In March 1989, the U.S. Forest Service received a letter warning that trees in the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho had been spiked, claiming that nine people spent 11 days spiking trees with 500 pounds of nails. It mentioned that the land was important to the earth, and home to wildlife and the trees. The group signed the letter under the pseudonym “George Hayduke” in reference to a protagonist in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, followed by a threat that disregarding the message could result in a lot of people getting hurt. Investigations by the Forest Service revealed that 284 trees had been spiked with 384 nails. As a result, the Plum Creek Sawmill in Montana suffered damages when a saw exploded after hitting a spike. The perpetrators were a group associated with Earth First! who had first met in Missoula, Montana in 1988. They were protesting the Post Office Creek Timber sale, which opened a northeast parcel of Clearwater National Forest to logging operations. By spiking trees in the area, they hoped to preserve old growth in the forest. Earth First! founder Dave Foreman’s environmentalist guidebook Ecodefense, published in 1985, cites tree spiking as a viable tactic to disrupt logging and deforestation. The book includes a how-to section for tree spikers, as well as instructional diagrams. Spiking trees in a visible way was seen as an immediate deterrent for loggers, while concealing spikes could be effective in destroying equipment. By the 1990s, Earth First! literature no longer supported spiking due to both danger for humans and legal repercussions.  The mailing of the letter led to FBI and Forest Service investigations into the Environmental Studies Department at the University of Montana. Agents raided student housing, collecting notebooks and calendars for evidence. The FBI subpoenaed seven Missoula residents to provide handwriting and hair samples for physical evidence before an Idaho grand jury. Investigators discovered that Tracy Stone-Manning, a University of Montana graduate student associated with the group, had rented a typewriter from the library to retype the letter then mailed the letter to the Forest Service. Stone-Manning, facing charges of conspiracy, received immunity in exchange for her testimony against other members of the group. In February 1993, a grand jury indicted Jeffrey Fairchild and John Blount in connection to the tree-spiking. A federal jury in Spokane, Washington convicted the men of conspiracy and depredation against property of the United States following a June 1993 trial. Blount was sentenced to 17 months in prison and ordered to pay restitution, while Fairchild received probation.  The incident at Clearwater National Forest returned to the national spotlight in 2021 when President Joe Biden nominated Tracy Stone-Manning as director of the Bureau of Land Management. Her confirmation by the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources was marked by discussions on ecoterrorism and participation in radical environmentalist groups. Despite the controversy around her involvement in the 1989 tree-spiking, the Senate Committee confirmed Stone-Manning as director of the BLM.

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When describing the role of fire lookouts in the Intermountain West, one typically pictures scenic vistas atop remote woodland mountaintops. Lookouts rarely serviced urban areas, so imagine how odd it would have been to encounter a Forest Service fire lookout in the middle of a metropolitan area. As unusual as this sounds, one lookout station did operate in the center of downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, for roughly a decade.

Completed in 1912, the Walker Bank Building is a sixteen-story skyscraper in downtown Salt Lake. At the time of its construction, the building was the tallest structure in the Intermountain West. In the decades following Utah’s statehood in 1896, Utahans considered the construction of impressive infrastructure such as the Walker Bank an important step in the modernization of Salt Lake City.

During the 1930s, the city faced a water crisis. The Great Salt Lake itself is far too salty to use as drinking water, so most of the city’s water came from streams and rivers in the mountains surrounding the Salt Lake Valley. Grazing and wildfires had led to erosion that damaged the watersheds the city relied on. Determined to fix the issue, Wasatch National Forest began placing more emphasis on fire suppression. In 1939, the Forest Service and Salt Lake City Water Department banded together to establish a fire lookout to protect watersheds in the foothills around the Valley. Due to its height, the Walker Bank Building had an impeccable view of the region, so with permission from the bank, Wasatch National Forest set up a small lookout station atop the building.

The lookout itself consisted of little more than a small alidade table which was a map with a sighting device affixed to it for pinpointing spotted fires. From beneath a three-story steel tower advertising the Walker Bank and Trust, urban forest rangers surveilled the surrounding foothills for twelve hours daily. In 1941, The Times of San Mateo, California, reported that the Walker Bank Building had the only fire lookout in a downtown area in the entire country. In 1943, a fifteen-year-old named James Sarvis took on the lookout position. Despite his age, Wasatch National Forest at the Salt Lake Tribune credited him with the protection of the city’s valuable water resources. Sarvis returned to the post several times.

Wasatch National Forest has no records of the lookout being occupied after 1948, but the Walker Bank Building still exists. Now known as the “Walker Center,” the building is currently owned and operated by Wells Fargo.

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During the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was heavily involved in America’s fire policies through the construction of fire suppression infrastructure. Following the Great Fire of 1910, the federal government became increasingly concerned with the surveillance and management of wildfires. The responsibilities that arose from this concern fell at the feet of government forestry administrations, such as the Forest Service. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the CCC into existence as part of his broader New Deal policies. The founding of the CCC both created jobs for young men struggling during the Great Depression, and provided foresters with an ample work force to help with fire suppression.

During this period, Ashley National Forest in northeastern Utah desperately needed a permanent fire tower. While mountain tops had been used as crude fire lookouts consisting of little more than campsites, no fire lookouts with living quarters had been built in the state of Utah. However, in 1937, the CCC completed the construction of the Ute Mountain Fire Tower in Ashley National Forest. It was the first and last of its kind to be built in the state.

One of the tools utilized at Ute Mountain was an Osborne Fire-Finder. This device served as an essential part of any efficient lookout facility for decades. It consisted of a circular map mounted to a table, typically at the center of a given lookout. A sighting mechanism consisting of two brass posts pivoted around the table, secured to opposite ends of one another. One post had a thin slit in it while the other stretched a single horse hair. At the direct center of the map would have been the location of the lookout. By moving the posts to line up with any smoke sighted, a lookout could record the exact location of a fresh wildfire. Ute Mountain also had a telephone and radio, and either could be used to contact Ashley National Forest’s fire command, who would subsequently rush to the site of the fire and extinguish it if possible.

Unfortunately, by the late 1960s, the tower was in disrepair. In 1967, a Forest Service survey of the structure proved that all four of the tower’s legs were rotting, and the structure soon closed. In an effort to preserve Utah’s only remaining fire lookout, Ashley National Forest nominated the tower for the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The Service soon restored the tower, and the Forest held a rededication ceremony in 1987. However, in 2008 the Forest Service again discovered rot in all of the support beams. They considered demolishing the structure, but the local community believed it was too significant to the history of conservation in Utah. Ashley National Forest restored the tower most recently in 2014.

Today, the site is open to visitors as a historical interpretive site. Accessible by car, guests are encouraged to climb the steps of the tower and peer inside the large windows to experience the living quarters of a fire lookout.

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Following the Great Fire of 1910, which devastated much of the northern Rocky Mountains, the Forest Service prioritized wildfire suppression. By the mid-1910s, it constructed three small platforms along the Canyon’s edge to spot fires. The North Rim platform, constructed at Bright Angel Point, provided forest rangers and tourists with impeccable views of the forests which lined the Canyon.

As one of the natural wonders of the world, the Grand Canyon is widely considered one of America’s environmental gems. Federal attempts to preserve the Canyon date all the way back to the late nineteenth century, when the then Indiana Senator, Benjamin Harrison, proposed three bills in the 1880s to set aside the canyon as a national park. Though each of the bills failed, President Harrison eventually granted the Grand Canyon status as a Forest Reserve in the waning days of his presidency in 1893. After President Theodore Roosevelt visited the area in 1903, he granted the site status as a National Monument in 1908, replacing Harrison’s reserve . The National Park Service wouldn’t be founded for another eight years, so the Monument fell under control of the fledgling US Forest Service.

The Grand Canyon gained status as a National Park in 1919. The Park Service continued the Forest Service’s policy of fire suppression, and in 1928, it replaced the platform with a seventy five-foot tall steel tower. Topped with a tiny observation cab, fire lookouts lived in a small cabin beneath the structure. Under contract, the Aeromotor Company constructed the Bright Angel Lookout Tower. Aerometer also designed and produced the iconic windmill water pumps which became a symbol of the American West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

During the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) updated much of the North Rim’s infrastructure. This included moving the Bright Angel Lookout roughly fourteen miles away to the Park’s northern entrance. In 1933, the CCC renamed the structure the North Rim Lookout Tower.

From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, writer and environmentalist Edward Abbey spent four seasons working in the tower. Abbey’s time in the station inspired his book Black Sun, a novel which tells the story of a fire lookout in the Grand Canyon who falls in love with a tourist. When she goes missing, the lookout is blamed for her mysterious disappearance. In his book Fire on the Rim, Stephen Pyne references Abbey as the reason the Park ceased lookout tower operations. “Whether [Abbey] was even in the tower, no one could say. He was a writer, and the only smokes he reported were the ones in his novels… he was absent so often that he demonstrated that we did not need a lookout, because having [Abbey] in the tower was the same as having no one.” Ultimately, the Park opted for aerial fire spotting instead.

Though abandoned, North Rim Lookout Tower is still accessible. Hikers can reach the site via a short hike from the Park’s northern entrance toll booth.

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As early as 1907, the two-year-old Forest Service had begun to realize the potential usefulness of high vantage points to monitor fires. William Kreutzer, the nation’s first forest ranger, recommended a series of peaks in the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado for this purpose. The most prominent was Devil’s Head, a rocky granite outcropping high above Pike National Forest, near Sedalia, Colorado. In the wake of the Great Fire of 1910, the Forest Service began constructing permanent stations at these points. In 1912, Colorado foresters established a crude lookout at Devil’s Head. This primitive station consisted of a small alidade table, which is an instrument consisting of a map and sighting mechanism used to pinpoint the exact location of fires around the lookout, and a tiny log cabin on an outcropping. The Forest Service has used the site continuously since the establishment of this early station. In 1919, the Service built a more permanent structure. It consisted of a ten-foot by ten-foot wooden cabin, flanked by large windows that granted the ranger within a 360-degree view of the surrounding forests. The first lookout to occupy this new station was Helen Dowe, the second woman in United States history to staff an official forest fire lookout. In the wake of World War I, the Forest Service faced a shortage of able-bodied men to operate stations. Dowe was born in Denver in 1889, and spent much of her youth working as a horseback riding instructor in the mountains around Devil’s Head. As such, she knew the area well. Dowe spotted and reported dozens of wildfires during her tenure as a lookout from 1919 to 1921, saving thousands of acres from burning. In her time at Devil’s Head, she gained widespread publicity. As the subject of numerous magazine articles, Dowe became a prominent feminist figure at the height of the national suffrage movement. According to the Denver Post, she received thousands of letters from women around the country who envied her position.  The Forest Service replaced the old observatory at Devil’s Head Lookout in 1951. The current station is the last lookout in Colorado to be staffed full-time. Pike-Isabel National Forest makes the site available to tourists and hikers, who flock to the rocky outcropping for the lookout’s history and the incredible views from the top. Visitors can access the station via a 1.5-mile hike, and parking is available at the Devil’s Head Trailhead. The last leg of the journey takes hikers up a winding wooden staircase, which works its way up massive granite outcroppings. Lucky visitors may get the chance to talk to the station’s lookout.

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In the summer of 1910, every step through the forests in the Bitterroot Mountains between Idaho and Montana could meet with a resounding crunch from the arid twigs and leaves. The season had been extremely dry, with no rain at all from May through July. On the night of July 26, a lightning storm swept across the Bitterroots. Thunder roared through the valleys, but there was no rainfall. By the following morning, nearly a thousand fires had sprung up around the region, sparked by the lightning. In the following weeks, even more blazes emerged. Sparks, thrown by trains rumbling through the dense forest had no trouble lighting the desiccant woodland, adding to the crisis. By the middle of August, there were 2,500 separate fires burning in Idaho and Montana. On the morning of August 20, a breeze picked up through the Coeur d’Alene National Forest and the St. Joe Mountains. The wind gradually intensified throughout the day. Before the firefighters knew it, they were dealing with gusts of up to 70 mph. Hurricane-like winds pushed together hundreds of fires. By this point, there was virtually no hope of containing the fire. The Big Burn had started. The dry wilderness was like an endless source of fuel, and he giant blaze devoured everything in its path. Flaming trees were pulled from the ground and tossed like mere sticks while dry timber caught fire and instantly exploded into a ball of sparks. Firefighters that survived reported that it was near impossible to outrun the heat because the inferno moved at the speed of a charging horse. Those with a head start had a chance of survival; most others did not. Over the course of two days, the Big Burn torched three million acres of land. A third of Wallace, Idaho—a town of three thousand people—burned to the ground. The fire almost completely leveled the mining towns of Grand Forks, Idaho and Taft, Montana. Eighty-six people died, seventy-eight of whom were firefighters. It was soon clear that the Big Burn was the most destructive fire the United States Forest Service had ever seen. The fire would also be recognized as the most significant wildfire emergency because of its deep impact on future forest policies. The disaster inspired a wave of priority and policy concerning national land. The incredible loss of life and forest showed the Forest Service needed serious recognition from the people. Donations poured in, and Congress doubled the organization’s budget. Parks and forest stations hired more staff and established resources in preparation of another wildfire catastrophe. The disaster of 1910 imprinted on the nation how dangerous fire could be; it was a lesson learned at incredible human cost.

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Built in 1933, the Ogden U.S. Forest Service building was designed by the well-renowned architectural firm Hodgson and McClenahan. The two architects were known for their attention to detail and, in this particular build, their stylized brick layout. The firm designed other well-known examples of Art Deco such as Ogden High School in 1936 and the Ogden Weber Municipal Building in 1939.   It was numbered among the initial projects funded by congressional appropriations in the early years of the depression, prior to the formal organization of federal relief programs during the Great Depression. Locally, the building is significant in Ogden's development as a Federal government colony. The U.S. Forest Service was the first federal agency to locate in a city where the Federal government is currently the largest employer. In 1908, the U.S. Forest Service established District 4 regional headquarters at Ogden, Utah, then the state's second largest city and important railroad regional center. Ogden was selected over Salt Lake City because of three main factors: 1) more favorable railroad rates, 2) available facilities, and 3) greater aggressiveness of Ogden's business community. The building which housed these offices was built by local businessman Fred J. Kiesel at 24th St. and Lincoln. The Kiesal home became the site for the new building. On December 20, 1932, a contract for $229,000 was let to the Murch Brothers Construction Company of St. Louis, and work commenced in January 1933. Local labor was to be employed "when available." Lumber, brick, and cement was supplied by local businesses. Granite blocks were imported from the Raymond Granite Quarries of California. The U.S. Forest Service Building was originally built to provide offices for the U.S. Forest Service Intermountain Region, the experimental station, and the supply depot. The building, as described in a contemporary account, occupies a ground space of 11,300 square feet consisting of a basement, four floors, and a three story tower. The first story was decorated with Utah marble and described as Golden Travertine. The floors were of birch with a walnut finish. Since its construction, only minimal alterations have been made to the building. Original storage areas were renovated into offices between 1939 and 1940. In 1963, the roofing was replaced and the skylights removed. This has left a very high level of architectural integrity. The U.S. Forest Service Building was first listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1983 as part of the Ogden Art Deco Buildings Thematic Resources Nomination, which recognizes the town's significant Art Deco architecture. In 2006, the building was individually listed in the National Register as an architectural gem, exemplifying the Art Deco Style of the 1930s. The building is now being vacated by the Forest Service.

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