Former Fort Collins mayor (and former RCFC member) Douglas Hutchinson entertained us, via Zoom on April 7, with tales of the two summers (1964 and 1964) that he and his wife, Cathy, spent as fire-lookout employees of the US Forest Service. Hutchinson started by telling us that he and Cathy had first met in kindergarten in 1947, so they knew that they could get along with each other on top of a hard-to-reach 10,000 foot mountain in a 14X14 foot room at the top of a 42-foot lookout tower built in 1937 – a room with no toilet, no running water, no electricity, no refrigerator, but with a wood-burning stove, a Coleman lantern for light, an operator-assisted seven-party telephone for communication, and really steep stairs to the top.
The structure, being the tallest thing around, was securely grounded against lightning strikes. In addition, all of the furniture was on glass insulators to protect against any lightning that got around the lightning rods – and they did have one bolt that shot across the floor but didn’t get past the insulators. Although their assignment was in the summer, when thunder storms would normally be the main weather phenomenon, he commented that they suffered through one early-June ice storm when the temperature dropped to 280 Fahrenheit. The job required a 3600 look-around every 15 minutes, seven days per week (nominally 5 days for Doug, 2 days for Cathy) and the azimuth to any fire was determined using an Osborne Fire Finder with a rotating ring; distance to lightning strikes was determined by timing the delay for thunder arrival. The pay was excellent for a summer job and the major fringe benefit was the breathtaking view.
Daily living was back to basics. Water had to be hauled from a nearby spring (good water on top of a 10,000-foot mountain), firewood had to be cut, split, and hauled from the surrounding forest, food had to be hauled over a primitive “road” from some two hours away (with food types constrained by lack of refrigerator). All supplies were hauled by pully from the ground to the room at the top – and the trash taken back to the ground in the same way. This was accompanied with climbing the steep stairs on the order of 12 times per day. Fortunately, Cathy was experienced at cooking on a wood stove (Doug commented favorably on toast from the wood stove) and fresh raspberries from surrounding forest made for a real treat. Washing the dishes as well as morning ablutions occurred on the porch surrounding the room (no nearby neighbors, so who was going to watch?) using water heated on the stove. Calls of nature were answered in an outhouse that Doug had to build. They got something of an upgrade for the second summer with a dial phone (but still seven parties) and a propane stove with an oven. In spite of the relatively primitive nature of the life, they had few distractions and lots of time to themselves. Doug commented that he read 31 books the first summer, put together a number of buildings for an HO-scale model railroad, and spent a lot of time indulging his interest in photography. Entertainment came via a transistor radio and an early portable TV (rabbit ears and battery life of only one hour). Being above 10,000 feet in relatively thin air, they commonly took time for afternoon naps.
The actual job started each day at 6:30 AM with a radio check. They were supplied with a VHF radio, giving line-of-sight communication. But since they were the highest point around, they were commonly the relay point for any communication from other nearby installations. Their primary responsibility was to report wild fires (then called forest fires), of which they saw 14 the first year. The location could commonly be confirmed by another azimuth from another fire lookout. Once they called a fire in, there was a quick response. If there was any uncertainty, they could call in a Forest Service plane. Any visitors were awarded a “Squirrel Card” to document the date of their visit.
Two years after Doug and Cathy spent their time there, the lookout tower was abandoned. Since then, the Forest Service has two flights per day to identify and locate new fires – probably less expensive but arguably less efficient. Some 10 years later (1978), the room was removed from the tower and moved by Army helicopter (at that altitude, the helicopter’s systems were all red-lined) to Fort Collins, originally to Lee Martinez Park and then to CSU. Finally, in 2010, after the president of CSU and the mayor of Fort Collins started an effort to find out what had happened to it, it was moved to its current location in Running Deer Natural Area near Prospect and I-25.
In response to a question about how to manage forests, Doug commented that we should be trying to enhance forest health and prevent dangerous wild fires, at least in part by catching them quickly. He suggested that we should be managing our forests in “good ways”, including thinning and creating fire breaks.
In the area of daily life, what would have happened if they had a health emergency? Doug estimated that it would have taken some 25 minutes of aggressive driving to get to a decent road and maybe two hours to get to an emergency room in Fort Collins.