Fire lookout · Lincoln County, Montana
Pulpit Mountain
30-foot pole tower built in 1934 in the Kootenai National Forest, Lincoln County; in ruins by 1948 and listed as gone.
- Gone
- Access unknown
- Verified
Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. In ruins by 1948; no source read describes what remains at the site
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
- Cab on a tower30-foot pole tower, originally with an L-4 cabThe design: L-4
- Built of
- Not recorded
- Built
- 1934
- Height
- 30 ft (9.1 m)
- Elevation
- Unknown
- Agency
- Kootenai National Forest
- Land
- Unknown
- Location
- Lincoln County, Montana
- Coordinates
- 48.52886, −115.78855
- Registers
- Not on a lookout register
- This entry
- VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
- Firefinder id
us-mt-pulpit-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 its recorded height.
Downloads about 4.2 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
- 1934 Built30-foot pole tower with an L-4 cab, per firelookout.comSource: firelookout.com
- 1948 EventIn ruins by 1948 per firelookout.com; no demolition or removal date is givenSource: firelookout.com
- 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 (opens another site) (click the spot there to list them, with dates and downloads).
Story
Researched 10 Oct 2026, fact-checked.
Pulpit Mountain's lookout was a 30-foot pole tower, built in 1934 in Lincoln County, Montana, in the Kootenai National Forest.1,2 The firelookout.com page says the tower originally carried an L-4 cab on top.1 The county list gives its location as 32N-33W-23.2
The Forest Fire Lookout Association list marks the tower as gone and gives its coordinates.3 The firelookout.com page says it was in ruins by 1948, and its heading reads "R.I.P. 1934-1948."1 That page is a short entry with a photo credited to the Fire Lookout Museum, so the 1934 and 1948 dates rest on this one source alone.1
No source we read describes what, if anything, remains at the site today, or whether the site is open to visitors.
- Pulpit Mtn. Fire Lookout Tower, firelookout.com (Rex Kamstra), https://www.firelookout.com/mt/pulpitmtn.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
- Lincoln County - Forest Lookouts, montanalookouts.weebly.com, https://montanalookouts.weebly.com/lincoln-county.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
- Montana Lookouts, Forest Fire Lookout Association, https://firelookout.org/lookouts/us/mt/ (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
- 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
- Lincoln County - Forest Lookouts (montanalookouts.weebly.com) (opens another site)
- FFLA Montana lookout list (firelookout.org) (opens another site)
- Pulpit Mtn. on firelookout.com (Rex Kamstra) (opens another site)
Firefinder takes facts (places, dates, numbers) from these sources and writes its own words. See all sources and licences.