UP FOR HOURS

OF THE 125-MILE TRIP, the final 80 feet  — a sprint up the steel stairs of landmark Grandview Lookout Tower near the Grand Canyon’s South Rim — are the toughest. After a lingering stop at Desert View and a stately procession behind a trio of slow-moving rental RVs, I’m late, and ever later, for an outing with Neil Weintraub, a Kaibab National Forest archaeologist.

The Civilian Conservation Corps constructed Grandview in 1936, but Weintraub plans to take me to a fire lookout that, by some measures, could be a few hundred years old. That’s because the Hull Tank Lookout is a ponderosa pine, not a steel tower.

Long before the CCC began building permanent fire observation structures, the U.S. Forest Service established a network of tree lookouts on the Kaibab. Sometimes, rangers drove lag bolts into the trees to use as steps. They also improvised ladders, from wooden slats hammered into the trunks, for the long, dangerous climb to the top, where they could scan the surrounding landscape for smoke.

When I finally pull up at Grandview, I don’t see Weintraub but spot someone in the tower’s cab. So I start up the steps, and between the third and fourth landings, I meet a couple on their way down.

“Hey, is there a guy named Neil up there?”

“Oh, you must be Matt!”

I squeeze through the trapdoor and into the 7-by-7-foot metal compartment with its circular Osborne Fire Finder, a sighting device that observers use to pinpoint blazes. Smiling and gracious, Weintraub accepts my breathless apologies. Of course, there are worse places to have to wait for a laggard than this perch at 7,526 feet, with its view out over the forest and the Grand Canyon and all the way to Point Imperial on the North Rim.

We drive for a mile or so before setting out on foot for Hull Tank Lookout. Weintraub usually approaches from a different road but says it should take 20 minutes to reach the tree. He fiddles with his GPS and we traipse into the forest, stepping around stalks of mullein and stacks of logs from a thinning project.

The 20-minute mark comes and goes with nary a tree in sight. Our route turns increasingly circuitous, and Weintraub begins mumbling to his balky GPS before rebooting it. “I was so confident today, I’m like, I’m going to leave my compass and topo map at home,” he says. “That’s the thing about technology. Love it when it works. Or it can really screw you.”

Wandering around the woods semi-aimlessly with a guy like Weintraub is not without its benefits. He grew up outside New York City and was a dedicated distance runner, then attended Iowa’s Grinnell College, where he pitched and played center field as co-captain of the baseball team. Weintraub came in as a math major, then pivoted to anthropology. Because of his late start, Weintraub needed a few credits, so he attended a Grinnell summer field course near Flagstaff and discovered Arizona.
 

I WONDER WHY THE FOREST SERVICE bothered with so many lookout trees on the Kaibab. Starting in 1905, 37 were established, 33 of them on what today is the North Kaibab Ranger District. The threat to life and property would have been minimal, even if the threat to timber wasn’t. Grand Canyon Lodge didn’t open until 1928, and even now, there’s little development and settlement north of the Canyon. But the original manual for Forest Service rangers, published in 1906, was unambiguous: “Officers of the Forest Service, especially forest rangers, have no duty more important than protecting the reserves from forest fires.” The lookout trees formed the first line of defense.

The man who knows the most about Arizona’s fire lookouts is Dave Lorenz, a retired Northern Arizona University administrator. He grew up in Muskegon County, Michigan, and indirectly came to fire lookouts by way of his boating days on the Great Lakes. After moving to Arizona in 1982, Lorenz went hiking at Kendrick Peak near Flagstaff and came upon his first lookout tower.

“In Michigan, my hobby had been lighthouses,” he says. “So here I am in Arizona, and I was just hiking up the Kendrick Trail, and not to go to the lookout, either. But I find this thing. Sticking up in the air, like a lighthouse. I started going to see more. And the characters! The people running the lookouts were such an interesting lot. Later, I got in touch with the Southwestern Region Forest Service people in New Mexico and asked whether anyone had ever been to all of the lookouts. And they just said, ‘Who would really want to do that?’ ”

The short answer was Lorenz. He visited all 83 fire lookouts still standing in Arizona, only 75 of which are still around today, and researched their histories. Lorenz also documented a later generation of lookout trees, the 22 the CCC established in Grand Canyon National Park. Many of those lookouts used white firs, not ponderosa pines, and featured metal ladders, fabricated at the Canyon, that were bolted onto the trunks.

In 1967, when he was 18, Arizona State University environmental historian and author Stephen J. Pyne went to work with North Rim firefighting crews. He remembers rebuilding and frequently using the lookouts, which supplemented the North Rim’s two steel towers, one of which was manned by writer Edward Abbey.

Pyne says lookout trees became common at the Grand Canyon and on the Kaibab because of the area’s plateau topography. “In places like the Northwest, there are peaks, and you can pretty well sight fires from those high points,” he says. “But the North Rim is a shallow inverted bowl with all of these ridges and ravines. It’s very hard to orient yourself, and you need two sightings in order to triangulate a location. If you can’t see the fire from two spots, you’re stuck.”

You had to get above the forest canopy. And so the lookout trees on the Kaibab and the North Rim were probably the last of their kind used in the United States. What ultimately rendered the Grand Canyon’s tree and tower lookouts obsolete, Pyne says, was the increase in commercial aviation. Smoke gets spotted more easily from the air, and then, local planes and helicopters can direct crews in.

“It’s much harder to find a fire from a lookout sighting,” he says, before mimicking a spotter’s jargon: “ ‘Well, it’s the northwest quarter of the southwest quarter of Section 32, Township 32, north range 3 east.’ Wow! Yeah, that’s pretty accurate. But where the hell is it on the land?”
 

WHETHER IT'S IN A TREE or a tower, there’s magic to a fire lookout, especially if both Zen mystic and Smokey Bear mingle in your soul. I, for one, love the idea of days alone, high above ground, looking into the distance and seeing nothing — that is, until the smoke rises and your whole world changes.

Pyne says the “sub-subgenre” of fire lookout writing has added to the towers’ mystique. Jack Kerouac and poet Gary Snyder both wrote about their stints in towers, and Abbey, Pyne says, served as the North Rim’s last lookout, though he wasn’t especially taken with the role. “I requested a desk job,” Abbey said in the recording Freedom and Wilderness. “The chief ranger thought I lacked the competence to handle government paperwork. He offered me instead the only job in the park that required less brains, he said, than janitor, garbage collector or park superintendent. He made me fire lookout.”

After Hull Tank, I’m eager to track down more lookout trees, so I head to the North Rim to meet my buddy, landscape photographer Tom Gamache.

We go searching for Tater Point Lookout. Neither of us has a GPS: Tom, who drives a 1972 Chevy Blazer, does what he can to stay off the grid, and though I’m not a total Luddite, I do appreciate that you don’t need to recharge a paper map.

I isolate Tater Point to a square-mile sector on the Forest Service’s Kaibab map. We turn off of State Route 67, traveling through burned forests that open in places to the Vermilion Cliffs and distant Navajo Mountain. Yellows and oranges mottle stands of changing aspens, and Tom dodges deep troughs of water from recent rains before turning onto the road where we hope to find the tree.

Tater Point must be about 30 yards off the road somewhere in the next mile. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, except that we can’t see the tree for the forest, to both mix and mangle metaphors. By definition, there are many, many ponderosa pines in a ponderosa pine forest.

Tom slowly rolls us down the road until I spot what look like silhouetted lag bolts coming out of one tree. We get out, only to realize that they’re just dead branches. I tell Tom to follow in the truck as I start walking parallel to the road. Then, before he even gets back to the Blazer, Tom whistles and shouts, “Got it! There’s a ladder going all the way to the top of a tree here!”

Somehow, we have stopped almost directly opposite Tater Point Lookout. It’s a beauty, more majestic than Hull Tank — 100 feet tall, with an eight-section wooden ladder assembled from rungs attached to vertical two-by-fours. We trace the weathered ladder’s course as it leads skyward and seemingly back into the past, to a time before cellphones and drones, when, if you wanted to look out, the first thing you had to do was go up.