FirefinderFire lookouts of the US

Fire lookout · Flathead County, Montana

Meadow Mountain

1936 L-4 cabin on a ground site about 10 miles SE of Spotted Bear Ranger Station, Flathead NF; listed Gone; no source describes 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
Ground-level cabL-4 cabThe design: L-4
Built of
Not recorded
Built
1936
Height
Unknown
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
U.S. Forest Service (Flathead National Forest)
Land
Unknown
Location
Flathead County, Montana
Coordinates
47.81893, −113.37557
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-mt-meadow-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 4.3 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. 1936 BuiltListed as a 1936 L-4 cab.Source: 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.

Meadow Mountain rises to 7,162 feet in the Flathead National Forest, about ten miles southeast of the Spotted Bear Ranger Station in Flathead County, Montana.1 The county listing places it at 47.81893 north and 113.37557 west.2

The firelookout.com entry dates its lookout cabin to 1936 and calls it an L-4 cab.1 The National Historic Lookout Register describes that design as a 14-by-14-foot frame cab meant for living in.3 The register's notes, citing Ray Kresek's book, place the L-4's origin in 1929, when it was still a prototype.3

The Forest Fire Lookout Association's county list gives the site type as Ground rather than Tower and marks it Gone.2 The firelookout.com entry also marks the cabin Gone.1

No source describes what, if anything, remains at the site today, or whether the public can reach it.

  1. Meadow Mtn. Fire Lookout Cabin, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/mt/meadowmtn368.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Montana Lookouts (by County), Forest Fire Lookout Association, https://firelookout.org/lookouts/us/mt/mt-co/ (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  3. Definitions, National Historic Lookout Register, http://nhlr.org/definitions/ (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.