Fire lookout · Santa Barbara County, California
Los Coches Mountain AWS
Santa Barbara County AWS site in the Los Padres National Forest; FFLOS list marks it gone with no date; no build, staffing or site description found.
- Gone
- Access unknown
- Verified
Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. FFLOS California list marks the site Gone, with no date
Visit & stay
Gone: site only. The lookout no longer stands, so there is nothing to climb or rent.
Access
Access unknown
We do not know the access rules. Check with the land manager before you go.
- Road to the top?
- Unknown
Facts
- Status
- Type
- Type unknown
- Built of
- Not recorded
- Also served as
- Aircraft Warning Service postDuring the Second World War it was staffed to spot and report aircraft.
- Built
- Unknown
- Height
- Unknown
- Elevation
- Unknown
- Agency
- Los Padres National Forest (per page header)
- Land
- Unknown
- Location
- Santa Barbara County, California
- Coordinates
- 34.98311, −120.25728
- Registers
- Not on a lookout register
- This entry
- VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
- Firefinder id
us-ca-los-coches-mountain-aws
View from the cab
What the lookout saw from its cab: every ridge out to about 93 miles, the named peaks in sight, and other fire lookouts within view, worked out from terrain data in your browser.
This lookout is gone. The view is reconstructed from its recorded site and a typical height for a lookout like it.
Downloads about 3.1 MB of terrain data the first time.
Or see what it could see on the map: the ground in its line of sight.
History
Then and now
No dated events recorded yet: nobody has recorded when this lookout was built or when it came down.
Old maps of this spot
USGS topographic maps from the years a lookout stood may show it, often as a small symbol labelled “Lookout”. See the old topo maps around it on the Firefinder map, or find every scanned sheet of this spot on USGS TopoView (opens another site) (click the spot there to list them, with dates and downloads).
Story
Researched 10 Oct 2026, fact-checked.
Los Coches Mountain lies in Santa Barbara County, inside the Los Padres National Forest.1,2 The Forest Fire Lookout Association's California list places the site at 34.98311, -120.25728.1
The list gives the site type as AWS, short for Aircraft Warning Service.1,3 That was a civilian service tied to the Army's Ground Observer Corps during World War II, and a Wikipedia summary says it was deactivated on May 29, 1944.3
The same list marks the site as gone, with no date.1
We found no source that describes what, if anything, remains at the site today, or whether the site is open to visitors.
- California Lookouts, Forest Fire Lookout Association, https://firelookout.org/lookouts/us/ca/ (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
- Los Coches Mountain - FOREST LOOKOUTS, Forest Lookouts, https://californialookouts.weebly.com/los-coches-mountain.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
- Aircraft Warning Service, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_warning_service (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
Sources
- Forest Fire Lookout Association (FFLA) - US lookout lists (opens another site) Gave us: name, location, county, wartime use, status, links Forest Fire Lookout Association (firelookout.org) · No licence stated; facts extracted only, no prose copied. · retrieved 8 Oct 2026
- Firefinder research Gave us: summary, status, agency, links, fact-check Firefinder research (sources cited in the story footnotes) · Our own research notes; each fact cites its source in the lookout's story
More about this lookout elsewhere
- Los Coches Mountain - FOREST LOOKOUTS (opens another site)
- Aircraft Warning Service (Wikipedia) (opens another site)
- FFLA California lookout list (firelookout.org) (opens another site)
Firefinder takes facts (places, dates, numbers) from these sources and writes its own words. See all sources and licences.