First line of wildfire defense: hilltop spotters

Those who work in fire lookouts come from very different backgrounds. Many are retired loggers and ranchers accustomed to the burdens and glories of rural isolation. Ken Struck and his wife, Colleen, have been sharing the duties on Soda Mountain for 16 years, spending the rest of the year looking after their horses. Before that, he was a firefighter for 25 years in Medford, Ore.

Dominic Luebbers is a 19-year-old community-college student working at the Carpenter Mountain lookout in the Willamette National Forest this summer. It's his second summer as a lookout, and he collects and disseminates information on fire lookouts through his website.

It's Glasscock's first summer as a lookout, and the learning curve has been very steep. Telling the difference between smoke and haze or dust kicked up by logging operations miles away can be difficult. "You have to watch every little pocket, every little wispy thing," she says. Sometimes other firefighting staff will flash a mirror at her from miles away as a drill in spotting lightening strikes.

Though there's a fire community of sorts – dispatchers, firefighters, reconnaissance aircraft and fire tanker pilots, and lookouts, who keep in 24-hour radio contact – it's essentially a lonely life. "You've got to enjoy your own cooking," says Mr. Struck, warming up a pot of coffee for a visitor. "Yesterday I baked bread and ate the whole thing."

There's a Thoreauvian aspect to the existence. In "Walden," Henry David Thoreau wrote: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life...."

"Part of what brought me here was the chance to be both focused and simple," says Glasscock. She left her cello at home, but plays her wooden recorder while keeping watch.

Sometimes art emerges from the isolation. Jack Kerouac wrote his novel "Desolation Angels" while working as a fire lookout in Washington State in the summer of 1956. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder drew inspiration from his work as a lookout as well.

As fire detection methods become more sophisticated, the use of human lookouts is declining. Oregon once had 849 lookouts; now there are no more than 100. In many places around the country, retired lookout cabins now are rented out to campers. The revenue helps maintain other historic lookouts

Still, the men and women who continue to live and work in them remain a vital part of fighting fires.

"They're someone who's very familiar with the terrain and can let the dispatchers know specifically where the smoke is," says Jack DeGolia, of the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. "They're a 24-hour set of eyes."

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