Fire lookout · Cass County, Minnesota
Birch Lake
Minnesota Forest Service 81-ft Aermotor ladder tower, dated 1927 or 1928; sold and removed in 1981. The site later became a landfill and transfer station.
- Gone
- Permission required
- Verified
Permission required
You need permission from the tribe or landowner before visiting. The former site is at a transfer station; the writer's visit to the site was made with staff permission
Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. Sold and removed in 1981; the site later became a landfill and then a transfer station
Visit & stay
Gone: site only. The lookout no longer stands, so there is nothing to climb or rent.
Access
Permission required. See the warning at the top of this page.
- Road to the top?
- Unknown
Facts
- Status
- Type
- Cab on a towerAermotor ladder towerThe design: Aermotor
- Built of
- Not recorded
- Built
- 1927
- Height
- 81 ft (24.7 m)
- Elevation
- Unknown
- Agency
- Minnesota Forest Service
- Land
- Unknown
- Location
- Cass County, Minnesota
- Coordinates
- 46.96911, −94.51773
- Registers
- Not on a lookout register
- This entry
- VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
- Firefinder id
us-mn-birch-lake
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 4.2 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
- 1927 BuiltTable date; the note on the same entry says the Aermotor tower was erected in 1928Sources: upload.wikimedia.org, upload.wikimedia.org
- No record between 1927 and 1981
- 1981 RemovedTower sold and removedSources: upload.wikimedia.org, upload.wikimedia.org
- 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 (opens another site) (click the spot there to list them, with dates and downloads).
Story
Researched 10 Oct 2026, fact-checked.
The Birch Lake tower stood in Cass County, and the Minnesota Forest Service owned it.1 It was an 81-foot Aermotor ladder tower.1,2 Birch Lake Township takes its name from that lake, which borders the village of Hackensack.3
The lists give two build years. The date column says 1927, while the note on the same entry says the Aermotor tower was erected in 1928.1,2 Either way, it was sold and removed in 1981.1,2
A Minnesota tower history says the spot became a landfill and later a transfer station.3 The writer visited the former tower site, now in a gravel pit, and elsewhere on the same page calls it a sand pit.3 A photograph on the same page shows the landfill, which is now closed.3 The writer's visit was made with a transfer-station staff member's permission.3
The Forest Fire Lookout Association lists the tower as gone.4
- Cass County Fire Lookout Towers (PDF), Wikimedia Commons, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Cass_County_Towers.pdf (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
- Minnesota fire lookouts A-Z list (PDF), Wikimedia Commons, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/A-Z_List-Towers.pdf (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
- Birch Lake, Historical Minnesota Fire Towers (kjackson.us), https://tower.kjackson.us/BirchLake.php (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
- Minnesota Lookouts, Forest Fire Lookout Association, https://firelookout.org/lookouts/us/mn/ (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
Sources
- Forest Fire Lookout Association (FFLA) - US lookout lists (opens another site) 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
- FOREST LOOKOUTS -- central US (centraluslookouts.weebly.com) (opens another site) Gave us: agency, links centraluslookouts.weebly.com · No licence stated; facts only (county, coordinates where the page's own map widget gives them, status, height, design hints, register links). The site's own historical quotes, newspaper citations and narrative are not reproduced. · retrieved 8 Oct 2026
- Firefinder research Gave us: summary, design, height, status, agency, access, 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
- Cass County Fire Lookout Towers (PDF) (Wikimedia Commons) (opens another site)
- Minnesota fire lookouts A-Z list (PDF) (Wikimedia Commons) (opens another site)
- Birch Lake, Historical Minnesota Fire Towers (kjackson.us) (opens another site)
- FFLA Minnesota lookout list (firelookout.org) (opens another site)
- Birch Lake (centraluslookouts.weebly.com) (opens another site)
Firefinder takes facts (places, dates, numbers) from these sources and writes its own words. See all sources and licences.