This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
In the woods of far eastern Utah, Ute Mountain Fire Lookout Tower is keeping watch, and keeping history alive.
Beginning this May, a Forest Service firefighter will spend warm days stationed in the tower's 14-by-14-foot cabin, keeping an eye out for smoke in the pine-filled Ashley National Forest. On clear days, you can reportedly see Wyoming and Colorado from the tower's catwalk.
The view isn't just spectacular; it's increasingly rare. Lookout towers used to be more common, but as radios and cell phones spread, the need for them faded away.
But in an age when almost everyone has a way to report a forest fire, the Ute Mountain Fire Lookout Tower is still faithful to its mission, a monument to days gone by. In fact, it's the last of its kind in the state.
Nathan Shinkel, a Forest Service assistant fire management officer who supervises the tower, noted that staffing it with a firefighter is "fairly rare" in the 21st century. Around the country, most surviving towers have become mere tourist attractions; some are also rented to people who want a unique place to camp.
Even more uniquely, the Ute Mountain Fire Tower has homing pigeons.
Beginning in the 1920s, lookouts relayed messages about fires to ranger stations by strapping messages to the cooing birds. This summer, the tower officially kicks off a recreational version of that avian tradition — in reverse.
"We drop pigeons off at the Red Canyon Visitor Center [located about 10 miles southeast of Manila], where people can put messages on the pigeons and send them to the lookout tower [about five miles southwest of Manila]," Shinkel said. When the forest rangers were testing the pigeons last summer, one of the rangers proposed to his girlfriend by attaching a ring to the bird.
As far as Shinkel knows, no other lookout tower has resurrected the homing pigeons like they have. People can retrieve their messages at the tower, where the stationed firefighter provides a tour of the historic site.
The tower was built in the late 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, an initiative by then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt to put people to work during the Great Depression.
The tower fell out of use by 1969. Over the years, storms took their toll, and the tower's long, Douglas fir legs began to rot. Although there was an effort to repair the damage in the 1980s, the rot returned. By 2008, the tower was closed to keep people safe.
But in the past several years, passion for the retro lookout was strong enough to raise money to bring it back.
"It represents such an important part of the history of the area," said John Erickson, forest supervisor at Ashley National Forest, in a Forest Service YouTube video. "And many people have experiences of either coming up and looking at it, or being a part of working here and seeing it."
Repairs began three years ago. And once the rotted legs were replaced with metal ones, the tower reopened to the public last summer.
"Watching fires in this remote area, and getting a sense of that, is so different than the world we live in that has cars, roads, telephones, cell phones, everything like that," said Jeff Rust, a Forest Service archaeologist, in the same video. "This [tower] allows you to have an appreciation you can't get in other places."
From the top of the 30-foot tower, visitors can see about hundreds of acres of scenic northeastern Utah, including a virtually uninhabited slope of the Uinta Mountain Range.
When Lee Skabelund was the tower's lookout in the mid-1960s, he woke with the sun rising over Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area and wiped the sleep from his eyes while scanning one of the most scenic forest landscapes in Utah. At night, he recalled, the stars were amazing.
Claire Boerigter, the lookout who was stationed there last summer, knows all about the tower's singular views.
From her perch, Boerigter watched lightning thread behind Hogsback Butte, rushing behind the peaks of the High Uintas. And "when a ground strike flashed down into nearby Half Moon Park, I felt the breath catch in my chest," she said in an article for Lookout Network, a quarterly magazine for fire lookouts.
Thanks to the summer she spent keeping watch, she knows that at night, she could see the lights from the town of Manila shine to the north. She knows how Sheep Creek Lake glistens in the afternoon sun. And on the Fourth of July, she could "just make out fireworks as they clear Death Valley so that, for a brief moment, the window panes spark and glow."
The job has its challenges, too. In the article, she said that there were days when she resented the 48 steps to the top, the rattling windows and "the perpetual buzz of flies who were inextricably drawn to my glass room on stilts."
Then again, there were days when she leaned against the railing, "watching the rains blow in, noting the contours of the mountains, mouthing the names of ridges and lakes so that I would not forget them. Or days when I would sit in the silence of a calm afternoon and feel intensely, wonderfully alone."
As she describes in her article, it was difficult for Boerigter not to feel like the tower was hers, with her maps spread out over the tables, her books on the shelf and her oatmeal in the cupboard. But she was just one in a long line of rangers. And thanks to the restoration, she is far from the last who will call the tower their summer home.
Twitter: @MikeyPanda —
Visit the Ute Mountain Fire Lookout Tower
Take State Road 44 to the Sheep Creek Geological Loop. Take the turnoff toward Spirit Lake, then follow signs for Ute Tower, which is located two and one-half miles west of the Loop. The tower is open from 10:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, June to September. To ensure the lookout is at the tower and not assigned to a fire, contact the Vernal or Manila Forest Service Offices at 435-789-1181 for Vernal and 435-7815260 for Manila.
Source: U.S. Forest Service