TUNK MOUNTAIN, 10-8

Passing the Baton to the Next Generation
The third week in August was a very special. My son Kent flew up from Denver to join me for a week of visiting lookouts in Washington State and spend a few days staffing and doing maintenance on Tunk Mountain Lookout. What a great chance to get out of the other Washington (D.C.)!

Located on the Okanogan National Forest on the east side of the North Cascades just south of the Canadian border, there has been a lookout on Tunk Mountain since 1933 when an L-4 live-in cab was constructed on a 40' pole tower. In 1966 the Washington Department of Natural Resources replaced the lookout with a 14'x14' DNR flat roof cab with catwalk on a 40' timber tower. The site overlooks both state protected land as well as national forest, and the Forest Service and DNR share in the protection responsibilities in the region.

In 1996 the DNR stopped staffing the lookout and several years later it was purchased by FFLA member Dick Morrison and maintained on the site as a radio relay and as an emergency lookout when needed. As it turned out the Forest Service staffed it for four weeks in 2005 while repairs were being made on nearby Bonaparte Mountain. In 2004 Tunk Mountain lookout was sold to Historic Structures LLC of Virginia, a company organized by our family for the purpose of restoring and maintaining lookouts.

Being a former District Ranger and Incident Commander, I always enjoyed fire management, and saw quite a bit of it. Having served in the Army as a Captain in the Infantry, there was a similarity between fire control and military operations that was challenging and always exciting. By the time Kent came along, I had moved on to college professor and he missed out on living on a ranger district. However as a timberland owner I did keep my appointments as both a state and a federal fire warden, so the family heard about wildfires and occasionally saw me come home a bit dirty from an afternoon on the fireline.

On Friday morning the Forest Service inspector came up from Tonasket for our annual review. He had not been there very long when I noticed a smoke coming over the ridge just two miles away. The forester called it in right away, but the two nearest lookouts could not see any smoke. If they didn't see it, as far as dispatch was concerned it didn't exist. Besides, what was Tunk Mountain anyway? It is no longer on the maps. With recent consolidations the dispatch officers are located fifty miles away and don't know the country. We had watched the air patrol go by earlier (on the other side of the mountain from where the fire was) and they didn't see it either!

However, our forester was insistent and local district sent out a Forest Service engine, a DNR engine and a community engine, a very respectable response considering the fire danger was extreme. However, I had the feeling having a local person they knew call it in made a difference.

The next few hours Kent witnessed a lot of fire action as we listened the communications between the engine captains. None of them could find our fire although we had a good azimuth on it. A DNR supervisor on the scene finally called their helicopter and it flew right to it with our description. Yes, it was a Forest Service fire but there was also a risk to private land, so the DNR authorized water drops. The next thing we heard was sound of an airplane right behind us as the smokejumper plane from Twisp came over. We watched the streamers dropped to help the spotter determine wind conditions, then four jumpers went out. I also told him to wait for the tool drops which are typically low and fast passes, and we weren't disappointed. We could almost see the faces of the pilots.

Kent turned to me and said: "Dad, you willed that fire just to show me the importance of lookouts and the response of air attack." Well, I don't know about the "willed" part, put it was fun to be in on the action again, at least as an observer, and to show the importance of early detection by fire lookouts.

Later that afternoon that "damn fire patrol plane"--of the kind that helped put lookouts out of business-- checked out the fire twice. On his last visit he left with a flyby of the lookout and dipped his wings at us, a friendly gesture that was appreciated. I guess we are partners in fire detection after all!

Keith A. Argow
Chairman of the Board
argow@cs.net

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