Fire lookout · Lewis & Clark County, Montana
Hilger
1950s L-4 cab on the Helena National Forest north-northeast of Helena, Montana; abandoned and gone, with no dated end.
- Gone
- Access unknown
- Verified
Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. Abandoned and gone; no source describes the site now.
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
- Type
- Ground-level cabL-4 cabThe design: L-4
- Built of
- Not recorded
- Built
- Unknown
- Height
- Unknown
- Elevation
- Unknown
- Agency
- Helena National Forest
- Land
- Unknown
- Location
- Lewis & Clark County, Montana
- Coordinates
- 46.77098, −111.93392
- Registers
- Not on a lookout register
- This entry
- VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
- Firefinder id
us-mt-hilger
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
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 (opens another site) (click the spot there to list them, with dates and downloads).
Story
Researched 10 Oct 2026, fact-checked.
Hilger was a lookout on the Helena National Forest in Lewis and Clark County, Montana, about 12 miles north-northeast of Helena.1,2 The firelookout.com page dates it to the 1950s and calls it an L-4 cab.1 The Forest Fire Lookout Association lists it as a ground lookout rather than a tower.3 The page gives its elevation as 5,287 feet.1 The association's list places it at 46.771 N, 111.934 W.3
The same page says it was abandoned and is now gone.1 The association's Montana list also marks it as gone.3
No source I read describes what, if anything, remains at the site today, or whether the public can visit it.
- Hilger Fire Lookout Cabin, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/mt/hilger.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
- Hilger, Forest Lookouts, Montana Forest Lookouts (montanalookouts.weebly.com), https://montanalookouts.weebly.com/hilger.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
- Montana Lookouts, Forest Fire Lookout Association, https://firelookout.org/lookouts/us/mt/ (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
Sources
- Forest Fire Lookout Association (FFLA) - US lookout lists (opens another site) 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
- firelookout.com -- Rex Kamstra's Forest Fire Lookout Page (opens another site) 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
- Firefinder research Gave us: summary, design, status, agency, 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
- Hilger - Forest Lookouts (Montana Forest Lookouts (montanalookouts.weebly.com)) (opens another site)
- FFLA Montana lookout list (firelookout.org) (opens another site)
- Hilger on firelookout.com (Rex Kamstra) (opens another site)
Firefinder takes facts (places, dates, numbers) from these sources and writes its own words. See all sources and licences.