Back in the early '90's, I stumbled across some sort of vacation rental program for fire lookout towers.
If I'm remembering it right, most of the towers were located in Montana and Idaho, were relatively remote (you had to hike to most of them), and weren't that expensive to rent ($20-40/day with a 2-6 bed capacity).
At the time (and way before "off-the-grid" became the latest fad), I had some grand idea about eventually building an "off-the-grid" type of fire tower cabin that I was going to research by visiting a number of those towers.
But, I ran out of time and money before I ever got around to doing anything about it, and I think the whole fire tower rental deal eventually stopped or was scaled back sometime in the mid-90's.
Until seeing this post about fire lookouts, it had been a long time since I've thought about those old ideas and plans.
The beds in some of those Forest Service lookout station are specially insulated somehow so that, if I recall correctly, in a lightening storm the occupants are supposed to be on them, lest the structure be hit by lightening. That might give me a bit of pause in building one.
I think I've only been to one once, while a college student, and a friend and I happened upon one high in the mountain and the employee, who was from the Mid West, came out to speak to us and would hardly let us go, as it'd been so long since anybody had come by to talk to.
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Back in the early '90's, I stumbled across some sort of vacation rental program for fire lookout towers.
If I'm remembering it right, most of the towers were located in Montana and Idaho, were relatively remote (you had to hike to most of them), and weren't that expensive to rent ($20-40/day with a 2-6 bed capacity).
At the time (and way before "off-the-grid" became the latest fad), I had some grand idea about eventually building an "off-the-grid" type of fire tower cabin that I was going to research by visiting a number of those towers.
But, I ran out of time and money before I ever got around to doing anything about it, and I think the whole fire tower rental deal eventually stopped or was scaled back sometime in the mid-90's.
Until seeing this post about fire lookouts, it had been a long time since I've thought about those old ideas and plans.
Sometimes I'm amazed at how the brain works.
The beds in some of those Forest Service lookout station are specially insulated somehow so that, if I recall correctly, in a lightening storm the occupants are supposed to be on them, lest the structure be hit by lightening. That might give me a bit of pause in building one.
I think I've only been to one once, while a college student, and a friend and I happened upon one high in the mountain and the employee, who was from the Mid West, came out to speak to us and would hardly let us go, as it'd been so long since anybody had come by to talk to.
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