Did someone in your family work a fire lookout?

Hi. I’m Drew. I’m trying to learn about the fire lookouts in the Cascades, and about one lookout in particular, who happens to be my dad.

He worked lookouts for six summers, from 1969 to 1974. A while ago he gave me his logbooks from those years, and I’ve been reading through them slowly, the way you’d read somebody’s letters. Most of the entries are what you’d expect: wind and visibility, smoke checks, lightning, people who hiked up to visit.

But there’s a mark in them that I can’t read. It’s a little circle with a line standing up out of it, like a pin, and then a number and a time. It shows up summer after summer, usually at night. And next to it, he wrote about lights.

I have two questions, and I’d be grateful for help with either one.

1. Did your father, mother, or grandparent work a fire lookout in the Cascades, anywhere from Mount Baker down to Crater Lake? I’d love to hear their stories. And if your family still has logbooks, letters, or photos from a lookout, I’d really like to know about them.
2. Have you seen this mark before? In a logbook, a field notebook, the margin of a map, anywhere at all.

I’m going to follow the lights the way he described them, north to south, one mountain at a time, and I’ll post my notes here as I go.

Thanks for reading this far.

Drew