FirefinderFire lookouts of the US

Fire lookout · Lincoln County, Montana

Keno Mountain

Kootenai NF 45-foot pole tower with an L-4 cab, built 1936 per firelookout.com; the page and the FFLA Montana list both say it is gone.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. firelookout.com says it has been gone for quite some time and leaves the end date open. The FFLA list says Tower Gone. No source describes what 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
Cab on a tower45-foot pole tower with an L-4 cabThe design: L-4
Built of
Not recorded
Built
1936
Height
Unknown
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Kootenai National Forest
Land
Unknown
Location
Lincoln County, Montana
Coordinates
48.83777, −116.03638
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-mt-keno-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 4.0 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. 1936 Builtfirelookout.com says built in 1936Source: firelookout.com
  2. TodayGoneThe lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. When it came down is not recorded.

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.

Keno Mountain's tower stood in the Kootenai National Forest, about 15 miles west of Yaak, in Lincoln County, Montana.1 The page gives its elevation as 6,542 feet.1

The firelookout.com page says it was built in 1936 as a 45-foot pole tower with an L-4 cab.1 L-4 is the name for a 14-by-14-foot frame cab that a lookout could live in, and the register notes these cabs could be placed on top of tall fire towers.2

The page leaves the end date open with a question mark, and says the tower has long since disappeared.1 The Forest Fire Lookout Association's Montana list also marks it as a gone tower.3

We found no source that describes what, if anything, remains at the site today, or whether visitors may go there.

  1. Keno Mtn. Fire Lookout Tower, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/mt/kenomtn.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Definitions, National Historic Lookout Register, http://nhlr.org/definitions/ (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. 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.