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Fire lookout · Lincoln County, Montana

Turner Mountain

Lincoln County, MT lookout: camp in 1915, tree-top platform by 1929, 65' steel Aermotor tower built 1934, gone by 1963; no source describes the site today.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. Tower and cabin gone by 1963 per firelookout.com; the Forest Fire Lookout Association list also marks it as a tower that is gone. No source 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
Gone
Type
Cab on a tower65' steel Aermotor tower with a log cabin for living quartersThe design: Aermotor
Built of
Not recorded
Built
1934
Height
65 ft (19.8 m)
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Kootenai National Forest
Land
Federal land
Location
Lincoln County, Montana
Coordinates
48.60955, −115.65122
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-mt-turner-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.

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Or see what it could see on the map: the ground in its line of sight.

History

Then and now

  1. 1915 EventFirst used as a camp, with a patrol point atop Mt. Tom 2 miles southSource: firelookout.com
  2. 1929 EventArchie Murchie's oral history describes a tent and a platform built on a cut-off tree trunk, braced to the tree and rimmed by a handrail; the structure predates the 1934 towerSource: montanalookouts.weebly.com
  3. 1934 Built65' steel Aermotor tower with log cabin living quartersSource: firelookout.com
  4. No record between 1934 and 1963
  5. 1963 RemovedTower and cabin gone by 1963; the page does not give the causeSource: firelookout.com
  6. 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.

Turner Mountain is in Lincoln County, Montana, about 15 miles north-northwest of Libby, on the Kootenai National Forest.1 The record starts in 1915, when the site was a camp; a patrol point on Mt. Tom, two miles south, was tied to it.1

Before the steel tower, the summit had a different kind of lookout.2 Archie Murchie, who was with the Forest Service from 1929 to 1965, recalled a tent with a dirt floor and a platform built on a cut-off tree trunk, braced down the side of the tree and rimmed by a handrail.2 In a strong wind, he said, the whole structure swayed quite a bit.2

The steel tower came later. A 65-foot steel Aermotor tower, with a log cabin for living quarters, went up in 1934.1 The tower and cabin were gone by 1963.1 The Forest Fire Lookout Association's Montana list also marks Turner Mountain as a tower that is gone.3

Today, no source we read describes what, if anything, remains on the summit, and none gives the site's access. The lookout page names the Kootenai National Forest and gives the elevation as 5,952 feet.1 Anyone planning a visit should ask the forest about access first.

  1. Turner Mtn. Fire Lookout Tower, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/mt/turnermtn.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Turner Mountain, Forest Lookouts (quotes Archie Murchie's oral history, The Free Life of a Ranger), https://montanalookouts.weebly.com/turner-mountain.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  3. Montana Lookouts, Forest Fire Lookout Association, https://firelookout.org/lookouts/us/mt/ (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩

Photos

View photo at firelookout.com
Turner Mtn. in 1953 (1953)Photo: Fire Lookout Museum · not stated on the page · source

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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, height, status, agency, dates, photos, 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.