Fire lookout · Clearwater County, Minnesota
Summit
Aermotor ladder tower near Bagley, Clearwater County, MN; listed standing; build year disputed (1928 in county text, 1938 in table and Central US page).
- Standing
- Access unknown
- Verified
Visit & stay
Not rentable. As far as we know, this lookout cannot be booked for overnight stays.
Access
Access unknown
We do not know the access rules. Check with the land manager before you go.
- Can you climb it?
- Unknown
- Road to the top?
- Unknown
- Staffing
- Unknown
Facts
- Status
- Type
- Cab on a towerAermotor ladder towerThe design: Aermotor
- Built of
- SteelGoing by its design; no source says so in words.
- Built
- 1928
- Height
- 94 ft (28.7 m)
- Elevation
- Unknown
- Agency
- Minnesota Forest Service, now Minnesota DNR Forestry Division (owner per the county list)
- Land
- Unknown
- Location
- Clearwater County, Minnesota
- Coordinates
- 47.50132, −95.34990
- Registers
- Not on a lookout register
- This entry
- VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 9 Oct 2026.
- Firefinder id
us-mn-summit
View from the cab
What you see from the 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.
Downloads about 3.8 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
- 1928 BuiltCounty list text says erected here in 1928; conflicts with the table and Central US page (disputed)Source: upload.wikimedia.org
- 1938 BuiltCounty list table and Central US page give 1938 (disputed)Sources: upload.wikimedia.org, centraluslookouts.weebly.com
- TodayStandingIt still stands, as far as our sources know.
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 9 Oct 2026, fact-checked.
The Summit lookout is an Aermotor ladder tower in Clearwater County, Minnesota, just southeast of Bagley.1,2 The county list gives its height as 94 feet, but a 1941 survey note in the same entry says the tower is about 100 feet high. The same note also appears under the LaSalle entry, so it may not belong to Summit.1
The sources disagree about when it went up. The county list's text says it was erected here in 1928, while the county table and the Central US Lookouts page both give 1938.1,2
The county list also calls it the Bagley tower, numbers it 48 on the state list, and describes it as a very old Minnesota tower.1
The list records the owner as the Minnesota Forest Service, which it says is now the Department of Natural Resources' Forestry Division.1 We found no record of who staffed the tower or which fires it watched.
The Forest Fire Lookout Association lists the tower as standing.3
We found no statement about public access in the sources we could read. Anyone planning a visit should ask the landowner or managing agency first, and should not climb the tower without permission.
- Clearwater County Minnesota Fire Lookout Towers, Wikimedia Commons, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Clearwater_County_Towers.pdf (accessed 2026-10-09). ↩
- Summit - Forest Lookouts, Central US Lookouts, https://centraluslookouts.weebly.com/summit.html (accessed 2026-10-09). ↩
- Minnesota Lookouts, Forest Fire Lookout Association, https://firelookout.org/lookouts/us/mn/ (accessed 2026-10-09). ↩
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: what it is built of, design, 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, 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
- Clearwater County Minnesota Fire Lookout Towers (Wikimedia Commons) (opens another site)
- FFLA Minnesota lookout list (firelookout.org) (opens another site)
- Summit (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.