FirefinderFire lookouts of the US

Fire lookout · Flathead County, Montana

Point 56

Flathead NF cabin site described as an L-4 cab from the 1930s; abandoned and listed gone; no source describes what remains today.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. Described as abandoned and gone; no source 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
Unknown
Height
Unknown
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Flathead National Forest
Land
Unknown
Location
Flathead County, Montana
Coordinates
47.66410, −113.47460
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-mt-point-56

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

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 (click the spot there to list them, with dates and downloads).

Story

Researched 10 Oct 2026, fact-checked.

Point 56 was a fire lookout cabin in the Flathead National Forest, six miles northwest of Big Salmon Lake in Flathead County, Montana.1 The site's listed elevation is 7,483 feet.1 The firelookout.com page dates the cabin only to the 1930s and calls it an L-4 cab.1 Working with the U.S. Forest Service, the Forest Fire Lookout Association completed a national inventory that found more than 8,000 lookouts in 49 states at one time.2

The Forest Fire Lookout Association's Montana list files Point 56 under Ground and places it at 47.66410, -113.47460.3 The firelookout.com page says the cabin was abandoned and is now gone, and the list agrees that it is gone.1,3

No source we read describes what, if anything, remains at the site today. Anyone thinking of visiting should ask the Flathead National Forest about access before going.

  1. Point 56 Fire Lookout Cabin, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/mt/point56.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Welcome to the FFLOS, Former Fire Lookout Sites, http://firetower.org/ (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. 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

Firefinder takes facts (places, dates, numbers) from these sources and writes its own words. See all sources and licences.