FirefinderFire lookouts of the US

Fire lookout · Flathead County, Montana

Martin Divide

Flathead County, MT ground lookout: a 1930 wooden L-4 cab on the Flathead NF, abandoned in the 1940s and listed as gone; no source describes the site today.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. Listed gone by firelookout.com and the Montana list; no source describes what remains today

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 cab10' wooden L-4 cabThe design: L-4
Built of
Not recorded
Built
1930
Height
Unknown
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Flathead National Forest
Land
Federal land
Location
Flathead County, Montana
Coordinates
48.57015, −114.73683
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-mt-martin-divide

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 4.3 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. 1930 BuiltWooden L-4 cab listed at 10 feet (firelookout.com)Source: firelookout.com
  2. 1940 AbandonedSource says 'Abandoned 1940s'; the year is the decade onlySource: 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.

The Martin Divide lookout stood in the Flathead National Forest, about 15 miles south-southeast of Fortine in Flathead County, Montana, at an elevation of 5,604 feet.1,2

Firelookout.com dates the lookout to 1930 and describes it as a wooden L-4 cab listed at 10 feet.1 The Montana list kept by the Forest Fire Lookout Association places the site at 48.57015, -114.73683 and classes it as a ground lookout.3

The same page says the cab was abandoned in the 1940s.1 Both the firelookout.com page and the Montana list now mark the lookout as gone.1,3

None of the sources we read describes what, if anything, remains at the site today, or whether the public can reach it. Firelookout.com and the Forest Lookouts page both place the site in the Flathead National Forest.1,2

  1. Martin Divide Fire Lookout Cabin, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/mt/martindivide.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Martin Divide - FOREST LOOKOUTS, Forest Lookouts (Montana), https://montanalookouts.weebly.com/martin-divide.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.