FirefinderFire lookouts of the US

Fire lookout · Flathead/Powell/ Lewis & Clark County, Montana

Haystack Mountain

Haystack Mountain near Seeley Lake, MT: a 1930s L-4 cab, now gone. The two lookout pages name different forests; no source describes the site today.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. Cab gone. No source we read describes what, if anything, 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
Unknown
Height
Unknown
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Deerlodge National Forest
Land
Federal land
Location
Flathead/Powell/ Lewis & Clark County, Montana
Coordinates
47.59434, −113.14360
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-mt-haystack-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 3.6 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

No dated events recorded yet: nobody has recorded when this lookout was built or when it came down.

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.

Haystack Mountain, about 30 miles northeast of Seeley Lake, once carried a fire lookout cab.1 Rex's Fire Lookout Page dates the L-4 cab to the 1930s, gives the elevation as 8,376 feet, and marks the site as gone.1

The two lookout pages disagree on the forest. Rex's page names the Flathead and Lewis & Clark National Forests, while the Forest Lookouts page lists the Deerlodge National Forest, with the reference 21N-12W-9, and marks the site as removed.1,2

The Forest Fire Lookout Association's Montana list records the site as a Ground-type structure that is gone.3

No source we read describes what, if anything, remains at the site, or whether it is open to visitors.1,2,3

  1. Haystack Mtn. Fire Lookout Cabin, firelookout.com (Rex's Fire Lookout Page), https://www.firelookout.com/mt/haystackmtn368.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Haystack Mountain, Forest Lookouts, https://montanalookouts.weebly.com/haystack-mountain1.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  3. Montana fire lookouts 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, 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.