On Friday August 29th, for the Labor Day weekend, I loaded my family into our van and headed for the family cabin located between Vernal Utah and Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area in northeast Utah.
Saturday we drove over to the Ute Mountain lookout tower on the mountain south of Manila Utah. This is one of the few remaining forest fire lookout tower in the western United States. This tower has special significance to my family since my Grandparents, Ida & Buell Bennett, manned this tower during World War II for two years (probably 1943-44 or so). They lived in a trailer and tent near the base of the tower while my mother (about 11 years old) lived in the tower.
Whenever a fire was spotted (usually lightning caused) my Grandfather and a couple of other forest service men, would walk out to the fire and be gone for several days while they fought the fire with hand tools. This left my Grandmother and my mother to man the lookout tower.
The tower was built by hand (no cranes) by a CCC troop stationed nearby. My Great-Grandfather, John Bennett, directed the building.
Since my Mother and Father was in our group of their children and grand-children, my Mother decided she wanted to climb the rickity wooden stairs to the top. Inasmuch as she is deathly afraid of heights, I thought that this was going to be a problem but she forced herself to go up and did just fine even coming down later. She was able to speak with the seasonal manager that is assigned to meet tourists, and swap information. Apparently, there are huge gaps in the history that the Forest Service has on the Ute Mountain Lookout Tower.
After leaving the lookout tower, most of us also drove out the Dowd Mountain road to the overlook at the end of the road. After a few pictures and spending some time watching the boats on Flaming Gorge through binoculars, we headed back to the cabin.
Lynn, I volunteer for the CO/UT chapter of the Forest Fire Lookout Association. Our website is http://www.firelookout.org/cohost-co/index.html. I am working on fleshing out our page for Ute Mountain Lookout, and I found your photo and story, so I will add a link from our page to yours. Thanks so much for contributing to keeping a little bit of fire lookout history alive! If you hear of any other existing or former lookouts in Utah, aside from Lava Point, would you please let me know? I staffed lookouts in northern CA in the late ’60s and ’70s, and it was truly the experience of a lifetime.
If you can see your way clear to allow me to copy any of your photos or to quote your story on our website, I’d appreciate it, just so it gets preserved in our archives as well as yours.
Thanks very much,
Susan Epstein
Thank you for your comment about the Ute Mountain Lookout. You can certainly copy any of my photos or quote my story.
Keep up the great work!
Thanks very much!
(Late reply…sorry!)