McGuire Lookout

On a nice warm and sunny Wednesday September 24 I hiked to the McGuire Lookout with Joyce, Kendra, and Glenda.  Kendra has a book about selected fire lookouts in NW Montana and has a goal to hike to most of them.  She and Joyce had visited about a half dozen lookouts before inviting me to join them to see McGuire Lookout.

Distance round trip to the lookout: 5.3 miles.   Our meanderings on the trail to the NW of the lookout made the trail 6 miles round trip.
Elevation gain to and from the lookout: 808 ft

Background from the Kootenai National Forest brochure and elsewhere: 

On a summit in northwestern Montana, about 19 miles southwest of Eureka at an elevation of 6991 feet, perches McGuire Mountain Lookout.

The lookout was built in 1923. It has a view of Lake Koocanusa five air miles to the west and the surrounding mountains and ridges.

Other historic remains include a root cellar, two outhouse holes, a Forest Service trail accessing the site, an early 1920’s campsite, and painted rock alignment spelling out “MCGUIRE”. The rock alignment is considered historical because the Forest Service began marking its location points this way in 1929 to aid aerial fire patrols.

In 1923, at the cost of $805.87, the Forest Service built the current McGuire Mountain Lookout. Lightning protection was added in 1931. The building was estimated to have a 20-year life. It is an excellent example of the first standardized Forest Service design, the D-6. The D-6 design is a square, wood frame building designed to rest on the ground with pyramidal cupola with windows all around which serve as an observation tower.

The lookout is a square 12' x12' wood frame building, designed to rest on the ground with pyramidal roofs and on top a pyramidal-shaped cupola, with windows all around, which serves an an observation tower. The main floor served as a living quarters for the fire guard. The cabin is equipped with a modern wood stove, 2 twin size bed boards (no mattresses), table, bench, shovel, bucket and cleaning gear. This cabin is very rustic. The building is not wired for electricity and has an outdoor toilet. Water sources are limited in the area and there is no water at the lookout.

The main floor served as living quarters for the fireguard. The fireguard also needed to patrol around the breaks of the mountain to view the Flat Creek watershed to the north. The patrol, including viewing times at three points took fifty-five minutes round-trip.

The end of the era of intensive fire lookouts use came in the 1940’s. As a result, the McGuire Mountain Lookout was abandoned in 1944. It stood vacant until 1983 when the Forest Service began restoring the building. Renovations were completed in 1998 under a PIT Project, making it eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. In 1996, windows replaced the boards in the cupola and the lookout was painted its original green with white trim. Today it is part of the Forest Service cabin rental program.

The lookout is open from June 1 to September 30 (weather permitting).
The cabin rents for $25.00 a night with a 14 day stay limit.

There are a number of ways to drive to the trail head.  Coming from Kalispell we drove through 'downtown' Trego, Montana and continued south on Fortine Creek Rd until we came to Edna Creek Rd (or FS 433) and then turned right onto that road.  Fortine Creek Road is paved and about 5 miles of the Edna Creek Rd is paved.  The rest of the roads are gravel but are in excellent condition with no potholes or rocks until the last 1.3 miles where the road got a little rocky.  But it was not bad.  Kendra drove a Prius and with its low ground clearance it had no trouble on the roads.

Google maps has the time from Trego as 1 hr 15 minutes. While we didn't time the drive it didn't seem like it took us even an hour to drive the route due to the good condition of the roads.  The only thing to watch out for is that there a number of roads in the area and we encountered several major intersections so use Google maps to get a list of the steps if you don't have a copy of the book's route description available.

An example of the many roads.  The short section from the intersection down by "Google" is the one that is a little rockier to drive.  The trailhead (plus a decent area on which to park off the road) are located on the saddle between McGuire Mountain and Sutton Mountain.

The trail takes the long way to the lookout and curves around from the west.  "McGuire" are rocks near the lookout and not an altered image.

There was no sign at the trailhead. We found a paper and plastic sign torn up into pieces at the base of a post.  The trail is nice and the forest along the trail is is open.

The trail goes up 200 to 300 ft then goes down a few hundred feet before going up again.  So the 808 ft of elevation gain is not straight up to the lookout but is gained going to and back from the lookout. The hike is easy.

The rock pile (there are four of them at each corner of the lookout) had cables between them and the lookout.

Near the trees in front of the lookout are some benches to sit on around a fire ring.  The outhouse is a short way down the hill and we also found the remains of the old root cellar.   As you can see, since the lookout was abandoned for fire detection use, trees have started to grow up around the lookout.

While the views are not spectacular as with other lookouts I have been to, nonetheless they are nice of the Salish Mountains.  The lack of large elevation change in the views hide the fact that the lookout is at an elevation of 6991 ft.

There is a trail that goes NW.  We followed it for a while in hopes of seeing more views to the NW and of Lake Koocanusa.  None where to be had.  The walk was nice and for some reason a number of large piles of rocks were placed at various points along the trail.  We came to an area off the trail where a very large section of the ground and rocks were disturbed.  Our guess it was due to a bear searching for grubs.

Someone placed a geocache at the lookout site. I didn't know about it until later when looking up info about the lookout.

http://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC581QE_mcguire-mtn-fire-lookout 


The forest service had conducted controlled burns earlier and on our drive out we could see and smell smoke from where the afternoon breeze had encouraged smoldering.  There was a large canvas(?) container along the road filled with water ready to pump from if needed.

More photos are at this link:

https://plus.google.com/photos/109566462412251958234/albums/6064383768758275585?authkey=CMDSxOPL86TuWA

A short video from the summit is at this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUr_pElZ2wo&feature=youtu.be
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