By Alexandra Duggan
The Spokesman-Review
Jun. 21 — Ray Kresek has been struck by lightning three times. He’s watched colleagues die in fires. He saw a plane knock down a fire with dish soap. And he was among responders who pulled the bodies of 44 Air Force members from a plane crash.
As the 88-year-old former firefighter sat in his home Friday, surrounded by memorabilia of firefighting artifacts he has collected over the years, Kresek insisted — again and again — this story was not to be written about him.
“I want it to be about preserving the history of fire lookouts,” he said, “Because that’s what I’m into.”
This story isn’t about fire lookouts, though. It’s about Kresek, who has invaluable experiences and a wealth of fire knowledge.
To those in fire, he is best known across the region as the leading expert on fire history and lookouts following the publishing of his 1984 book “Fire Lookouts of the Northwest.” His home on the far north side of Spokane doubles as the Fire Lookout Museum, which has amassed hundreds of memorabilia from the U.S. Forest Service, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources and the Spokane Fire Department. Radios, maps, signs, uniforms, Pulaskis, water pumps, helmets and even a 1950s Chevrolet from Spokane’s fire department sits in his backyard shed.
In the back of the lush greenery sits a fire lookout that Kresek rebuilt from parts. And surrounding the property are 25 different kinds of evergreens, labeled and all, which Kresek joked he stole from the Forest Service when he was younger.
“Be careful what you steal from the government,” he laughed.
The DNR would have meetings in Kresek’s yard sometimes, a special place dedicated entirely to their craft. Firefighters came by on Smokey the Bear’s 75th birthday and parked all their trucks down the street, too. It’s a place “meant for people who care about fire,” he says, meaning “not just anyone” is always welcome to wander through his backyard without a phone call. But lately, those visits of people who care about firefighting have tapered off.
“It’s history,” Kresek said. "... But they aren’t interested in this place anymore.”
So much has changed since Kresek started as a 16-year-old fire lookout with the DNR in the 1950s, he said. For starters, DNR doesn’t hire teenage firefighters or fire lookouts nowadays. Beyond that, fire lookouts are “a dying breed” due to advancements in technology. Fires are getting hotter and burning longer every year, more homes are being built in fire-prone areas and recently, U.S. Forest Service members are being fired by the government.
Getting people to pay attention and to care is what’s important, Kresek said. The museum that sits in his yard is just an extension of that — all the firefighters that handed him their old memorabilia over the years, memorabilia that was likely to be thrown away, are poignant reminders of fire safety, fire risk and the people who spend their career fighting flames.
” Times have changed, yes,” Kresek said. “But still the guy with the shovel, a Pulaski, a grub hoe and a hose is still necessary on fires. No matter where.”
A lifetime of experience
Kresek always wanted to be a firefighter. When he was younger, he and his siblings would have makeshift soapbox derby races down South Bernard Street. His father crafted his soap box like a fire engine, Kresek said, and it was fast enough to “burn the strip off between the sidewalk and the street.” One day it sparked, and sent flames across the vacant lot that is now Spokane Fire Station 9.
When Kresek was 8, he was riding his bicycle at 17th and Bernard when his mother looked out the window of his childhood home and watched a lightning rod strike him.
“Bam!” Kresek said, “It knocked me off my bike. I just got back on my bike and rode home,” he said.
It was a lightning rod of foreshadowing for the future firefighter, who would go on to be struck by lightning as a fire lookout two more times. Kresek shrugs it off, for the most part, but would describe it as “like being in a light bulb when it blows.” In every instance, he said, he has woken up within five minutes and gone about his day.
After working his way up as a firefighter, Kresek assumed the role as fire warden in Chelan while serving as the incident commander for the Antoine Creek fire in September 1956 . It was located 8 miles northeast of Chelan and burned about 5 acres. As Kresek was trying to work the fire, a small, open-cockpit biplane zoomed from the south with the pilot waving down at him.
“No radio contact, no nothing. He made a pass over this fire. He turned around and made two more in a triangle, three more in a triangle, and he knocked that fire down,” Kresek said, “With 100 gallons of water and one gallon of liquid dishwashing soap.”
That moment would go on to become Washington’s first ever fire retardant airdrop.
“And that was my fire,” Kresek said with a smile.
He married his wife, Rita, in 1960. She had never even been camping, but quickly grew to love the outdoors as the couple took their four children on backpacking and fishing adventures. Rita, who died in 2016, even embraced her husband’s passion for the firefighting profession, becoming a member of the Forest Fire Lookout Association.
Kresek later became a crash rescue firefighter at the Air Force base in Del Rio, Texas — a place where he’d often see American pilot Francis Gary Powers taking off on flights. Powers, who was recruited by the CIA to fly over Russia and spy on the Soviet Union, was captured by the Soviets when his plane was shot down in May 1960.
“I saw that man on a daily basis,” Kresek said. “That base, top secret, had spy planes. For the era that they were active in the 1960s — from 40,000 feet in the air — they could see you smoking a cigarette.”
Two years later, Kresek made his way back to his hometown of Spokane to serve at Fairchild Air Force Base. As the only firefighter with a top-secret clearance, the Air Force sent him up near Mount Spokane to search for a missing plane that held 44 military men from South Dakota. The pilot, the crew and the other 40 members were stationed at Fairchild because runway repairs were underway at the base near Rapid City. Traffic controllers in Spokane had lost contact with the pilot around 11 a.m. on Sept. 10, 1962.
Kresek, who was familiar with the area, beelined to question the girl stationed at the nearby fire lookout. He found she had heard a roaring sound and then a crash, but couldn’t tell where, because the trees were so thick with fog. Kresek, and other searchers, eventually came upon the wreckage of Mourn 79, still the deadliest plane crash in Spokane County’s history. Kresek, as a crash rescue firefighter, immediately joined the recovery effort.
“I’ve hauled dead bodies out of homes. I have seen three of my fellow firefighters die in fires,” Kresek said, “But I’d never want to do anything like that again. It has affected me my entire life.”
Kresek eventually joined the Spokane Fire Department and was later successful in marshaling an army to protect the Salmo River basin. He had seen survey stakes in the ground while bear hunting in the late 60s and knew it meant logging timber.
“I told them, ‘No you’re not,’ ” he said, and began the push for a wilderness boundary. It mostly worked. The Washington Wilderness Act, signed by former President Ronald Reagan, reigns in 41,000 acres in Washington as wilderness. The Idaho portion near the upper Priest River is managed as wilderness but still has not been formally designated, according to previous reporting from The Spokesman-Review .
But the fire lookouts — those are what Kresek cares about the most. He started as a fire lookout, then came back to a fire lookout in his later years. “A full circle,” is what he calls it.
His advocacy to preserve fire lookouts, which are slowly disappearing due to advancements in technology, is largely what has preserved the remaining ones in the northwest. Some of them are just too old, but the others are necessary, Kresek said. According to the Forest Fire Lookout Association, there were once 8,000 lookouts in the U.S. Now, there are only 2,500.
Kresek worked at a range of lookouts, but he recalls one known as “Heaven’s Gate,” a lookout that can see over Hell’s Canyon. There used to never be visitors there since there were no roads to the lookout, but as time passed, Kresek said tourists and wildlife would visit him often. There wasn’t really a way for him to be lonely there, he said.
His mission, even at 88 years old, has always been to restore and preserve lookouts. There are just some things lookouts can do that technology can’t.
“You might say they call it old school now, putting a person up in a tower on a mountain top all summer, where they may see only one or two fires. So are they worth it?” Kresek said. “You can spot a fire earlier. So in my estimation, they’re damn well worth it.”
He thought he’d put his knowledge to use. Kresek climbed as many lookouts as he could, he trained others and he was actively involved in fire lookout groups. In 1984, Kresek compiled an in-depth list with information and coordinates about every fire lookout left in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana into a 412-page book. He told his wife it wouldn’t sell, but he was wrong — fire lookouts everywhere in the northwest and beyond now use that book. The museum in Colville also sells it for $60, Kresek said.
At a book signing in Oregon, a nearly retired U.S. Forest Service regional forester came up to Kresek’s table and thumbed through “Fire Lookouts of the Northwest.” He bought the book, but told Kresek he had some fire memorabilia that was about to be tossed out and he wanted it preserved. The regional forester thought Kresek could do it. So Kresek, with permission from the Washington Secretary of State, began to turn his backyard into a museum for firefighters.
“He said, ‘Write me a letter when you get this done, and I’ll give you my forest service key,’ ” Kresek said. “And he did.”
Knowledge is invaluable
Kresek can tell you where every item in his home, yard, shed and lookout came from. He can tell you the year, the make, the model and the backstory. He can tell you how things “used to go” even though “the kids don’t want to hear about the old days.”
But there are some that don’t see it that way.
When Spokane Fire Department’s Administrative Battalion Chief Mike Forbes wanted to snatch up a fire lookout opportunity in 2014, he called up Kresek. He knew about him, he knew about his book and he knew his backyard was full of fire history that was probably due a visit. Forbes showed up after his shift at the fire department around 8 a.m. and stayed there with Kresek and his wife until 5 p.m. almost every day, learning what he could about how to become a fire lookout. Kresek was the one who taught him how to use an Osborne Fire Finder, a type of alidade, a surveying tool, that allows lookouts to triangulate the location of a fire based on their sight line.
Now, Forbes is the volunteer coordinator for fire lookouts in the North Fork Ranger District of the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest. And he’s still just as accurate with the alidade as a helicopter is flying overhead. What Kresek taught him is not only invaluable, but still needed, Forbes said.
“I love the history and how we got here, but I really enjoy that old knowledge. That stuff really does work,” he said.
Forbes remembers seeing an artificial intelligence demonstration about how the technology would be able to detect a fire. He knows there are benefits to it — and it has come a long way since that demo — but at the time, he thought, “If I was a lookout, I would have seen that before it became a smoke column.”
Forbes, who has been part of the Spokane Fire Department for 26 years, still has questions though. That’s usually when he’ll go to Kresek.
“Ray is the most passionate guy about wildfire,” Forbes said. “So when I start having these questions, he is one of those resources. He will give me that perspective. Understanding where things came from helps me understand where we are and where we should be going.”
In 2011, Kresek won a nationwide award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Association of State Foresters for outstanding public service in wildfire prevention. As a silver rendition of Smokey Bear, the award rests in Kresek’s " Smokey Bear room” in his basement, which is filled with the bear’s memorabilia he’s collected over the years.
While Kresek is recognized nationally as being instrumental in preserving fire lookout history, said Spokane Fire Department spokesperson Justin de Ruyter, he’s also been a key player in staffing lookouts through the volunteer program. While many have been shut down or slated for demolition, Kresek has stepped up to help restore and staff the lookouts with volunteers to preserve them through his Fire Lookouts of the Northwest Historic Lookout Project.
“There would be a lot less fire lookouts if not for Ray,” de Ruyter said.
The Bonaparte lookout in Colville, the oldest lookout in Washington, was slated to be closed this year but instead will be staffed with volunteers.
“This is one that would probably end up vandalized or demolished if not for volunteer staffing and folks like Ray to help,” de Ruyter said.
A museum located in a backyard beyond the pines in north Spokane might look a little odd on Google Maps. But to people like Forbes, who want local fire history to stay for the long haul, it’s necessary.
Among the hundreds of collectibles sits a 1939 smoke jumper uniform, a 1928 fire finder alidade, dozens of authentic fire lookout markers and a sign reminding onlookers of a blaze that killed two firefighters in 1967, also sits Kresek’s home. And because of that, he wants people to know it’s not just some city park.
“They don’t even know what a lookout is. They don’t even know one tree from another and they’re not interested in wildland fire, so I don’t want them,” Kresek said. “I want people who care about fire.”
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