FirefinderFire lookouts of the US

Fire lookout · Sanders County, Montana

Taft Summit

Sanders County, MT: a 1909 pole tower on Taft Summit burned in the 1910 fire and fell into power lines; an L-4 tower followed; a crow's nest is reported still there.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. L-4 tower destroyed in the 1950s; firelookout.com says a crow's nest half a mile east is still there (undated); montanalookouts marks the site Removed

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 tower35-foot pole platform tower built 1909; an L-4 tower built in the 1930s (firelookout.com)The design: L-4
Built of
Not recorded
Built
1909
Height
Unknown
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Lolo National Forest
Land
Federal land
Location
Sanders County, Montana
Coordinates
47.47758, −115.55235
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-mt-taft-summit

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 3.7 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. 1909 Built35-foot pole platform tower constructed (firelookout.com)Source: firelookout.com
  2. 1910 BurnedTwo of the tower's legs burned in the Great Idaho Fire; the tower fell into adjacent Montana Power Company linesSource: firelookout.com
  3. 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.

Taft Summit lies seven miles east-northeast of Lookout Pass, in Sanders County, Montana, at an elevation of 6,280 feet.1 The site is on the Lolo National Forest.1,2

The first tower there was a 35-foot pole platform, built in 1909.1 The 1910 fire, which firelookout.com calls the Great Idaho Fire, burned about three million acres across northern Idaho and western Montana.1,3 Two of the tower's legs burned in that fire, and the tower fell into the Montana Power Company lines beside it.1

An L-4 tower went up there in the 1930s and was destroyed during the 1950s.1

The Forest Lookouts Montana page marks the site as removed and gives no date.2 The Forest Fire Lookout Association lists the tower as gone.4

Firelookout.com says a crow's nest about half a mile east is still there, though the page does not date that remark.1 I found no source describing the summit site today or whether the public can reach it.

  1. Taft Summit Fire Lookout Tower, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/mt/taftsummit.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Taft Summit, Forest Lookouts Montana, https://montanalookouts.weebly.com/taft-summit.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  3. The Great Fire of 1910, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_1910 (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  4. 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. 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.