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Fire lookout · Bonner County, Idaho

Strawberry Mountain Lookout

Bonner County, ID lookout: c.1934 40-ft pole tower with L-4 cab; unused after 1950; 1962 report of towers being toppled and burned; now gone or removed.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. Idaho Fire Lookouts and firelookout.com say gone; Forest Lookouts gives its status as Removed; a June 1962 Sandpoint News Bulletin report, quoted by Forest Lookouts, says the lookouts were being toppled and destroyed

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?
No, you have to hike
Trail
Idaho Fire Lookouts tags the site Hike-In; no source describes what remains there now

Facts

Status
Gone
Type
Cab on a tower40-foot pole tower with L-4 cab (c.1934)The design: L-4
Built of
Not recorded
Built
1934
Height
40 ft (12.2 m)
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Kaniksu National Forest
Land
Federal land
Location
Bonner County, Idaho
Coordinates
48.46498, −116.21502
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-id-strawberry-mountain

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 3.7 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. 1934 Built40-foot pole tower with L-4 cab; dated c.1934 by Forest Lookouts (Kresek) and 1934 by firelookout.com and Idaho Fire LookoutsSources: firelookout.com, idaholookouts.weebly.com, idahofirelookouts.com
  2. No record between 1934 and 1950
  3. 1950 AbandonedNot used or maintained since 1950, when the Forest Service went to aerial patrol (per June 1962 Sandpoint News Bulletin report)Source: idaholookouts.weebly.com
  4. 1962 EventJune 1962 Sandpoint News Bulletin report lists Strawberry Mountain among six abandoned lookouts in the process of being toppled and destroyed; towers reported being burned. No later source confirms the outcome.Source: 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.

Strawberry Mountain Lookout stood in Bonner County, Idaho, about 20 miles northeast of Sandpoint, in the Kaniksu National Forest.1

The lookout was a 40-foot pole tower with an L-4 cab, dated to about 1934.2 A Sandpoint News Bulletin article from June 21, 1962, quoted by Forest Lookouts, says the lookouts were put up by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the 1930s.2 According to the same article, the Forest Service dropped the towers from use and upkeep in 1950, when it moved to aerial patrol.2

The paper listed Strawberry Mountain among six abandoned lookouts that were in the process of being toppled and destroyed.2 Forest Lookouts gives its status as "Removed."2 Firelookout.com and Idaho Fire Lookouts simply call it gone, and the Forest Fire Lookout Association's Idaho list reads "Tower Gone."1,3,4

No source we read describes what, if anything, remains at the site.3 The Idaho Fire Lookouts page tags it "Hike-In" but gives no current condition for the site.3

  1. Strawberry Mtn. Fire Lookout Tower, Fire Lookout, https://www.firelookout.com/id/strawberrymtn235.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Strawberry Mountain - Forest Lookouts, Forest Lookouts, https://idaholookouts.weebly.com/strawberry-mountain.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  3. Strawberry Mountain Lookout, Idaho Fire Lookouts, https://www.idahofirelookouts.com/northern-idaho/strawberry-mountain-lookout/ (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  4. Idaho Lookouts (Alphabetical List), Forest Fire Lookout Association, https://firelookout.org/lookouts/us/id (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: 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

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