FirefinderFire lookouts of the US

Fire lookout · Flathead County, Montana

Helmet (3 Forks)

Flathead County, MT tower on the Flathead National Forest: a 10-foot L-4 tower built in 1937, abandoned 1953, now gone. Sources say nothing about the site today.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left.

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 tower10-foot L-4 tower, a quarter mile north of the summit (firelookout.com wording)The design: L-4
Built of
Not recorded
Built
1937
Height
Unknown
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Flathead National Forest
Land
Federal land
Location
Flathead County, Montana
Coordinates
48.08780, −113.30337
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-mt-helmet-3-forks

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 4.1 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. 1937 Builtfirelookout.com: 1937: 10' L-4 tower 1/4 mile north of summitSource: firelookout.com
  2. No record between 1937 and 1953
  3. 1953 Abandonedfirelookout.com: Abandoned 1953Source: 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.

The Helmet (3 Forks) lookout stood in Flathead County, Montana, 19 miles southeast of Essex, on the Flathead National Forest.1,2 The Forest Lookouts page gives its land-survey location as 27N-13W-17.2

Firelookout.com dates the site to 1937, when a 10-foot L-4 tower went up a quarter mile north of the summit.1 A Sanders County history says the L-4 cab was, by a wide margin, the favorite live-in lookout design.3 It describes that design in general as a 14-by-14-foot wood-frame cab that could sit on the ground or atop a tower.3

Firelookout.com says the tower was abandoned in 1953 and is now gone.1 The statewide list also marks it as gone.4

The sources we read do not describe what, if anything, remains at the site, or whether it is open to visitors.1,2,4 Check with the Flathead National Forest before you go.

  1. Helmet (3 Forks) Fire Lookout Tower, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/mt/helmet3forks.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Helmet (3 forks), Montana Forest Lookouts (Rex's Fire Lookout Page), https://montanalookouts.weebly.com/helmet-3-forks.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  3. Remember When?, Sanders County Ledger, https://www.scledger.net/story/2021/08/19/communities/remember-when/6635.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  4. 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.