We go on the front lines of a drought from a unique vantage point—a fire tower. Tim Cash, a retired career public servant with the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, shares his eye-opening adventures of operating a fire tower for the US Forest Service this past year.
So how do you get to spend a summer out west in a tower? For Tim, it only took him over forty years.
Our next episode concludes our conversation with Tim Cash, shifting gears from talking about the lookout itself to the elements. We are talking fire, smoke, and lightning.
“Time shapes itself around me in that silence, shape-shifts from mistress to shade, caressing and haunting by turn. Days pass in which there is nothing but wind, bending the pines to postures of worship of an unseen god in the east.”
― Philip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout
Transcript
Starring June Lockhart, Hugh Reilly, Jon Provost as Timmy, and of course Lassie.
Tim Cash:
When I was a kid I used to watch Lassie and Fury, and all these other TV shows that people never heard of that are under the age of 50. Lassie was always up in the lookout tower with Timmy and Mrs. Martin
Mrs. Martin:
Headquarters, Calverton tower calling.
Speaker 2:
Hello, Calver. I’ve been trying to raise you out. I don’t like to leave that tower empty.
Mrs. Martin:
Well, I just got here.
Speaker 2:
Keep a sharp eye out Mrs. Martin, the humidity has dropped down to 20, if it goes much lower, we’re have to have some trouble.
Mrs. Martin:
Well, it’s as clear as a bell right now.
Speaker 2:
Now let’s hope it stays that way. Over and out.
Speaker 3:
Mom, what’s this thing? This is an Osborne Fire Finder. When you see smoke, it helps you locate the exact position.
Tim Cash:
And they would spot a fire, and Lassie would run down and put the fire out or rescue all the animals or the Rangers or whoever, I just always thought that was kind of cool.
Robert Osborne:
Hey, this is Robert, and welcome to The Outfall where we share the backstories of our water world. In this episode, we go on the front lines of a drought from a unique vantage point, a fire tower. Tim Cash, a retired career public servant with the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, shares his eye-opening adventures manning a fire tower for the US Forest Service this past year. In this first episode, Tim describes how he became a lookout and a little bit about the lookout structure itself.
Tim Cash:
Went in to see my high school counselor. I said, “You know, I don’t know what it is I want to do,” and he said, “What’d you want to do when you were a kid?” and I said, “I always wanted to sit in a lookout tower and look for fires,” he said, “Well, I know this great little school down in South Georgia called Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, and they have a forestry program down there.” So, I was able to get in there and went into forestry, and then got out of school, spent two years up at the University of Georgia, getting my bachelor’s in forest hydrology. Got out, got a job almost completely unrelated to forestry, spent 40 years working at the environmental protection division, and never once sat on a lookout tower.
Robert Osborne:
Isn’t this how life works out sometimes? You put your childhood passions on hold as you raise a family, have a career, save for retirement. Somehow Tim did not forget about his dream.
Tim Cash:
Decided to apply. I got the job, I told them the Lassie story when they interviewed me, and they said, “We got to have you.” So, I did that in 2016 on the Tahoe National Forest. Last year, stuck at home during the pandemic, kind of got cabin fever, and wanted to do the lookout thing again. So, I reapplied and got a job this past fire season working on the Plumas National Forest in California. So, that’s sort of how I got into the business.
Speaker 4:
That’s amazing. You know if you had told me the Lassie story, I would’ve hired you too.
Tim Cash:
Yeah. In the first interview, I told the Lassie story, and the guy said, “Hey, look, we got to have you.”
Robert Osborne:
Tim left his house early on Memorial day. This past year, he drove over 2000 miles to Port Hollow, California, which lies on the Eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, about 50 miles northwest of Reno. This is a wild area filled with granite peaks, glacier lakes, streams, and forests. His final eight miles was a bumpy dirt road that took him an hour and a half to get up the side of a mountain. Finally, he was at his new home at 7800 feet above sea level, a fire tower with a commanding view in all directions.
Tim Cash:
You’re carrying all your gear up there, usually backpacking, but you carry in your hands, all your food, clothes, bedding, and all that stuff. Lookout I was in this was built in 1936 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, as were 100s of these things during the ’30s. It sits on a rock foundation, and then there is a bottom floor in the lookout where you have a water tank, a water pump that’s operated by solar power. You have a shower and a hot water heater in the basement. Then, you have all the electronic and electrical equipment, the batteries, the inverter for the solar panel, all that’s in the basement. Most lookouts are not this commodious, a lot of them. The other two that I worked in did not have showers in the basement. They were pretty spartan.
This lookout was very well-accommodated. Then, you walk up a short flight of steps, there were 16 steps. I counted them over and over again, the course of five months. You walk up a short flight of 16 steps to a catwalk that goes all the way around the building and the building is 14′ x 14′. And it’s enclosed, all four sides are enclosed in glass. Directly underneath the lookout, there is a benchmark, underneath the floor of the lookout. That is the exact center of the lookout building. Then, over the top of that is what we call an Osborne Fire Finder. I don’t know if it was named for an Osborne ancestor, but it’s basically an alidade.
Robert Osborne:
Now, what’s an alidade?
Tim Cash:
Alidade, it’s simply a map, a circular map of the area that you can see from the lookout. It has a rotating disc on it that is graduated with all of the ordinate directions, north, south, east, and west. So, when you turn the site, there’s a site that you look through on the top of the alidade, and it will point, you can point it directly at a smoke if you spot a smoke. It will show you look on the map beneath the site, and it will tell you where that smoke is, give you a distance and a bearing. Once you have the distance and bearing, you can call that in that Fire Finder is the heart of the lookout. It’s the centerpiece of the lookout. It sits right in the middle of the floor of the lookout, and it is directly over the benchmark that’s underneath the four of the lookouts. So, you have a precise, directional location if there are smokes.
Dr. Ladner:
So, I understand the directional, I could get that’d be pretty accurate, but how does it do distance? Is that as accurate?
Tim Cash:
The distance is less accurate. It requires knowledge of the landscape. You have to be able to recognize features and landscape features and match those up with landscape features on the map that’s on the Fire Finder. So, that requires study, learning, and skill. You sit down and study topographic maps. You just try to match up features on the ground with features on the map. Then, if you have another lookout in the area, and they can see the same smoke that you’re seeing, they can use their Fire Finder to site out on that. When your line and their line cross, you have a precise location, [crosstalk 00:08:22] you can so locate it. So, if you have two or more lookouts, and we did, I had three lookouts that could see the same area that I was in. So, if we could all see the same smoke, you can put a smoke within 10 feet where you see it.
Dr. Ladner:
Nice.
Tim Cash:
So, it’s very accurate, but if you’re the only one that can see the smoke, sometimes you can be off. You can be off a half a mile.
Dr. Ladner:
So, how many miles could you see?
Tim Cash:
The most prominent feature I could see was Mount Lassen to the northwest, and it was 65 miles. I could see the Rim, the Tahoe Rim around the rim of mountains, around lake Tahoe, which was about 50, 55 miles. So, you can really only accurately locate a smoke within about a 30-mile radius of a lookout. You’ve got a large area that you’re responsible for covering, very large.
The rest of the lookout, so when you walk up to the catwalk, the catwalk goes all the way around. It’s about a two-foot wide, three-foot-wide, walkway, and you open the door, go in, you have a bed, you have a gas stove, you have a gas, a refrigerator, a double sink with running water, propane heater, a table, a desk to sit out and work on. So, all comforts with home, kind of. It’s still pretty rough, but you get to live there, rent-free. So yeah, you’re sitting on top of this big pile of rocks, 7800 feet above sea level. The only friends you have are hummingbirds, chipmunks, occasional bears wandering by down below, deer, or all kinds of birds. Sometimes you’ll have 10, 15 visitors a day. Sometimes you’ll go an entire week without seeing anybody.
Dr. Ladner:
Yeah. As a kid, we hike in that wilderness that you were talking about. And I remember passing one of the fire towers, and this was a quite remote one sort of in the wilderness. I didn’t know if anyone was in there or not. I didn’t know if we could or should knock on the door. What sort of the proper etiquette for approaching a fire tower?
Tim Cash:
Well, proper etiquette is announcing yourself because a lot of times the lookout can’t hear you coming. I’ve had people just appear on the catwalk, and it’s a little startling when someone just appears. Most of the time you can see people coming, but sometimes you can’t. Then we’ve had a nighttime visitation from pretty sketchy characters. We’ve had at one lookout, I worked at on the Tahoe National Forest, normally when people come up, they step up on the lookout if they’ve never been there, their first thing out of their mouth is like, “Wow,” they see the view and then-
Dr Ladner:
So walk us through a day. It sounds easy, right? Okay, I’m just looking out for fires, but obviously, I’m missing a few things. How do you stay regimented?
Tim Cash:
One of the mottos of the lookout is always a dull moment because it’s 90% boredom and 10% excitement. It is a very boring job. It begins early in the morning when the sun first comes up because when you’re living in a glass box on top of a mountain, there’s no place to hide from the sun. It comes up early. So, you roll out of bed and make breakfast and make coffee, and then try to squeeze in a nice long walk. The walk in the morning walk or evening walk it’s all downhill, the first half and then it’s all uphill, the second half because there’s nowhere else to go. Then at 9:30 is when you actually sign on duty at 9:30 in the morning. You go on the radio, and you tell the emergency operation center that you’re active and live.
Then the rest of the day is just spent scanning the horizon or the area for smokes. Then usually you’re off duty at six o’clock at night, 1800 hours. That’s when you get out and go for a walk, stretch your legs, start cooking supper, take a shower, kick back and read yourself to sleep at night. So, we have gas lighting in the lookout, and so there’s light at night, and that’s pretty much a day. There are always things to do, there are a lot of windows to wash. You get very good at washing windows, and there are usually just little repairs to do, small repairs.
Robert Osborne:
We want to thank Tim for joining us and describing the lookout. Please take a look at the pictures in the show notes. He’s blessed us with lots of pictures. For me, this Osborne Fire Finder tool is amazing. It’s analog technology at its best. Think about it. This tool has been in service since 1915. In the next episode, Tim talks about fires and other challenges he’s faced in the lookout.
Tim Cash:
And that fire took off that day. Over the course of a couple of weeks, it burned over 100,000 acres. There were days when it was burning 35 to 40,000 acres a day.
Robert Osborne:
Thanks again for listening to The Outfall. As always we love to hear your comments. So, if you enjoy our podcast, please help us. Subscribe to your favorite podcast player and share the podcast with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
