FirefinderFire lookouts of the US

Fire lookout · Flathead County, Montana

Forster Mountain

Flathead County, MT ground site on Forster Mountain: L-4 cab dated 1940 and abandoned 1948 per firelookout.com; listed gone; no source describes the site today.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. firelookout.com says 'Abandoned 1948. Gone.'; the Forest Fire Lookout Association lists it as Ground, 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
Ground-level cabL-4 cab half a mile south of the summitThe design: L-4
Built of
Not recorded
Built
1940
Height
Unknown
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Flathead National Forest
Land
Federal land
Location
Flathead County, Montana
Coordinates
48.18753, −113.49350
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-mt-forster-mountain

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 4.2 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

  1. 1940 Builtfirelookout.com dates the L-4 cab to 1940Source: firelookout.com
  2. 1948 Abandonedfirelookout.com: 'Abandoned 1948.'Source: firelookout.com
  3. 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.

Forster Mountain was a lookout in Flathead County, Montana, about eight miles southeast of Essex.1 The Forest Lookouts page places it in the Flathead National Forest and gives its legal location as 28N-15W-16.2 Firelookout.com lists its elevation as 7,736 feet.1

Firelookout.com calls it a fire lookout cabin. It dates the L-4 cab, sited a half mile south of the summit, to 1940, and says the cab was abandoned in 1948.1

The Forest Fire Lookout Association classes the site as a ground site, marks it gone, and gives its coordinates as 48.18753, -113.49350.3

No source we read describes what, if anything, remains on the mountain today, or whether the public can reach it.1,2,3 If you plan to look, ask the Flathead National Forest first.

  1. Forster Mtn. Fire Lookout Cabin, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/mt/forstermtn.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Forster Mountain, Forest Lookouts, https://montanalookouts.weebly.com/forster-mountain.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  3. Montana Lookouts, 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.