LEECHER MOUNTAIN, Okanogan County — A sudden burst of words pierces the soundless, black night at a fire lookout overlooking the Methow Valley.
“Four by four. Four by four,” shouts Bill Austin, one of the state’s most seasoned fire spotters. He keeps talking indecipherably under his covers while the tower’s BK digital fire radio sits silent, offering no hint of an emergency. My blood pressure lowers when it becomes apparent the subject of the somniloquy has nothing to do with the imminent threat of a wildland fire.
Rising a few hours later with the blinding June sun, Austin mentions he talks in his sleep and had dreamed about painting a 4×4-foot wall-size picture of the Leecher Mountain Lookout.
Austin, 69, has been thinking about his next act as an artist while working his final summer as a seasonal fire watcher for the Wenatchee-Okanogan National Forest. When late September fades into autumn, the man known as “Lightning Bill” will climb down the steep, three-tiered staircase of the Leecher tower one final time after 34 summers as the lovable caretaker of Central Washington lookouts.
“This September is my 50th high school reunion,” he says with a lisp, the result of new dentures. “This is a good year to call it quits.”
Austin is the tattered thread connecting us to a bygone era when the state’s 686 fire lookouts embodied the romance of solitary figures perched high in the Cascades, watching eaglelike for signs of looming trouble. Those rugged loners have become outmoded like lighthouse keepers, supplanted by aerial surveillance, drones, satellite imaging and automated camera systems.
Only about 25 spotters, including volunteers, now staff Washington lookouts, much to the chagrin of people such as Forrest Clark of the Forest Fire Lookout Association. The Darrington lookout expert says spotters remain an effective and inexpensive way to report smoke and weather changes, and to pinpoint the location of lightning strikes. “Yeah, it’s old technology,” he says of their tried-and-true methods. “So is putting peanut butter on bread with a kitchen knife.”
Austin, who is leaving on his terms, uses My Lightning Tracker & Alerts and Peak Finder phone applications for his work as a part-time U.S. Forest Service employee. But he is a practitioner of the old ways, methodically scanning the horizon every 15 minutes, starting north and walking around his 14-by-14-foot room with 360-degree views. Whether eyeballing a location or peeking through binoculars, Austin seems to have a sixth sense when differentiating puffs of smoke from “water dogs,” pockets of fog or vapor that collect in the mountains after a wet thunderstorm.
Austin’s protégé, Christine Estrada, says during a visit to the Leecher Mountain Lookout that something intrinsic is lost when relying solely on technology. “When you have a fire and crews on the ground, they love being able to talk to a person in the tower who has eyes on them,” says Estrada, in her fourth season as a volunteer at Goat Peak Lookout above Mazama.
Sentimentality seeps into the conversation with Estrada, who has climbed to all “93-ish” towers left in Washington state and runs the Methow Valley Forest Fire Lookout Association. The woman who lives off the grid in Twisp with a Mustang and a cattle dog revels in lookout history. “It’s this neat testament to the human spirit and the old American West,” she says.
Estrada, 48, turns toward the spiritual soul of the lookout tradition. Austin smiles, exhibiting the homespun charm that has entertained, inspired and educated scores of visitors, young and old, throughout the decades.
“He’s just an integral part of the landscape here,” Methow Valley District Ranger Chris Furr says.
DRESSED IN A Navy blue sweatshirt, jeans and Merrell Jungle leather slip-ons, Austin greets lookout aficionado Ken Harrison of Bellingham and me in June. His mustache is gray, like the tips of his chestnut-colored hair. The creases in his forehead look like wood carvings when he starts an animated story, which is how almost every conversation begins.
Austin, the oldest of five children, was born in a log cabin his father built near the Twisp River after serving in the U.S. Navy. Austin’s grandmother delivered him on a mid-July night because the doctor never showed up, he says.
Austin found his calling before entering first grade, when Frank Austin took his son to Leecher Mountain. “This is what I want to do,” the younger Austin says he announced. His grandfather and father worked lookouts; Frank Austin also led a Hotshot fire crew.
Leecher Lookout began operating about 1918 as a treetop crow’s nest below where the tower stands now.
Austin trundles past a hillside of pine trees and colorful lupine and larkspur to the remnants of the original lookout, including the ladder to the crow’s nest platform. “I love camping out and stuff, but climbing that tree, I don’t know,” he says.
He prefers the 41-foot structure with a series L-4 ground house that has five lightning rods on top and a catwalk around the perimeter. It arrived in 1954 from the Chiliwist Butte Lookout, south of Omak. Austin says he sleeps on the old Chiliwist Butte’s original bed. The cabin, updated in 2009, is grounded with copper wire to protect inhabitants from lightning strikes, which hit at least once a summer. His appliances include a propane stove, a wash basin and an ice chest.
Austin uses a solar camp shower to bathe during his five-day shifts. A wooden latrine with resident rats also sits on the summit. Austin descends and ascends the three narrow staircases when he has to go.
The centerpiece of the cab, as the ground houses are called, is an Osborne Fire Finder sighting device that looks like an oversized compass. Spotters can identify the location of a fire by looking through crosshairs and using the topographical map on the piece to calculate the azimuth, or compass directional bearing, of the smoke. Austin used to triangulate coordinates with fellow spotters. But with so few lookouts staffed, it’s often up to him to get it right.
“If I can see it, I’m pretty accurate,” he says. “I’ve been up here so much, I know the difference between a house light and a fire. Fires are a little more orange, and they flicker. I watch for good glows, especially after a lightning storm.”
THE LOOKOUT ON top of 5,008-foot Leecher Mountain represents a century-old tradition of fire management across the west. Forestry officials built hundreds of lookouts after catastrophic fires in 1910 burned 3 million acres of virgin forests in Idaho, Montana and Washington. The fires led to 87 deaths.
John Hearing of Snoqualmie Fire Lookouts Association describes the state’s surviving towers as living history museums worth preserving.
Clark adds, “When we lose it, we lose the identity to that mountain.”
Leecher Lookout, one of eight towers in the Methow Valley Ranger District, has an uncertain future. It could be placed on standby for emergencies once Austin leaves, or staffed with a volunteer.
Forest officials stationed Austin at Leecher in 2014 to better survey the Methow and Okanogan valleys. Austin had spent 19 seasons 45 miles to the northwest at Goat Peak, his favorite lookout.
Austin recalls having a bad feeling when moving to Leecher 10 years ago. Then shortly after he arrived, disaster struck with a rare dry lightning storm on July 17, 2014, the day after his 59th birthday. It led to the Carlton Complex Fire, the largest conflagration in state history. The fire consumed 256,000 acres and destroyed more than 100 homes in and around Pateros on the Columbia River.
At first, Austin couldn’t see what was happening from the tower. He says he went to the crow’s nest area for a better view. From there, Austin reported the fire moving toward Leecher Mountain. He didn’t panic, despite not having a car at the time to evacuate. “I knew they’d get me out,” he says.
Austin told his boss not to drive up because of the danger. She sent a helicopter as the flames closed in. That led to an ordeal with his dogs, Thunderdog Shilo and Blaze. “One dragged me down the hill, and one was trying to pull me up the hill,” he recalls. “Thunder wanted to go. Blaze was afraid of helicopters.” They eventually flew to safety. He took a few days off before returning to Goat Peak for the rest of the summer. Austin says he helped firefighting friends locate the Leecher crow’s nest just in time to save it.
Austin briefly left Leecher Lookout during the 2015 Twisp River Fire under different circumstances. His boss relieved him of duty to mourn the loss of three firefighters who perished while fighting the blaze.
He wrote a poem and painted a picture to commemorate the men.
AUSTIN BECAME A firefighter after graduating from Liberty Bell High School in the Methow Valley. He first worked on a helitack team that would land near fires to provide support for crews.
When the team disbanded, he was hired in 1978 at the Chelan Butte Lookout, above Entiat, Chelan County. Austin, then 22, dealt with a fire on his first day as a spotter. He says three young women were visiting the lookout when a big column of smoke appeared. A prescribed burn had gotten out of control. In the excitement, Austin forgot everything he had learned in training the previous week. He pulled out an instructional manual and, with the help of his guests, reported the location. “I was 15 miles off, but I’d seen it and got it reported,” he says.
Making his debut as a lookout wasn’t the only major change in ‘78. Austin says he drove to California that year to find his mother, whom he had not seen since she left the family when he was a child. Austin and two brothers had stayed with his dad, who eventually married his ex-wife’s sister. Austin’s reunion with his mother reconnected them, and they enjoyed a good relationship the rest of her life.
Nineteen-seventy-eight also was the year Austin got married to a 19-year-old firefighter. The union lasted only a few years. Austin married and divorced a second time, but he swears never again. “I am married to the lookouts,” he says. “That’s why I got single. Both wives said I was too crazy about the lookouts.”
Austin worked numerous forest service jobs in different districts before returning home to the Methow Valley in 1992. He spent three seasons in Twisp replanting trees in logged forests and helping fight fires before starting 30 consecutive summers as a seasonal lookout in the Methow in 1995. As Austin settled into his work at 7,000-foot Goat Peak, he caught the attention of the renowned North Cascades Smokejumpers, the elite wildland firefighters based in Winthrop. They started calling Austin “Lightning Bill” during his second summer because of his animated calls during thunderstorms.
Austin can’t help but get excited to report a fire. In his first season at Chelan Butte, he awoke late one night and thought the range was burning. Austin frantically called his boss. “The Northern Lights,” she said.
Hearing the story reminded Estrada of a near gaffe. Like Austin, and most fire spotters, she works alone. She almost called in a full moon in 2021, her first season at Goat Peak. “We had all the wildfire smoke,” she tells Austin, describing her summer as starring in a live-action movie. “The moon came up, and it looked like a fire right on the horizon. I was that close to calling. I’m so glad I didn’t.”
Austin: “I told Christine, when you don’t know, wait a few minutes.”
FIRE SPOTTERS PRIDE themselves on accuracy, which takes scrupulous assessments. Traditionally, fires get their names from the first official to spot them. That person often hastily picks a local landmark for a name in the chaos of impending disaster.
It’s an inexact science, as Austin discovered one July day in 2006. He recalls eating lunch when a lightning-caused fire took off on Blue Buck Mountain above the Methow Valley. Austin reported the fire originating at nearby Tripod Peak. He caught the mistake quickly, but it was too late. Officials called it the Tripod Complex Fire.
Most days pass without incident, but Austin says he never gets bored. He pulls out a ukulele and begins strumming. Then Austin stops.
“I am myself’s best friend,” he says. “There is no such word as bored in my vocabulary.”
He starts strumming again. And stopping. Again.
Suddenly, Austin announces he was happiest when reporting to duty on the first day — even this summer, when an uneasiness grew about the potential for a tumultuous fire season. “Then, on the last day, I am sad because I have to go down,” he says.
THE DESCENT IN the coming weeks will be bittersweet for Austin, who lives with a brother in the three-bedroom home his mom left Bill in Bridgeport, Douglas County. Austin turned one room into a studio, where he paints vibrant scenes of fire lookouts using watercolors and acrylics.
Austin won a prize in the Washington state Smokey Bear poster contest in third grade, foretelling his life’s pursuits of firefighting and painting.
He plans to paint three days a week and sell “Lightning Bill”-signed prints on weekends at the Pybus Public Market in Wenatchee.
Once he steps off the tower, Austin can focus on his dream of painting a 4×4 with oils.
“I didn’t know what I wanted my 4×4 to be,” he says in a July phone call. “Then I saw his photo.”
Harrison, a landscape photographer, had captured a luminous image of the tower’s orange glow framed against an indigo sky just before we went to bed. “Lightning Bill” Austin couldn’t stop talking about it through the night.