FirefinderFire lookouts of the US

Fire lookout · Lincoln County, Montana

Weigal Mountain

Kootenai NF tower in Lincoln County, MT: a 1938 50-foot pole L-4 tower, destroyed 1960 per firelookout.com; listed gone. No source describes the site today.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. Listed gone by the Forest Fire Lookout Association; firelookout.com says the tower was destroyed in 1960. 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 tower50-foot pole L-4 towerThe design: L-4
Built of
Not recorded
Built
1938
Height
Unknown
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Kootenai National Forest
Land
Unknown
Location
Lincoln County, Montana
Coordinates
48.42742, −115.04264
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-mt-weigal-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 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

  1. 1938 Built50-foot pole L-4 tower, per firelookout.comSource: firelookout.com
  2. 1940 FireOne-acre fire at the head of Cripple Horse Creek, cause not given, which the memoir associates with the Weigal Mountain lookout; the memoir places it within its account of a bad July 1940 fire seasonSource: npshistory.com
  3. No record between 1940 and 1960
  4. 1960 DestroyedDestroyed, per firelookout.com; cause not givenSource: 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.

Weigal Mountain is a former lookout site in the Kootenai National Forest, in Lincoln County, Montana, about 25 miles east of Libby.1,2 Firelookout.com gives its elevation as 5,765 feet.1

Firelookout.com dates the tower to 1938 and describes it as a 50-foot pole L-4 tower. It also says the lookout was never manned.1

A memoir by Forest Service employee Leon L. Lake implies that the Weigal Mtn. Lookout had a telephone line. Lake could not get a call through the lookout because lightning had damaged its phone, so he rode back to Boundary Station.3 The same account places a one-acre fire at the head of Cripple Horse Creek that the memoir associates with the Weigal Mountain lookout.3 The memoir places this episode within its account of a bad fire season in July 1940.3 It does not say who worked the lookout, so it neither confirms nor settles firelookout.com's statement that the lookout was never manned.1,3

Firelookout.com says the tower was destroyed in 1960.1 The Forest Fire Lookout Association lists it as gone.4

No source we read describes what remains at the site today, or whether the public may visit it.

  1. Weigal Mtn. Fire Lookout Tower, firelookout.com, https://www.firelookout.com/mt/weigalmtn.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Lincoln County - Forest Lookouts, Forest Lookouts (Rex's Fire Lookout Page), https://montanalookouts.weebly.com/lincoln-county.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  3. Early Days in the Forest Service (Volume 4), section by Leon L. Lake, npshistory.com, https://npshistory.com/publications/usfs/region/1/early-days/4/sec13.htm (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. 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.