Blackhall Lookout

A wrap-around catwalk circles the cab of Blackhall Mountain Lookout, and from it the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest falls away on every side. The Forest Service and Recreation.gov listings put the summit at nearly 11,000 feet. Firelookout.com gives the elevation as 10,981 feet and places the tower in Carbon County, 15 miles southeast of Riverside. Recreation.gov lists it as near Encampment. The listings recommend the catwalk for sunrises, sunsets, and “an occasional lightning storm.”

The cab on the Sierra Madre

The road to the tower is one of the highest in Wyoming. It is a single-lane gravel road, and the last three miles call for a high-clearance, four-wheel-drive vehicle. The Forest Service advises carrying a saw in case trees have fallen across the way. The lookout is a popular destination, and the reservation notice warns overnight guests to expect frequent vehicle activity and visitors on the summit.

Firelookout.com describes the building as a two-story flat cab. It was built in 1963 and is listed on the National Historic Registry. Inside it sleeps four, in one queen bed and one twin bunk bed, with a table and chairs. LED lights run on solar power. There are no outlets and no charge ports, though the listings note strong AT&T and Union cell signals. The sources disagree on propane. The Forest Service page says the tower has propane heat and a propane stove. The Recreation.gov listing says propane is not available and tells guests to bring their own stove. Neither source offers water, so guests haul in their own drinking water. A vault toilet stands nearby. Guests bring their own bedding, dishes, and utensils and carry out their own garbage. Cleaning supplies are left in the cab for the next party.

Summer lightning storms are frequent here. The tower carries lightning protection systems, and guests are told to stay inside during a storm and keep their hands off the metal furnishings. Recreation.gov lists photography, star gazing, and wildlife viewing among the things to do. The building is still a functioning fire tower, and its availability for rent may change at any time if it is needed during a fire.

Sixty-eight days in 1943

The mountain was a staffed fire station twenty years before the present cab went up. On June 21, 1943, Clay R. Apple, Jr., climbed to the lookout station atop Blackhall Mountain, south of Encampment. He had just turned 16, the minimum age at which the U.S. Forest Service hired watchers, and had finished his sophomore year at Greeley High School. The Greeley Daily Tribune reported that he was the youngest fire guard in the Medicine Bow forest that summer. The snow was so deep when he went up that pack horses carried his supplies the last seven or eight miles.

He stayed alone on the peak until September 1. Every 30 minutes from dawn to dusk he surveyed the Douglas fir, Engelmann spruce, and lodgepole pine below him, out to the peak-ringed horizon. Five times a day he took meteorological readings and computed the fire danger from temperature, wind velocity, humidity, fuel moisture, and lack of rain. He was credited with three fire discoveries that summer. One burned nearly 25 miles away beyond a high ridge, much closer to another lookout station, and none of the fires grew large.

Rangers visited only twice, to bring food. Apple cooked for himself with what he had learned earning a Boy Scout merit badge. “Mother also gave me some recipes including one for biscuits. I had biscuits three meals a day,” he told the Tribune. “Once they brought me a ham, but worms got into it and I was out of meat for a while until some Mexican sheepherders came to my neighborhood. They gave me a leg of lamb and it tasted good. They visited me every day for 10 days while they were near.”

His water came from a spring down the mountain, a three-quarter-mile round trip. “I had to hustle on my water trips to be back in half an hour to make my half-hour surveys,” he said. He cut and sawed his own firewood. Near the end of his stay the mercury dropped into the low 20s. “I had to thaw out my water bag behind the stove,” he said. “I slept under 13 blankets that night; most of the summer I got under only seven or eight.” Snow fell on the peak the Sunday before he came down.

Before leaving Greeley he had spent days repairing a radio for company. Four days after he arrived, a bolt of lightning knocked it out, and it stayed silent the rest of the summer. He had brought no mirror and found none at the station. To cut his hair he went outside when the light was right, used the window panes of his 14-by-14-foot home as a mirror, and worked the scissors as best he could.

The Steamboat Pilot followed another watcher that season. On August 26, 1943, the paper reported that Amos Ebersole, lookout at Hahns Peak, was to be transferred to the “Black Hills lookout,” which the record corrects to Black Hall. On September 2 it reported that Ranger Williams from the Encampment area had come in Monday to take Ebersole to his new post. By October 7 Ebersole was back on Hahns Peak.

Fire below the peak, 1955

Firelookout.com records Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Boucher as the lookouts on Blackhall Mountain in 1950.

In 1955 the watcher was Virginia McIntyre, 19, of Harvey, Illinois, a senior in the forestry department at Iowa State College in Ames, serving her second summer as a fire watcher. She spent the season on Blackhall Mountain with her 12-year-old cousin, David Howarth, son of Nelson Howarth of Springfield. On July 20, 1955, the Suburbanite Economist of Chicago reported that she was safe after more than a week trapped in the mountain-top cabin by a forest fire in the Medicine Bow forest near Saratoga. Flames had taken down their telephone line, leaving them without communication. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Harold McIntyre, learned of it from a letter that arrived on a Sunday. In it she described in detail the timber-consuming flames she could see for miles around her, and wrote that she and David were safe and well.

A tower among sixteen

The present lookout was built in 1963. To mark the 50th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act, the Forest Service set out to preserve 16 fire lookouts by 2016. In an August 2016 profile, the Alliance for Historic Wyoming reported that the goal had been met and that five towers had been saved in the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest alone, many with volunteers from the nonprofit HistoriCorps. The profile was illustrated with photographs of the Blackhall Fire Lookout Tower, courtesy of the forest.