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Fire lookout · Shoshone County, Idaho

Flash Peak Lookout

St. Joe NF 20-foot pole tower with L-4 cab built 1932 in Shoshone County; 1934 wildfire came within a mile; destroyed 1956.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. Destroyed in 1956 per all three lookout pages. No source describes what remains at the site.

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
Trail
The Idaho Fire Lookouts page lists the site as a hike-in, marked destroyed. No source describes access to the site now.

Facts

Status
Gone
Type
Cab on a tower20-foot pole tower with an L-4 cabThe design: L-4
Built of
Not recorded
Built
1932
Height
20 ft (6.1 m)
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
St. Joe National Forest
Land
Federal land
Location
Shoshone County, Idaho
Coordinates
47.30957, −115.87868
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-id-flash-peak

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. 1932 Built20-foot pole tower with an L-4 cab, per all three lookout pages.Sources: firelookout.com, idahofirelookouts.com, idaholookouts.weebly.com
  2. 1934 FireA wildfire came within about a mile of the station at midnight on August 23, 1934. The Morning Oregonian account, quoted on the Idaho index, does not name the fire.Source: idaholookouts.weebly.com
  3. No record between 1934 and 1956
  4. 1956 DestroyedDestroyed in 1956 per all three pages; the cause and the exact date are not given.Sources: firelookout.com, idahofirelookouts.com, idaholookouts.weebly.com
  5. 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.

Flash Peak Lookout stood about five miles northwest of Avery, in Shoshone County on the St. Joe National Forest, at 5,685 feet.1,2 It was built in 1932 as a 20-foot pole tower with an L-4 cab on top.1,2,3 The L-4, also called an Aladdin, was a prefabricated lookout house, 14 feet square, produced between 1929 and 1953.4

In August 1934 a wildfire came within about a mile of the station.3 A Morning Oregonian account, quoted on the Idaho index, put the station roughly a mile ahead of the fire at midnight and reported that concern was voiced it might be destroyed.3 The quoted account does not name the fire.3

The lookout was destroyed in 1956, as all three pages record.1,2,3 None of them gives the cause or the exact date of the loss.1,2,3

Today, no source describes what, if anything, remains on the summit.1,2,3 The Idaho Fire Lookouts page lists the site as a hike-in, though it also marks the tower destroyed.2 No source says whether the public can reach the site now.1,2,3

  1. Flash Peak Fire Lookout Tower, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/id/flashpeak.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Flash Peak Lookout, Idaho Fire Lookouts, https://www.idahofirelookouts.com/st-joe-clearwater-region/flash-peak-lookout/ (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  3. Flash Peak - Forest Lookouts, Idaho Forest Lookouts index, https://idaholookouts.weebly.com/flash-peak.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  4. Lookout Styles of the Nez Perce National Forest, USDA Forest Service, https://fs.usda.gov/media/259212 (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, ownership, 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

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