By John Coté
The San Francisco Chronicle (California)
Copyright 2006 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
All Rights Reserved
Jennifer Dewey shares her summer days with a fire-service radio inside a cramped hilltop cabin in western Sonoma County.
There is no running water and only a Porta Potti nearby. Small solar panels on the roof charge the radio and the CB dangling in the corner, but little else. Few people visit, cell phones get spotty reception and reading is unacceptable, lest her attention wander from her job spotting smoke.
“I actually enjoy this,” Dewey said while atop her 2,204-foot perch on Pole Mountain, the county’s last staffed wildfire lookout. To pass time, she studies maps stashed in the cabin. “I get bored, but I’m not lonely.”
Dewey, 51, a mother of three grown children and a self-described computer geek, is a member of a fading fraternity of fire lookouts.
California lookout towers are being retired because of budget cuts, improved fire-detection technology and a proliferation of cell phone-wielding hikers pushing into the wilderness. Some towers have simply been shuttered, while others are rented out as cabins or — in the case of a lookout near Auburn in the Sierra foothills — turned into a cell phone tower.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection no longer uses lookouts in Southern California, in part because of poor visibility caused by air pollution. The agency has more than two dozen towers in Northern California but hasn’t paid to regularly staff them since the 1990s. Instead, the agency relies on volunteers, said Paul Helm, an assistant chief at the department’s San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties division.
The U.S. Forest Service had 600 lookout towers through California after World War II. The number has since dwindled to about 170 and only about 55 of them are staffed, said Forest Service regional spokesman Matt Mathes. Others are used as rustic lodging rentals for backcountry enthusiasts who enjoy the unbeatable views. Some have been vandalized and fallen into decay.
“All of us in the Forest Service remember this concept of the lonely ranger keeping watch over the forest. That’s something a lot of us have in our values,” Mathes said. “But we need to do the best job spotting fires that we can. We need to do it as efficiently as we can, and technology has given us other ways to do it.
“They’re never going to completely go away. We’re always going to have certain number of fire towers,” Mathes said. “There just won’t be as many.”
During fire season, the Marin County Fire Department still staffs two lookouts — one on Mount Tamalpais, the other on Mount Barnabe — at a cost of about $22,000 each.
County Fire Chief Ken Massucco said his department relies on the lookouts for first reports of fires in remote areas. While there are no statistics on lookouts’ statewide effectiveness, Massucco said Marin County’s towers are worth the money because they buy time for firefighters.
“Our success is based on how fast we get there and how many people we can put on the incident,” he said.
But as more hikers take their cell phones into the wilderness, the number of fires spotted first by lookouts has dropped, some fire officials said. Other technology, including aircraft and lightning-detection equipment, also has helped to find fires before they rage out of control.
“The plane goes up, and it’s very good at looking directly overhead down into steep canyons, even before the lookouts can detect the smoke,” said Ann Westling, a spokeswoman at Tahoe National Forest.
Jennifer Dewey’s $140-a-day job may also end up a casualty of technology.
The Pole Mountain lookout is run by a community-based nonprofit formed in 1981. Pole Mountain Fire Lookout Inc. solicits donations from residents and holds an annual pancake-breakfast fundraiser.
It costs about $25,000 to equip and staff the lookout for a four-month fire season that usually ends around October. Finding lookouts has become difficult, said Deanna Baxman, a state forestry battalion chief and board president for the nonprofit.
“It’s getting harder and harder to get people to agree to sit up on that mountaintop,” she said.
Baxman is looking into purchasing a digital camera system that uses software to detect smoke, fire and the glow of flames. The price starts at around $70,000.
Decades ago, most lookouts heard about jobs from friends or neighbors. That’s how Sally Weston, 82, got started. In the 1970s, she spent seven fire seasons on a Siskiyou County tower with a black poodle named Buffy.
Unlike Dewey, who makes the hourlong drive down a rugged dirt road to her home each night, Weston and many Forest Service lookouts lived in remote towers for days. They might drive to the closest town — sometimes a few hours away — once a week or so.
“You go up with the knowledge that you’re going to stay up and probably not get days off until the season is over,” which in the mountains comes with the first snow, said Weston, a Klamath Falls, Ore., resident. “One of the lookouts I knew I had to stay up for her Thanksgiving dinner.”
Accommodations are austere. Weston had no electricity or running water. She bathed in a tub with water from 10-gallon milk cans brought in by Forest Service staff. An outhouse and gas-powered refrigerator sat at the tower’s base, she said.
Inside the tower was a bed, a desk for the radios, a treadle sewing machine that she brought and a stool with insulated legs to stand on during lightning storms, Weston said.
“It really is a fascinating thing to have these storms go over you,” she said. “These beautiful, big cauliflower clouds come rolling along, and you’re seeing a long ways away — a long ways. It’s fantastic.”
Tower life, with its mix of boundless scenery, isolation and vigilance interrupted by wandering deer or the occasional visitor, was transformative, Weston said, perhaps in a way difficult to understand today.
“It changed my whole way of life ... ,” she said. “It made you become accustomed to the solitude, and it’s kind of nice. It really is. ... When you think, ‘I’m going be alone, basically, for three months,’ it’s not easy, but you do it. It makes it so you don’t mind being alone. I kind of enjoyed it.”