Fire lookout · Lewis & Clark County, Montana
Olson Peak
Lewis & Clark County fire lookout cab with an L-4 design from the 1930s, listed as gone; no source describes the site today.
- Gone
- Access unknown
- Verified
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
- Type
- Ground-level cabL-4 cabThe design: L-4
- Built of
- Not recorded
- Built
- Unknown
- Height
- Unknown
- Elevation
- Unknown
- Agency
- Helena National Forest
- Land
- Federal land
- Location
- Lewis & Clark County, Montana
- Coordinates
- 47.21687, −112.76182
- Registers
- Not on a lookout register
- This entry
- VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
- Firefinder id
us-mt-olson-peak-2
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 4.1 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.
Firelookout.com calls Olson Peak a fire lookout cabin, and says its L-4 cab dated from the 1930s and is now gone.1 The site lies roughly 26 miles southwest of Augusta, in Lewis & Clark County, Montana, at 8,881 feet.1
The forest is listed two ways. Firelookout.com names both the Lolo and Helena National Forests for the site, while Forest Lookouts names only the Helena National Forest, at township 17 north, range 9 west, section 21.1,2
No source checked describes what, if anything, remains of the cab or the summit today, or whether the public can visit.
- Olson Peak Fire Lookout Cabin, Rex's Fire Lookout Page (firelookout.com), https://www.firelookout.com/mt/olsonpeak369.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
- Olson Peak, Forest Lookouts, western US (Ron Kemnow), https://montanalookouts.weebly.com/olson-peak.html (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
- FOREST LOOKOUTS -- western US (Ron Kemnow's weebly sites) (opens another site) 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
- 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
- FFLA Montana lookout list (firelookout.org) (opens another site)
- Olson Peak on firelookout.com (Rex Kamstra) (opens another site)
- Olson Peak on Forest Lookouts, western US (Ron Kemnow) (opens another site)
- firelookout.com page (Rex Kamstra) (opens another site)
Firefinder takes facts (places, dates, numbers) from these sources and writes its own words. See all sources and licences.