Austin retires after 34 seasons as Forest Service fire lookout
“Lightning” Bill Austin has spent much of his life on top of the world.
Austin, 69, was 5 or 6 years old when he visited the Leecher Mountain fire lookout, on a peak east of Carlton. More than 60 years later, on a hot day in July, Austin was in the same lookout tower, standing next to the same small bed he remembered from his first visit.
“I remember sitting on the bed, thinking, ‘This is what I want to do,’” Austin said, recalling the childhood memory.
The boy who wanted to grow up to be a fire lookout became just that. Now, after 34 seasons, he’s ready to hang up his binoculars. He announced his retirement on his popular Facebook page in late spring.
Compare Austin’s lookout career with that of Jack Kerouac, who wrote in his novels about his experience as a North Cascades lookout. The famous author could only hack it for one season.
“I think I want to be famous,” Austin joked on top of Leecher Mountain on July 12.
What Austin said next actually came across as humble.
“Well, right now I am,” he said, correcting himself. “I’m a legend right now in the valley.”
Methow District Ranger Chris Furr said much the same thing.
“Bill’s pending retirement is the end of an era,” Furr said. “He’s been an important figure in the valley for a long time.”
Lifetime of service
Except for a Gold Creek farmer whom Austin worked for as a teen, baling and bucking hay, the only employer Austin has ever known has been the U.S. Forest Service. He started with the agency at 16 and worked his first lookout tower, on Chelan Butte, at 22.
Austin put in some time with Forest Service at lower elevations, with office work, and some prescribed burning and firefighting. But Lightning Bill earned his fame and his nickname in the towers.
His favorite lookout was Goat Peak, where he was stationed for 20 seasons and became a favorite of hikers, whose photos he kept in albums over the years. He also wrote poetry from the lookout.
At more than 7,000 feet in elevation, the Goat Peak tower was often struck by lightning. Before a better system of lightning rods was installed, Austin would feel a little jolt whenever his tower was struck, he told the Methow Valley News in 2014.
“A smokejumper said, ‘Well, he must be Lightning Bill if the lightning didn’t scare him away,’” Austin said in July.
Carlton Complex Fire
The Forest Service relocated Austin from Goat Peak to Leecher for the 2014 season, citing the greater risk of wildfires down-valley.
The decision proved prescient. On July 14, 2014, Austin spotted the starts of what would become known as the Carlton Complex Fire.
“I’m the one that reported the fire,” Austin said. “There were six lightning strikes, six fires. … On the 17th, the day after my birthday, all six of them blew up at the same time.”
Soon after, Austin and his two dogs were evacuated by helicopter. Before leaving, he watched the flames race over Cow Creek and French Creek to the south, toward Pateros.
“There was kind of just a line of fire, just shooting down the valley,” Austin recalled.
To his north, the flames marched through the Beaver Creek drainage and Finley Canyon.
By then, the smoke was too thick to see what was happening at Gold Creek, across the Methow River.
“Then I was watching it come at me,” Austin said. “This is where the Carlton Complex was formed, right here. This side met that side right here on Leecher.”
Austin would finish fire season back at Goat Peak.
The right stuff
On a clear day, Austin has a sweeping view of the Okanogan and Methow valleys. He has a direct line of sight to the Bonaparte Lookout beyond Tonasket, where he was stationed in 1986 and 1987. He can point you to the Omak Walmart. And stretched before him are Okanogan and Malott, the Loup Loup highway, Carlton and Twisp.
The Forest Service gives Austin Wednesdays and Thursdays off, but he sometimes stays up for six days and returns early on the seventh. While he has regular visitors, usually “lookout baggers” trying to visit all the staffed towers in Washington state, he has had days or even weeks when he didn’t see a soul — his only company radio chatter punctuated with static.
When visitors do come, they sometimes underestimate the job, Austin said.
“A lot of people go, ‘Oh man, I could do this,’” he said. “When it comes right down to it, can you do this?”
Austin scans his 360-degree view every 15 minutes ago, looking for telltale wisps of smoke. After so many decades on the job, fire spotting has become second nature.
“If I do see something, I seem to turn right to it,” he said.
What does it take to be a good lookout?
“Just be on top of it,” he said. “Don’t miss anything.”
Austin is an artist as well as a fire lookout, but he doesn’t work on his paintings or crafts very much in the tower because he doesn’t want to be distracted. And despite the example Kerouac set on Desolation Peak in 1956, Austin doesn’t recommend reading.
“I don’t understand lookouts that read, but some of them do” he said. “Some of them got quite the library.”
“They don’t have time to read,” Austin added. “There’s too much going on out there.”
“Do I ever get bored or lonely?” he offered, as if he had already been asked the question many times.
“Those are not in my vocabulary.”
Also without being prompted, Austin answered another question he’d probably heard before.
Will you miss it?
“This is my life,” he said. “I got tears in my eyes. It’s just really hard to give up.”
The outlook for lookouts
Forest Service officials don’t yet know whether they will replace Lightning Bill at Leecher Mountain after this year. If they don’t, the Methow Valley likely won’t have a full-time lookout in 2025. Goat Peak is staffed this year with a volunteer.
The Forest Service’s fire lookout program is well past its prime. The number of people staffing towers peaked back in the 1930s, according to a Forest Service website.
“Guys like me have been keeping it going,” Austin said.
But technological advancements have cast into doubt the long-term future of human fire lookouts.
Cameras have been installed on lookout towers and other structures with good views of wildfire zones. Some of them show what the human eye can see, more or less like a TV camera. But others see in the infrared part of the spectrum and can pick up heat signals, even through obscuring smoke, said Sean Triplett, tools and technology team lead for the Forest Service’s fire and aviation program.
But cameras need power, Triplett said, and most lookout towers aren’t connected to the grid. The lights, heaters and cooking equipment on Leecher run on solar power and batteries.
Austin said the fire-detection cameras have worked well, but like any piece of equipment they need to be maintained.
Then again, he quipped, “you got to keep me maintained, too.”
No studies have been conducted to show whether human or camera lookouts are superior, Triplett said, but Washington state may be finding out.
Last year, the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) launched a pilot program with 21 cameras installed on DNR lands throughout the state — including Chelan Butte, and Aeneas and Little Buck mountains in Okanogan County. Pano, a San Francisco-based tech company, installed the cameras, which are powered with artificial intelligence and can learn how to spot a new fire.
“They’ve already identified a number of fire starts last year and this year,” said Hilary Franz, the state’s commissioner of public lands.
DNR’s top official added that the pilot program has gone well enough for her agency to extend its contract with Pano another five years.
Franz is bullish on the AI cameras and said the state needs more than the current 21. She visited DC several months ago and urged federal officials to adopt the technology on Forest Service lands.
The argument in favor of the cameras is straightforward, in Franz’s view: Quicker identification of fires will mean quicker responses and safer outcomes for firefighters and the communities they protect, she said.
“I truly believe the federal government needs to be in partnership with us, especially if they are reducing their lookout resources,” Franz said.
Not a retirement
Lightning Bill may be retiring from his lookout job, but he’s not slowing down. Now that he won’t have to constantly train his eyes on the horizon, he can focus on his other passion. For years now, in the off season, Austin and his watercolor-and-ink paintings have been fixtures at markets and festivals.
“The art is gonna keep me going,” Austin said. “You got to keep moving. You can’t just stop, just because you’re old and retired — stop and start watching TV. You’re not going to last very long.”
Austin’s renown as a fire lookout has carried over to his work as an artist. He does well enough at Pybus Public Market in Wenatchee and other venues to make a living selling his paintings. He’s even caught the attention of collectors, he said.
“That ‘Lightning Bill’ name is circling all over the world,” Austin said. “My art’s following it.”
