Fire Tower Lookouts: Guardians of Montana's Wilderness. More for You. Trump won’t rule out sending military to take Panama Canal and Greenland in rambling press conference: Live.

The event will start at 9 a.m. at Fire Tower Park, 111 S. Cruse St., and will include remarks from Helena Mayor Wilmot Collins and City Commission members.

Though Thoma was one of Montana’s staffed locations in 2024, work on a fire lookout is not as prevalent as it was during the structures’ heyday in the mid-20th century.

State and federal workers built more than 650 lookouts in Montana over the course of the 20th century, but by 2024, roughly one in four of Montana’s lookouts remained standing.

If, on a hot, dry day a fire should break out within a certain 300,000-acre patch of northwest Montana, in an expanse of backcountry between the crest of the Whitefish Range and the glacier-carved ...

Why did the towers — and their ever-vigilant occupants — lose their fire-spotting role? Mark Hufstetler is an architectural historian who works for the Forest Service as a fire lookout at Baptiste ...

The Forest Service began building fire-detection towers after the Great Fire of 1910, then added more after the Civilian Conservation Corps and other government agencies considered lookouts ...