Keeping Watch

Michael Decker was 10 miles into a 20-mile hike in one of Idaho’s most remote wilderness areas when he and his friends spotted smoke on a ridge in the direction he was going.

They had reached an abandoned fire tower in the summer’s heat and peered through the broken windows of the wooden shell across miles of mountain tops, heat waves and scarred timber when the plume like a gray cyclone appeared in the distance.

The buzz of flies dancing in the shade was the only sound as the hikers watched with awe the rising column through binoculars.

“I had just come off my first stint as a volunteer fire lookout, and we were on our way to visit the Sheepeater Lookout, one of the oldest and most remote lookouts still in use in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness on the Payette National Forest,” said Decker, who is currently the director of graduate student support programming in the College of Graduate Studies.

The smoke they watched was from a lightning strike that eventually became the Dixie Jumbo Fire that burned 21,000 acres in central Idaho.

“It seemed to be right in our path,” he said.

Decker and company were collecting data about Idaho’s fire lookouts for “Keeping Watch,” an online mapping project funded by a U of I library grant that plots Idaho fire lookouts along a GIS interface and includes videos, essays and oral histories. The project embodies the university’s land grant mission to preserve state history and bring science, technology and the arts to the people of Idaho.

Decker, who grew up in Bonners Ferry, and two other former graduate students, Chris Lamb and Jack Kredell — all earning master’s degrees in English literature — spent more than three years gathering data, interviews and telling the fire lookout story, which was published online by the U of I Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL) — the university’s digital humanities and scholarship center — in Fall 2024.

 "We wanted to do an Idaho-centric project using a critical humanities and theoretical lens,” Decker said.

As part of the project, he referred to texts by land management authors William Cronon and Stephen Pyne, as well as a book on land ethics called "Lochsa Story," written by the late father of a fire lookout volunteer.

"This was fundamentally a humanities project,” Decker said.

The group wanted the project to tell the story of Idahoans and their tie to natural landscapes, which are so essential to Idaho. It also would consider mankind’s role in nature and how nature affects human thought and existence. They used fire lookouts and wilderness as the center of these environmental narratives.

For almost a century manned lookouts were the best tool land managers had to immediately detect wildfires and direct resources to douse them. Decker and his friends wanted to tell these stories and examine them in a contemporary and critical way.

The three-member team had worked on previous projects with help from the University of Idaho’s Confluence Lab, documenting the Stories of Fire, and to record the state’s vanishing woodland caribou herd.

“After doing those projects, we had this idea we should do one on fire lookouts,” Decker said. “They were such interesting places that could help us understand how we viewed the land and its management, and they were an important aspect of Idaho state history.”

We wanted to do an Idaho-centric project using a critical humanities and theoretical lens.

— Michael Decker, College of Graduate Studies

An interview with the director of a North Idaho fire watcher program and longtime lookout volunteer led Decker to an invitation to volunteer at a lookout near Priest Lake. He spent a week in the summer monitoring spot fires from his perch atop Sundance Mountain lookout on the southeastern edge of the lake.

“I was giving updates on the spread of lightning-caused fires when I was up there,” he said.

And that week, from his solitary aerie, Decker wrote an essay that was later introduced into the “Keeping Watch” project.

“Being an observer of the landscape — one of the key functions of the fire lookout — should make you conscious of the small part that humans play in a landscape that’s so vast,” said writer Don Scheese, who was interviewed for the project and who for years manned a lookout near Stanley.

At night, Scheese said, he saw the glow of the town over the mountain ridges from 20 miles away.

“It’s also easy to be reminded that there’s so many signs of human activity around you — everything is an artifact of human activity. I think those things are reminders we live in human modified space even in so called wild, pristine places,” Scheese said.

Ray Kresek of Spokane, Washington, became a volunteer lookout at 16, and his exploration of lookouts culminated in the 1984 book “Fire Lookouts of the Northwest,” now in its fifth edition.

Lookouts and their history are perhaps part of the reason that Kresek — who operates a fire lookout museum at his home — became a lifelong lover of the wilderness and a passionate wilderness activist, Decker said.

Kresek was instrumental in forming the Salmo-Priest Wilderness on Idaho and Washington’s northern boundary. He laments the demolition of lookouts as forest policy and the deterioration of a fire management strategy that once valued human eyes and observation to report fires.

“Manning a fire lookout is such a quintessential western experience,” Decker said. “It’s so symbolic of the American West, and that’s why it resonates so deeply, and why it’s so important to have these experiences and to know it’s still possible to have these experiences.”

The Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning supports projects from a range of disciplines and helps create well-developed and digitally experimental special collections. Confluence Lab projects are a combination of oral and natural history, the telling of stories about events tied to nature such as fires or the extirpation of animals from their native landscapes. They endeavor to elucidate these ideas through exploration and a deeper understanding of natural phenomenon.

Article written by Ralph Bartholdt, University Communications.

Photos by Garrett Britton, University Visual Productions, and Michael Decker.

Published in November 2024.