Field notes · Mount Baker to Crater Lake

The Lookout Logs

My father kept the logbooks in fire lookouts along the Cascades. In them there’s a small mark, the same one, summer after summer. And next to it, he wrote about lights.

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Recording 00 · Welcome

Thanks for finding this.

Drew Silva0:00 / 1:06

Transcript

Hi. Thanks for, um… thanks for finding this.

My name is Drew Silva. This is a research project, and right now it’s mostly a cardboard box.

My dad worked fire lookouts in the Cascades, back in the late sixties and early seventies. A while ago he handed me his old logbooks. He didn’t really say why. Most of what’s in them is what you’d expect. Weather. Smoke reports. Who hiked up, and when.

But there’s a mark. A small one, the same one, showing up summer after summer. And next to it, he wrote about lights. Lights moving along the range, one mountain at a time.

So I’m going to follow them. North to south, from Mount Baker down to Crater Lake. I’ll keep my notes here as I go, and the recordings, too.

If you worked a lookout… or someone in your family did… or if you’ve ever seen something from up high that you couldn’t explain, I’d really like to hear from you. There’s a way to leave me a message on this page.

Okay. That’s the project. Thanks for listening.

A note before you start

I should say up front that I’m not a historian. I’m a guy with a box of my dad’s old logbooks and more questions than I expected to have.

My father, Abe Silva, worked fire lookouts in the Cascades from 1969 to 1974, a few years before I was born. He spent those summers alone in glass cabs on top of mountains, watching for smoke, writing down the weather, and taking a bearing whenever something burned.

Most of what he wrote is the job. But there’s a small mark that keeps showing up, usually at night, and usually near a few words about lights. I’d like to understand what he was looking at. If I’m honest, I’d also like to understand him a little better.

So this is where I’ll keep my notes, one mountain at a time, north to south. Each stop gets a log entry with what I found, the logbook pages that matter, and sources for the history, because the history here is real and I want to get it right.

Drew

A pencil mark on a logbook page: a small circle with a short line standing up from the top, followed by the numbers 317 and 03:14.
From one of my father’s logbooks

The mark

A little circle with a line standing up out of it, like a pin, and then a number and a time.

It isn’t in any lookout manual I’ve found. If you’ve seen it before, in a logbook, a notebook, or the margin of a map, I’d really like to know.

seen this before?

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The route

Ten stops, north to south

From Mount Baker down the volcanic spine of the Cascades to Crater Lake, the place where a mountain used to be. Each stop lights up here when its log is posted.

    Newest log

    Nothing yet

    The first entry is Mount Baker. It will have my field notes, the logbook pages that matter, the sources, and a full transcript of the recording.

    Log 01 · Mount Baker · November 23

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    Listen to the recordings

    The first recording goes up November 9.

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    Just an email when something new goes up. Nothing else.