For the last 21 years, Mr. Gates, 58, has been a fire lookout, a sky-high voyeur at the front line in the battle against wildfires, which have burned more than five million drought-parched acres, or more than 7,800 square miles, nationwide this year. Armed with four pairs of binoculars, Mr. Gates spends almost every waking hour prowling a narrow catwalk outside his 14 foot-square shack, scanning the day — and night — for the nature’s surest sign that something is ablaze. Mr. Gates has spotted perhaps 100 fires in his two decades on the job — and two in the last month. He’s known for staying up late, and waking before dawn to fix his eyes on his patch of Tahoe National Forest, a 1.2 million acre preserve about 180 miles northeast of San Francisco. “Maybe after looking at the same landscape for so long,” he said, “it’s easy to see something’s amiss.”
Liberia RPCV Michael Gates, a contract fire lookout with the U.S. Forest Service, spends his summers in a lookout tower that sits at 6700 feet atop Saddleback Mountain in the Tahoe National Forest near Downieville, Ca
Watching for Fires and Seeing the World
Caption: Michael Gates, a contract fire lookout with the U.S. Forest Service, spends his summers in a lookout tower that sits at 6700 feet atop Saddleback Mountain in the Tahoe National Forest near Downieville, Ca. Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY
Published: October 2, 2007
ON SADDLEBACK MOUNTAIN, Calif. — Walk into Mike Gates’s summer home here and the first thing you notice — the only thing you could possibly notice — is the view.
With a wrap-around horizon broken only by the occasional hummingbird, Mr. Gates has 25-mile visibility on a decent day, and more than twice that on a superlative one. The sunrises are pretty enough to make the cold worthwhile, and the sunsets would make a vampire sad to see the day go.
But Mr. Gates doesn’t really come to the top of Saddleback Mountain — at the corner of 6698 ft. and the middle of nowhere — to look at the horizon or the hummingbirds, at the sunrise or the sunset.
He comes to look for smoke.
For the last 21 years, Mr. Gates, 58, has been a fire lookout, a sky-high voyeur at the front line in the battle against wildfires, which have burned more than five million drought-parched acres, or more than 7,800 square miles, nationwide this year.
Armed with four pairs of binoculars, Mr. Gates spends almost every waking hour prowling a narrow catwalk outside his 14 foot-square shack, scanning the day — and night — for the nature’s surest sign that something is ablaze.
Mr. Gates has spotted perhaps 100 fires in his two decades on the job — and two in the last month. He’s known for staying up late, and waking before dawn to fix his eyes on his patch of Tahoe National Forest, a 1.2 million acre preserve about 180 miles northeast of San Francisco.
“Maybe after looking at the same landscape for so long,” he said, “it’s easy to see something’s amiss.”
It’s a skill set that is slowly fading away, replaced by less romantic, more technological methods. Only about 800 lookouts nationwide are manned, according to the nonprofit Fire Lookout Association, down from more than 8,000 in the 1930s.
While few people may be suited for, and headed into, his profession, Mr. Gates may have been destined for it. His birthday is the same date that Smokey Bear first appeared on a poster: Aug. 9. And his entire life, it seems, has involved watching life from a distance, from his days in an Air Force reconnaissance unit, to a stint with the Peace Corps in Liberia, to a lifelong obsession with photography.
“I just observe,” says Mr. Gates, who sports a gray goatee and glasses, and earns $13,400 for five months on the mountain. “I’m a looker.”
That is an opinion shared by the one person who regularly breaks up Mr. Gates’s routine: Prairie Rose, a 52-year-old former disk jockey who came up for a visit 12 years ago and fell in love with the lookout, both the place and the man.
“I love being on top of the world,” she said. “It’s my little piece of heaven.”
A former Chrysler electrical engineer who “unplugged” in the mid-1980s, Mr. Gates says he’s “not a real kind of social animal,” a man who values the pleasures of being alone. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea; Jack Kerouac, who spent a summer as a lookout in 1956, called his days on the job a “mountaintop trap.”
True enough, it isn’t always thrilling work. Weeks can pass without a fire or a friendly face. And the nature of the lookout’s life — basically living in a glass box — means that leaving the office behind is impossible. “Even if I’m doing dishes,” Mr. Gates said. “I’m keeping my eyes open.”
But Mr. Gates seems to love it, combining his smoke-hunting with a passion for photography. (His photographs can be seen at www.pygmyhippo.net).
To get to the Saddleback lookout, one travels back in time, road-wise, going from asphalt to dirt to a treacherous stone filled path which acts as the lookout’s driveway. And then you hike. Up past an outhouse, up past the spot where rattlesnakes like to sun themselves, and up two flights of metal stairs, until finally you find what might be the world’s coziest government building.
Built in 1933, Mr. Gates’ wooden shack sits on stilts and is held on the rocky crag by steel cable. Inside, there’s a child-sized sink, a small stove, and a set of pink flamingo-shaped Christmas lights over his platform bed. Not that sleep is always easy: winds on the mountain can gust up to 80 miles per hour.
“You don’t have to put a quarter in the bed or anything,” Mr. Gates said. “It just goes.”
It’s also not exactly insulated, as there are no walls, per se, just 360 degrees of windows. Mr. Gates has resorted to tacking personal touches — cartoons, maps, a photo of a pair of women’s eyes — to the ceiling or support beams. There’s also a dirt-floored basement that houses a propane-powered refrigerator and a set of car batteries, which store solar-generated power.
Mr. Gates keeps his most powerful binoculars next to his bed. For a lookout, red herrings abound: clouds of dirt from logging vehicles, for example, or “water dogs,” wisps of steam which rise, smoke-like, from valley floors.
But it was a real fire that drew Mr. Gates’s attention on Sept. 10, when a blaze erupted near Lindsey Lake, a popular area where several campsites and trail heads converge.
“I could start to pick up a little bit of a puff behind a ridge,” Mr. Gates recalled. “At first, I wasn’t really sure, but you sense that something is not quite right. The smoke is a little bit thicker and that kind of thing.”
Within minutes he had calibrated the distance and called in the fast-moving blaze. Air tankers and ground crews flooded into the area and suppressed the fire after it had devoured a mere 21 acres.
This time of year, storms start to roll in, and fire season begins to wind down.
Mr. Gates said he’s already girding himself for a return to his winter home in Bradenton, Fla. There, he and Rose care for his elderly mother, and curse the stoplights and traffic.
“The whole sky closes in, basically,” he says of his other life, looking out at early morning clouds. “It just takes a while, I guess, to adjust.”
Just then, the wind changed, and the fog seemed to lift. And then, so did Mr. Gates’s mood.
“Oh,” he said. “It’s going to clear nicely.”
