FirefinderFire lookouts of the US

Fire lookout · Flathead County, Montana

Pinehill

Lolo NF tower in Flathead County: 50-ft L-4 dated 1940, destroyed 1962, listed as gone; no source describes the site today.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. Destroyed 1962 according to firelookout.com; the Montana list also marks the tower gone

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 tower50-foot L-4 towerThe design: L-4
Built of
Not recorded
Built
1940
Height
50 ft (15.2 m)
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Lolo National Forest
Land
Unknown
Location
Flathead County, Montana
Coordinates
47.95586, −114.87630
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-mt-pinehill

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 its recorded height.

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. 1940 BuiltListed for 1940 as a 50-foot L-4 tower; the listing does not use the word builtSource: firelookout.com
  2. No record between 1940 and 1962
  3. 1962 DestroyedDestroyed 1962 per firelookout.comSource: firelookout.com
  4. 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.

Pinehill was a lookout tower on the Lolo National Forest in Flathead County, Montana, about five miles south of McGregor Lake.1 Firelookout.com puts the site at 6,410 feet, roughly 1,954 meters.1 The Forest Fire Lookout Association's Montana list gives its coordinates as 47.95586 north and 114.87630 west.2

Firelookout.com dates a 50-foot L-4 tower here to 1940, about 15 meters tall.1 The same page says the tower was destroyed in 1962. If the 1940 date holds, it stood for about 22 years before that.1 The Montana list agrees that the tower is gone.2

Neither source describes what remains at the site today or whether the public can reach it, so check with the Lolo National Forest, which manages the land, before you go.1,2

  1. Pinehill Fire Lookout Tower, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/mt/pinehill.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Montana Lookouts (alphabetical 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. Firefinder research Gave us: summary, design, height, 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.