FirefinderFire lookouts of the US

Fire lookout · Mineral County, Montana

Deer Peak

Lolo National Forest lookout near Alberton, Mont.: 30-foot pole L-4 tower built 1933, destroyed 1964; no source describes the site today.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. destroyed in 1964 per firelookout.com; the Forest Fire Lookout Association's Montana list marks the tower as gone

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
Cab on a tower30-foot pole tower with a gabled L-4 cabThe design: L-4
Built of
Not recorded
Built
1933
Height
Unknown
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Lolo National Forest
Land
Federal land
Location
Mineral County, Montana
Coordinates
46.91304, −114.57139
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-mt-deer-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 4.0 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. 1933 Built30-foot pole tower with a gabled L-4 cab, per firelookout.comSource: firelookout.com
  2. 1935 StaffedMissoulian item of September 22, 1935, as quoted on montanalookouts.weebly.com, names Jim Castles from Deer Peak; the newspaper itself was not readSource: montanalookouts.weebly.com
  3. No record between 1935 and 1964
  4. 1964 Destroyedfirelookout.com says destroyed in 1964Source: firelookout.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.

Deer Peak was a fire lookout on the Lolo National Forest, about seven miles south-southwest of Alberton in Mineral County, Montana.1 It sat at an elevation of 6,719 feet.1

The tower was a 30-foot pole structure with a gabled L-4 cab, and it went up in 1933.1 On September 22, 1935, a Missoulian item, as quoted on a Montana lookout history page, said most lookout men had come back in from their stations, and it named Jim Castles as coming from Deer Peak.2

Firelookout.com dates the tower's destruction to 1964.1 A Montana lookout history page lists the site only as removed, with no date.2 The Forest Fire Lookout Association's Montana list marks the tower as gone.3 The sources differ on how it left, but all three agree it no longer stands.1,2,3

No source I found describes what, if anything, remains at the site today, or whether the ground is open to visitors. The Association's list gives the site's coordinates as 46.91304 and -114.57139.3

  1. Deer Peak Fire Lookout Tower, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/mt/deerpeak.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Deer Peak - FOREST LOOKOUTS, montanalookouts.weebly.com, https://montanalookouts.weebly.com/deer-peak.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  3. Montana Lookouts - Forest Fire Lookout Association, firelookout.org, 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.