The Fire Lookout on Packsaddle Mountain

The fire lookout on Packsaddle Mountain is a square cab on timber legs, standing on the cleared crown of a peak in the Idaho panhandle where the Selkirk range runs north toward the Canadian line. The legs have gone the gray of years of weather, and the iron angle braces bolted between them have gone the same gray, so tower and summit rock read as one material. A catwalk of steel grating rings the cab below the sills of the windows, and the paint along its railing has flaked in long chips that lie in the seams of the grating with pine needles and the meltwater of the last snow.

The tower was raised to be looked out from, and everything about it serves that end. The catwalk's outer rail is worn smooth along the stretch where a lookout stands to make a full turn against it. The wood of the west face of the cab has gone pale where wind and rain have beaten the paint away in streaks, while the north face keeps its color longest. The roof is standing-seam metal, gray in the ridges, and the stovepipe that comes through it leans a degree out of true from the weight of snow that crosses it every spring.

Inside, the cab is one room, and its furniture is the furniture of watching: a steel cot under one window, a table under another, and at the center the Osborne fire finder on its wooden pedestal. The finder's alidade is a flat brass arm with a sight wire at one end and a peep at the other, pivoting on a post over the map of the country around the mountain. The bearing scale around the map's rim has been read so often that its etched numbers have worn shallow, and the brass beneath the sight arm is bright where thumbs have turned it.

The four walls of the cab are windows, each one hinged to lift from the bottom, and the screen wire over them has been pushed in soft curves by wind that leans on it season after season. The glass is filmed with a haze of the season's dust and blown moisture, the way a window gets when the hand that washes it has moved on to another fire season. The cab door shuts with a hasp, and the hasp is turned — the tower is past its working part of the year, and the peak's short fall is already giving over to the first snows.

Snow has reached the peak and lies in narrow stripes on the catwalk where the grating lets it through, and it drifts against the sill of the cab door.

A copper grounding wire runs down the south leg and into the ground at the tower's foot.