Spend a night alone in a fire lookout tower
A place: United States
The stove is small enough to heat with one armful of wood, and by dusk the windows go dark orange with the sunset instead of black, because you are above the treeline on all four sides at once. The US Forest Service leases out these decommissioned lookouts, mostly across the Pacific Northwest, Montana and California, structures built between the 1930s and 1960s to watch for smoke before anyone had a phone to call it in. There is no signal and often no water, so you carry in what you need and spend the evening reading a logbook where a ranger in 1978 wrote only: 'Elk again. Nothing burning.'
Practical
- Cost
- $40–100 per night
- Best time
- Summer, when fire-season access roads and trails are clear
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time it takes
- One night, often with a multi-mile hike each way
- What people get wrong
- People book too close to the date and find every slot for the season gone by spring, or underestimate the hike and arrive after dark without a headlamp. Others forget there's no water source at the tower and no way to resupply once they're up there.
- With
- Alone