Firefinder

Every fire lookout in the United States (Alaska and Hawaii included) and Canada on one map: standing or gone, with its history, how to visit, and how to stay.

Firefinder pulls together information scattered across many lookout websites, registers and agency pages. It puts that information on a modern interactive map with a page for every lookout site:

• Visit & stay: whether you can climb it or rent it, the rules, and a link to recreation.gov where it's bookable.
• History: a sourced story of who built it, who staffed it and what happened to it.
• The view: a simulated panorama from the cab and a map of what the lookout could see, worked out in your browser from terrain data. This works for towers that are long gone too.
• Spot the smoke: a short lesson in how two lookouts found a fire with the Osborne Firefinder.

It's named for the Osborne Firefinder, the round sighting table in every lookout cab.

Status: early and growing. Entries marked Unverified come from a single source and have not been checked yet. Corrections are very welcome.

Credits

Firefinder stands on the work of people who have documented lookouts for decades, above all the Forest Fire Lookout Association, the National Historic Lookout Register and the Former Fire Lookout Sites Register. Every tower page links back to its sources. See the site's Credits page for the full list.

Corrections, additions, takedowns

• Use Suggest an edit on any tower page, or open an issue.
• Photo or text removal: if you own something shown here and want it credited differently or removed, open an issue titled "Takedown: ". It will be handled promptly, no questions asked.

Licenses

Code: GPL-3.0 (LICENSE). Lookout database: ODbL 1.0 (DATA-LICENSE.md). Our written histories: CC BY-SA 4.0. Photos keep their own rights; see the credit next to each one.

For developers

See DESIGN.md (authoritative design and data model). The 3D views need Rust with the wasm32-unknown-unknown target and wasm-pack: cd web && npm run wasm once before npm run dev.