"If from the top of his tree he saw a smoke, he climbed down and went and put it out."
| | | | Biographical data
The first lookout on Woody Mountain was in 1910. He had no tower, he climbed a tree. He rode his horse up every day, because there was no road. And if from the top of his tree he saw a smoke, he climbed down and went and put it out. This was very early in the organization of fire suppression as part of the Forest Service. I haven't been able to find his tree. It may have fallen down since then. It was probably large, and the mountain was clear cut by the Riordans—Arizona Lumber and Timber Company—in 1904. So it's quite possible that it was on either the north side or the west side, both of which are quite steep. The loggers didn't take so many trees from there. And that would have been places where he could have looked out toward town. So my assumption is that if the tree is still there somewhere with pegs in it to the top, it's lower down on the slopes, places I haven't found yet.
Kern: And who is the "he"?
Ashworth: Judge Croxen's father. I think Croxen has retired now, but it was his father. And he was the first lookout on Woody Mountain. Then there was a little sort of shelter to put the telephone in—there was a telephone line up there—to figure distances and make calls. And finally an enclosed wooden tower that was only one flight off the ground because the mountain had been cut and there were no trees in the way. But in 1936, I think partly with WPA money, the existing tower was built forty-five feet off the ground, mostly of metal with wooden stairs. And the lookouts were all men until the men went off to the war in the 1940s, at which time women began to take over. Most of the people who've been there of recent years—say the last thirty or so—have been women. It's only seven feet square, about as wide as this table, and squared off. We found that young men just can't handle that lack of muscle movement. Olden men and women of all ages are a little more comfortable as lookouts. But most of the males would prefer a bigger tower. Towers are all sizes—mine is the smallest one on this forest. Some are four times that size—fourteen feet square—with a kitchen end and a bed, and you stay up there all the time, live up there, sleep in it.
On our towers we spot smoke, figure locations, report by radio to Flagstaff Dispatch. There aren't many of us: on the Coconino, nine lookout towers are in full service, with cooperation around the edges from seven towers on the Kaibab, others on the Tonto and the Apache-Sitgreaves. Chris says, "Sure I like it! I wouldn't be here if I didn't." We like our jobs, most of us. It's not often that one of our towers comes open. Helen calls her eighty-five-foot-tall perch "a great office job with a view, and a built-in Stairmaster." Nights in my little cabin, alone on its mountaintop, are a joy. The moon shines on treetops and makes long shadows on the ground. In a storm, trees roar and thrash, wind whistles through cracks, and I'm cozy with a book under blankets. I'm working on a theory that if phone calls and business decisions, lawsuits and legislation were conducted from a cabin on a stormy night, this would be a happier country.
But the worst fear all of us lookouts have is that ground units will think we are stupid when we get our distance wrong—again. It would be awful to repeat the record of a lookout who reported the dome at Lowell Observatory as smoke so often that finally the dispatcher's response was a long silence. Jean says we deserve "H" pay—not "H" for hazard, "H" for humiliation. We're afraid of going to sleep after lunch and missing a fire. Once I went to sleep standing up and fell into the fire finder.
I report to the forest dispatch office, which is on Fourth Street in Flagstaff—a little room with one window. The dispatcher is essentially blind. He depends on the lookouts for his eyes. So when I see smoke, the first thing I do is turn the—well, we call it a fire finder, which is a clever name. (laughs)
… It's a [pedoscope?], about eighteen inches square, in the middle of my seven-foot-square tower, with a map on which Woody Mountain is in the center, and a ring that rotates around so I can look through the site, put this wire right on the smoke. Down here there are compass readings all the way around, 360 degrees. That's the easy part. The hard part is how far away is it. So I will report that to Flagstaff. First I say, "Flagstaff, Woody Mountain, fire flash," which is dumb, but that's what they say, so that's what I say. And it catches their attention in the dispatch office. And then I give them the degree reading, which will be where it is relative to my tower, the distance, and describe the smoke—small and white, you need to throw everything you've got at it right away. White is usually just pine needles burning. Large and black, that's different—growing rapidly, something of this sort. And they'll call back every five minutes or so until someone reaches the fire, to ask for a smoke report. "What's it doing? What's happening?" Because, as I said, they can't see. So they depend on me to tell them how to react. And they like to have long-term lookouts, because they know who's likely to become hysterical and who isn't, and who'd be fairly reliable.