Where in the Wild is Chris

Fire Lookout Friday: Desolation All I want is an ice cream cone Nearly twenty years after scribbling “Desolation” into a notebook, I finally set out for one of Washington’s most legendary fire lookouts. It took me two attempts to get there. Jack Kerouac spent 63 days up there. I got fifteen minutes. A tale of border crossings, wildfire smoke, and the realization you’re in the worst place imaginabl...

Fire Lookout Friday: Lookouts and Lightning, Part 3 What lightning leaves behind For the last two weeks, I've been talking about lightning. What it's like to ride out a storm from a fire lookout, and what our eyes miss inside a lightning flash. This season, I hunted down three different trees hit by lightning strikes I witnessed from Goat Peak. Come join me to see what happens when lightning hits...

Fire Lookout Friday: Lookouts and Lightning, Part 2 What happens inside a lightning flash? I was planning to talk this week about what lightning leaves behind. But then I went back through some footage I captured during an extraordinary August 2024 storm from Goat Peak, and frame by frame, I realized I'd been watching something far more complicated than I understood. This week, we slow lightning d...

Fire Lookout Friday: Lookouts and Lightning, Part 1 What It's Like to Be Inside the Storm Lookouts and lightning go together like bread and butter, and after six seasons staffing Goat Peak—a fire lookout with a well-earned reputation as a lightning magnet—I’ve amassed quite the collection of lightning stories. I've seen lightning hiss past the windows, heard the explosive crack of a direct strike,...

Fire Lookout Friday: The Oldest Tool in the Box A brief history of fire lookouts, and why they still matter today For more than a century, fire lookouts have watched over the American West. With the rise of technology, including satellites, cameras, lightning detection, and AI, human lookouts have been called antiquated, obsolete, and destined to disappear. This week on Fire Lookout Friday: a brie...

Fire Lookout Friday: On Presence, Ponies, and Scooping Manure Musings from the likely end of another fire lookout season Fire lookout work requires you to pay attention. As it turns out, so do horses and living off-grid. After another intense summer at Goat Peak, I've been thinking about the strange life I've assembled and why all of it seems to ask the same thing of me. This week on Fire Lookout...

Fire Lookout Friday: An Invitation to the Yakama Reservation Some adventures are earned. Some are simply luck. Most of Washington's fire lookouts I reached through stubbornness, problem-solving, and a truly unreasonable number of failed attempts. Satus and Signal Peak were different. These two lookouts stand on the Yakama Reservation and getting there required something I couldn't manufacture on m...

Fire Lookout Friday: War Creek Ridge A trail to the past Once upon a time, hundreds of fire lookouts stood on mountaintops across Washington. Many are long gone, including the fire lookout on War Creek Ridge, high above the Twisp River. This week on Fire Lookout Friday, join me on a steep climb up a nearly vanished trail, following breadcrumbs of history along the way, including the story of a tou...

Fire Lookout Friday: Goat Peak—More Than Fire, Smoke, and Radio The relationship between a bird and a tree Fire lookout life isn't just smoke on the horizon, bearings on the fire finder, and radio traffic. It's also about developing a relationship with a place. And with the neighbors who share the summit. This week is a story about a threatened tree, a raucous corvid with an extraordinary memory,...

Fire Lookout Friday: Goat Peak, Then and Now A hundred years of Tuesdays When I unlock the Goat Peak fire lookout each summer, I'm not just opening a fire lookout. I'm stepping into nearly a century of stories. Log books. Historical photographs. Osborne panoramas. Names scratched into the ceiling hatch by generations of lookouts. Join me for a walk through Goat Peak's remarkable living history, an...

Fire Lookout Friday: From the Summit of Goat Questions about Fire Lookout Life Six seasons on the same mountain, and the questions don't really change. What do you actually do up there? Don't you get bored? How does a thousand pounds of groceries get to a 7,000-foot summit? This week, straight from the catwalk at Goat Peak, I'm answering the questions I hear most from visitors, including what nobo...

Fire Lookout Friday:  Dodger Point Some places are simply about the journey Some places stay with you because of the destination. Others stay with you because of everything in between. Dodger Point turned into one of those rare adventures where the fire lookout almost became secondary to the journey itself. This week's story is about a 40-mile odyssey into the Olympics, the remarkable rebirth of o...

Fire Lookout Friday: Slate Peak Losing a landmark, and what fire lookouts leave behind For five summers at Goat Peak, Slate Peak has been a familiar silhouette on my northwest horizon. Fifteen miles away, but always there. This past winter, the 70-year-old tower collapsed, and the ridgeline has been empty ever since. This week's story is about what it feels like to lose a place you didn't realize...

Fire Lookout Friday:  Four days at Lookout Mountain Bringing an old lookout back to life By the summer of 2022, Lookout Mountain had spent several years sitting quietly above the Methow Valley. Shutters closed. Doors locked. This week's story is about what happens when an old fire lookout wakes up again. Four unforgettable days over the Fourth of July weekend filled with old logbooks, northern lig...

Fire Lookout Friday:  Lookouts Take a Village How fire lookouts inspire community A few weeks ago, vandals severely damaged the historic High Rock fire lookout just as a decade-long restoration project was nearing completion. But this week's story isn't really about the vandalism. It's about what happened next. This week, I'm sharing stories of High Rock, Lookout Mountain, Columbia Breaks, and the...

Fire Lookout Friday: Goodman Hill Washington's lowest elevation fire lookout, artillery fields, and a military escort. Washington's lowest elevation standing fire lookout sits hidden on one of the largest military installations in the world. The problem? Almost nobody on base seems to know it’s there. This week's story is about a fire lookout that took me two attempts, three trips to Range Control...

Fire Lookout Friday: North Twentymile Why do I keep going back? North Twentymile is the Washington fire lookout that took me more failed attempts to reach than any other. Fire. Smoke. Heat. Snow. All caused four years of failure before I finally stood on the summit. And now, I keep returning.  This week’s story is about one of Washington’s most unique fire lookout sites, it’s rare D-6 cupola, a yo...

Fire Lookout Friday: Horses, Fire Lookouts, and Potato Chips You can't have just one. A cattle dog who grew up on a mountain. A one-eyed Mustang from Oregon. A Quarab mare who doesn't have time for your produce aisle. And a five-year-old South Steens Mustang who could pass for his big brother's mini-me. Eight episodes in, it's time to properly introduce the herd—and the story of how horses and fir...

Fire Lookout Friday: Green Mountain A Lookout and Wilderness on Trial A Montana-based watchdog group. A federal judge. An 80-year-old fire lookout listed on the National Register of Historic Places, restored and then ordered removed. This is the story of Green Mountain, the lawsuit that nearly took it down, and the larger question underneath all of it: what does wilderness actually mean? And who g...

Fire Lookout Friday: Monument 83, Part 2 A starry night, midnight surprise, and mysterious gravestone The conclusion of a three-attempt journey to what might just be Washington State's most remote fire lookout. After two failed attempts in Part 1, this is the episode where I finally make it to the summit of Holdover Peak. 300 downed trees, some of the largest animal tracks I've ever seen, a specta...

Fire Lookout Friday: Monument 83, Part 1 One of Washington's most remote fire lookouts has a blowdowns-per-mile problem Monument 83 sits on the US-Canada border on a summit called Holdover Peak, and it might just be the most remote fire lookout in Washington State. Getting there requires navigating miles of beetle-killed blowdown so legendary it has spawned its own trail metric: blowdowns per mile...

Fire Lookout Friday: Buck Mountain The history of the lookout that was almost lost Buck Mountain is where this whole journey started. A low-snow January, a map, and a phone call with my dad. But what I didn't know was how much history was packed into that one small DNR tower above Loup Loup Pass. Or how close it came to being lost forever. Fire Lookout Friday is a weekly podcast and newsletter abo...

Fire Lookout Friday: Goat Peak Nobody staffs this fire lookout to read books Most people imagine staffing a fire lookout as a quiet summer spent reading books and watching sunsets. Goat Peak is not that lookout. This is the story of one of Washington’s busiest remaining staffed fire lookouts, and what it’s actually like to spend a summer alone on a mountaintop with a radio, endless visitors, light...

Fire Lookout Friday: The Toughest Physical Climb There's a fire lookout there? After visiting all 93 of Washington State's remaining historic fire lookouts, the question I get asked most is: which one was the hardest to reach? This is the story of the most physically demanding day I've ever had in the mountains, and the century-old fire lookout waiting at the top. Fire Lookout Friday is a weekly p...

Fire Lookout Friday: The Beginning The journey to visit Washington’s last standing fire lookouts In January 2014, a low-snow winter, a map, and a phone call with my dad set off a chain of events I never could have predicted. This is where it all started. The story of how I ended up visiting all 93 of Washington State’s remaining historic fire lookouts and some of what happened along the way. Fire...