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Fire lookout · Lewis & Clark County, Montana

Sentinel Mountain

An L-4 cab built about 1933 on a Bob Marshall Wilderness summit and abandoned in the mid-1950s; a 1937 season is documented in a Montana newspaper.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. The cab was abandoned in the mid-1950s and is gone. No source describes what remains on the summit.

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
1933
Height
Unknown
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Flathead National Forest
Land
Federal land
Location
Lewis & Clark County, Montana
Coordinates
47.38500, −113.05253
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-mt-sentinel-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 a typical height for a lookout like it.

Downloads about 3.8 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. 1933 BuiltL-4 cab, constructed about 1933Source: firelookout.com
  2. 1937 StaffedSeasonal lookout occupied through the 1937 summer, per a 1937 newspaper articleSource: montanalookouts.weebly.com
  3. No record between 1937 and 1955
  4. 1955 AbandonedSource says abandoned in the mid-1950s; 1955 is an approximate yearSource: firelookout.com
  5. 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.

Sentinel Mountain lies inside the Bob Marshall Wilderness, about 24 miles northeast of Seeley Lake, on the Flathead National Forest in Lewis and Clark County.1 The summit was first home to a camp set up in the 1920s, and an L-4 cab was built there about 1933.1

A 1937 article from The Ekalaka Eagle, reprinted on a Montana lookout site, describes one season on the mountain.2 A Carter County high school student reached the lookout after a 70-mile airplane trip from Kalispell and a 10-mile pack-train ride from the Big Prairie ranger station.2 The cabin was a 14-by-14 building, and he carried water up from a stream 2 1/4 miles down the mountain.2 The article also said the season was unusually quiet for fires.2

The cab was abandoned in the mid-1950s, and the Fire Lookout site says it is now gone.1 The Forest Fire Lookout Association's Montana list also marks the site as gone.3

No source we found describes what remains on the summit today, or how the site is reached now.

  1. Sentinel Mtn. Fire Lookout Cabin, firelookout.com (Rex Kamstra), https://www.firelookout.com/mt/sentinel.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Sentinel Mountain, Forest Lookouts, western US (Ron Kemnow), quoting The Ekalaka Eagle, September 1937, https://montanalookouts.weebly.com/sentinel-mountain.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  3. Lookout list, Montana, 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. FOREST LOOKOUTS -- western US (Ron Kemnow's weebly sites) 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
  4. Firefinder research Gave us: summary, design, 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.