Fire lookout · Flathead County, Montana
Riverside
A 1934 30-foot pole L-4 tower in the Flathead National Forest; its page says Hungry Horse Reservoir submerged the site, a date that conflicts with the dam history.
- Gone
- Access unknown
- Verified
Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. The lookout page says Hungry Horse Reservoir submerged 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 L-4 towerThe design: L-4
- Built of
- Not recorded
- Built
- 1934
- Height
- 30 ft (9.1 m)
- Elevation
- Unknown
- Agency
- Flathead National Forest
- Land
- Unknown
- Location
- Flathead County, Montana
- Coordinates
- 48.28049, −113.85860
- Registers
- Not on a lookout register
- This entry
- VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
- Firefinder id
us-mt-riverside
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
- 1934 Built30-foot pole L-4 tower, per the lookout page.Source: firelookout.com
- No record between 1934 and 1950
- 1950 EventPage says the site was submerged by the reservoir and gone in 1950. The Park Service dates dam completion to 1953, so the dates conflict.Source: 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.
A 30-foot pole tower that the lookout's page calls an L-4 went up at Riverside in 1934.1 The site lies in the Flathead National Forest, about 12 miles southeast of Hungry Horse, in Flathead County.1
The page says rising water from Hungry Horse Reservoir covered the site, and it dates the loss to 1950.1 The Forest Fire Lookout Association's Montana list also marks the tower as gone.2
Those dates conflict with the dam's history. The Park Service dates the completion of Hungry Horse Dam to 1953, which falls after the 1950 date on the lookout page.3 The same history says the reservoir flooded one fire lookout tower, which the Bureau of Reclamation rebuilt at another site, but it does not say which tower that was.3
No source describes what, if anything, remains of the site today. If the lookout page is right, the site now lies under the reservoir.1 No source says whether the spot is open to the public.
- Riverside Fire Lookout Tower, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/mt/riverside.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
- Montana lookout list, Forest Fire Lookout Association, https://firelookout.org/lookouts/us/mt/ (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
- Montana: Hungry Horse Dam, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/articles/montana-hungry-horse-dam.htm (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
- Montana: Hungry Horse Dam (National Park Service) (opens another site)
- FFLA Montana lookout list (firelookout.org) (opens another site)
- Riverside 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.