FirefinderFire lookouts of the US

Fire lookout · Flathead County, Montana

Moran Peak

Flathead County lookout site with an L-4 cab dated 1930 and listed abandoned and gone; a 1912 phone-line item mentions a lookout man. No source describes the site today.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. Cab listed as abandoned and gone per firelookout.com; no source we read describes what remains at the site 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 cabL-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
48.73555, −114.41995
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-mt-moran-peak

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. 1912 StaffedLookout man stationed on Moran mountain, with a telephone line to the Moran ranger station (The Columbian, quoted on Forest Lookouts)Source: montanalookouts.weebly.com
  2. No record between 1912 and 1930
  3. 1930 BuiltL-4 cab, dated 1930 by firelookout.comSource: firelookout.com
  4. 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.

Moran Peak is a lookout site in Flathead County, about 7 miles west-southwest of Polebridge.1 It is listed under the Flathead National Forest, at an elevation of 7,404 feet.1 Firelookout.com dates its L-4 cab to 1930 and marks the lookout as abandoned and gone.1

A 1912 item, quoted on the Forest Lookouts site from The Columbian, describes a lookout man stationed on "Moran mountain." We take that to mean this site.2 A telephone line linked him directly to the Moran ranger station.2 A second lookout about twenty miles north would send him the location of any fire.2

The Forest Fire Lookout Association's Montana list also marks the site as a ground lookout that is gone.3 The Forest Lookouts page carries a bare "Removed" label, with no date or reason given.2

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

  1. Moran Peak Fire Lookout Cabin, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/mt/moranpeak.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Moran Mountain - FOREST LOOKOUTS, Forest Lookouts, https://montanalookouts.weebly.com/moran-mountain.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  3. Montana lookout list, 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.