with USFS badge) is identified as Andy Tomchick.  According to his obituary, Andy worked for the Forest Service in his youth, before embarking as a career as a coal miner, mostly in Alaska.  He passed away in 2002.

I the poet Gary Snyder
Stayed six weeks in fifty-three
On this ridge and on this rock
& saw what every Lookout sees,
Saw these mountains shift about
& end up on the ocean floor
Saw the wind and waters break
The branched deer, the Eagle's eye
& when pray tell, shall Lookouts die?

from Left Out in the Rain: Poems