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Fire lookout · Fremont County, Idaho

Warm River Butte Lookout

Warm River Butte L-4 cab on an enclosed wooden tower in the Caribou-Targhee NF, Idaho; cabin 1942, burned 1976 per one list; a July 2011 blog post found only footings and steel.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. Gone; one list gives 1976 as the year it burned, and a July 2011 blog post found only cement footings and jagged steel

Visit & stay

Gone: site only. The lookout no longer stands, so there is nothing to climb or rent. You may still be able to visit the site.

Access

Open to the public. No closure notice found. The only visit report read is a July 2011 blog post, which places the butte along Fish Creek Road and describes the road on the butte as narrow and winding; no current status found

Road to the top?
Yes, you can drive up
Trail
A July 2011 blog post describes the road on the butte as narrow, winding and sometimes steep, and advises against low-clearance vehicles

Facts

Status
Gone
Type
Cab on a towerL-4 cab on an enclosed wooden towerThe design: L-4
Built of
Not recorded
Built
1942
Height
30 ft (9.1 m)
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Caribou-Targhee National Forest
Land
Federal land
Location
Fremont County, Idaho
Coordinates
44.17072, −111.23525
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-id-warm-river-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 3.6 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. 1942 BuiltCabin, per two lists; an L-4 cab on an enclosed wooden tower followed in the 1940sSources: idahofirelookouts.com, firelookout.com
  2. 1947 StaffedGene Hawks listed for 1947Source: idahofirelookouts.com
  3. 1948 StaffedGene Hawks and Allen Hedrickson listed for 1948; a 1948 Post-Register item names Gene Hawkes on his second seasonSources: idahofirelookouts.com, idaholookouts.weebly.com
  4. No record between 1948 and 1973
  5. 1973 EventListed as unstaffedSource: idahofirelookouts.com
  6. 1976 BurnedListed as burned by the Idaho Fire Lookouts page; no other source read gives a fire dateSource: idahofirelookouts.com
  7. No record between 1976 and 2011
  8. 2011 Condition assessmentBlog post dated July 27, 2011: tower no longer there; cement footings and jagged steel remainSource: jeepsummertour2011.blogspot.com
  9. 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.

Warm River Butte sits in the Caribou-Targhee National Forest in Fremont County, Idaho, where a lookout cabin went up in 1942.1,2

Sources disagree on the height of the tower. Two lists give 25 feet for the enclosed wooden L-4 tower of the 1940s.1,2 A July 1948 Salt Lake Tribune item, quoted on the Forest Lookouts page, describes a 14-by-14 glass-enclosed building on a 30-foot tower.3

Gene Hawkes, who was majoring in forestry at ISC, had first manned a lookout at 16 and was in his second season at Warm River in 1948.3 The Idaho listing names Gene Hawks for 1947 and 1948 and adds Allen Hedrickson for 1948.1 The two spellings of the name differ between the sources.1,3

The Idaho listing marks the lookout unstaffed by 1973 and burned in 1976, the only source we read that gives a fire date.1

The firelookout.com page and the Forest Fire Lookout Association index both list the lookout as gone, with no date.2,4

A July 2011 blog post found no tower left, only cement footings and jagged steel. The post places the butte along Fish Creek Road and describes the road on the butte as narrow and winding. The writer advised against low-clearance vehicles but still praised the view from the top.5

We found no later report on the site and no closure notice, so the 2011 post is the most recent account we read.5

  1. Warm River Butte Lookout – Idaho Fire Lookouts, Idaho Fire Lookouts, https://www.idahofirelookouts.com/southern-idaho/warm-river-butte-lookout/ (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Warm River Butte Fire Lookout Tower, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/id/warmriverbutte.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  3. Warm River Butte - FOREST LOOKOUTS, Forest Lookouts (Idaho), https://idaholookouts.weebly.com/warm-river-butte.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  4. Idaho Lookouts, Forest Fire Lookout Association, https://firelookout.org/lookouts/us/id (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  5. Jeep Summer Tour 2011: Warm River Butte: former fire lookout site, Jeep Summer Tour 2011 blog, https://jeepsummertour2011.blogspot.com/2011/07/warm-river-butte-former-fire-lookout.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: 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: 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, access, 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.