FirefinderFire lookouts of the US

Fire lookout · Powell County, Montana

Cardinal Peak

Powell County, MT lookout site on the Flathead NF; firelookout.com dates an L-4 cab to 1936 and abandonment to 1955; Forest Lookouts marks it removed; no present-day description found.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. Listed as gone and marked removed on the Forest Lookouts page; no source describes what remains

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

Facts

Status
Gone
Type
Ground-level cabL-4 cabThe design: L-4
Built of
Not recorded
Built
1936
Height
Unknown
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Flathead National Forest
Land
Federal land
Location
Powell County, Montana
Coordinates
47.38000, −113.36790
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-mt-cardinal-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 a typical height for a lookout like it.

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. 1936 Builtfirelookout.com lists '1936: L-4 cab'Source: firelookout.com
  2. No record between 1936 and 1955
  3. 1955 Abandonedfirelookout.com: 'Abandoned 1955.'Source: firelookout.com
  4. 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.

Cardinal Peak is a former fire lookout in Powell County, Montana, about 15 miles north-northeast of Seeley Lake, on the Flathead National Forest.1 The firelookout.com page gives its elevation as 8,551 feet.1 The Forest Lookouts listing places it at township 19 North, range 14 West, section 27.2 Those two lookout pages agree on the forest and the county.1,2

The firelookout.com page dates an L-4 cab there to 1936 and says the lookout was abandoned in 1955.1

The Forest Lookouts listing marks the site as removed.2 The Forest Fire Lookout Association's Montana list gives coordinates of 47.38000 north, 113.36790 west and calls it a ground lookout that is gone.3

No source we read describes what, if anything, remains at the site today.

  1. Cardinal Peak Fire Lookout Cabin, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/mt/cardinalpeak.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Cardinal Peak - FOREST LOOKOUTS, Forest Lookouts, https://montanalookouts.weebly.com/cardinal-peak.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  3. Montana lookout list, Forest Fire Lookout Association, https://firelookout.org/lookouts/us/mt/ (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. FOREST LOOKOUTS -- western US (Ron Kemnow's weebly sites) Gave us: 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
  4. Firefinder research Gave us: summary, design, 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

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