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Fire lookout · Clearwater County, Idaho

Beals Butte Lookout

Potlatch TPA lookout tower on Beals Butte, Idaho (county disputed): 100-ft pole tower with L-6 cab, 1933. Destroyed 1962 or 1967; no remains described.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. Destroyed; sources give 1962 or 1967 and none describes what remains.

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?
Yes, you can drive up
Trail
Idaho Fire Lookouts tags the site as drive-up. No source describes the site today.

Facts

Status
Gone
Type
Cab on a towerL-6The design: L-6
Built of
Not recorded
Built
1933
Height
100 ft (30.5 m)
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Potlatch Timber Protective Association
Land
Unknown
Location
Clearwater County, Idaho
Coordinates
46.94348, −116.50635
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-id-beals-butte

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 its recorded height.

Downloads about 4.1 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

  1. 1914 EventLookout on Beal's Butte connected to Bovill by telephone; from it the logging around Bovill could be overseen (Potlatch TPA annual report, quoted on Forest Lookouts)Source: idaholookouts.weebly.com
  2. No record between 1914 and 1933
  3. 1933 Built100-foot pole tower with L-6 cab (Kresek, via Forest Lookouts)Sources: firelookout.com, idahofirelookouts.com, idaholookouts.weebly.com
  4. No record between 1933 and 1962
  5. 1962 DestroyedPotlatch TPA annual report quoted on Forest Lookouts says destroyed that year because unsafe; no replacement planned. Conflicts with 1967.Source: idaholookouts.weebly.com
  6. 1967 DestroyedGiven as the year destroyed by firelookout.com and Idaho Fire LookoutsSources: firelookout.com, idahofirelookouts.com
  7. TodayGoneThe lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left.

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 (click the spot there to list them, with dates and downloads).

Story

Researched 10 Oct 2026, fact-checked.

Beals Butte stands at 4,932 feet, about 9 miles north-northeast of Deary.1,2 The sources disagree on the county: firelookout.com says Clearwater County, while Forest Lookouts lists the butte under Latah County.1,3

A lookout was on the butte by 1914.3 That year's annual report from the Potlatch Timber Protective Association says it had a telephone link to Bovill and could oversee the logging around that town.3

A 100-foot pole tower with an L-6 cab went up on the butte in 1933.1,2,3

The sources disagree on when the tower was destroyed. The Forest Lookouts page quotes an association annual report that gives 1962 as the year the tower was destroyed, for safety reasons, and says no replacement was planned.3 Firelookout.com and Idaho Fire Lookouts both give 1967 instead.1,2

No source we read describes what, if anything, remains of the tower on the butte today.1,2,3 Idaho Fire Lookouts tags the site as drive-up, but its page does not say what is there now.2

  1. Beals Butte Fire Lookout Tower, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/id/bealsbutte.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Beals Butte Lookout, Idaho Fire Lookouts, https://www.idahofirelookouts.com/st-joe-clearwater-region/beals-butte-lookout/ (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  3. Beals Butte, Forest Lookouts, https://idaholookouts.weebly.com/beals-butte.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩

Sources

  1. Forest Fire Lookout Association (FFLA) - US lookout lists Gave us: name, location, county, type, status, links Forest Fire Lookout Association (firelookout.org) · No licence stated; facts extracted only, no prose copied. · retrieved 8 Oct 2026
  2. firelookout.com -- Rex Kamstra's Forest Fire Lookout Page Gave us: links firelookout.com · No licence stated on the site; facts only (coordinates, elevation, built/destroyed years, design, agency). Photos mirrored with the site's stated credit. · retrieved 4 Oct 2026
  3. Idaho Fire Lookouts (idahofirelookouts.com) Gave us: dates, links idahofirelookouts.com · No licence stated; facts only (coordinates, status/built/destroyed year parsed from each entry's short excerpt). Thumbnail photos mirrored with credit per the project's photo policy. · retrieved 4 Oct 2026
  4. FOREST LOOKOUTS -- western US (Ron Kemnow's weebly sites) Gave us: design, height, agency, links Ron Kemnow's Forest Lookouts sites (westlookouts, californialookouts, idaholookouts, montanalookouts, oregonlookouts and washingtonlookouts .weebly.com) · No licence stated; facts only (county, land manager, status word, coordinates where the page's own map widget gives them, township-range-section, height and design hints, links). The site's own newspaper quotes, citations and narrative are not reproduced. · retrieved 8 Oct 2026
  5. Firefinder research Gave us: summary, design, height, status, agency, visiting details, dates, 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

Firefinder takes facts (places, dates, numbers) from these sources and writes its own words. See all sources and licences.