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Fire lookout · Sandoval County, New Mexico

Red Top

Sandoval County site on the Cuba Ranger District: a 1933 L-4 lookout house, replaced by a trailer per a 1989 survey; FFLA lists the site as gone.

Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. FFLA lists the site as gone, with no date; the 1989 survey describes a trailer lookout on it

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 cab14-foot-square wood-frame L-4 type lookout house, built 1933; a trailer lookout laterThe design: L-4
Built of
Not recorded
Built
1933
Height
Unknown
Elevation
Unknown
Agency
Santa Fe National Forest, Cuba Ranger District
Land
Federal land
Location
Sandoval County, New Mexico
Coordinates
35.92691, −106.81226
Registers
Not on a lookout register
This entry
VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
Firefinder id
us-nm-red-top

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 3.1 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 Built14-foot-square wood-frame L-4 type lookout house (survey text and figure caption)Source: archive.org
  2. No record between 1933 and 1989
  3. 1989 Condition assessmentThe 1989 survey describes the trailer lookout and does not recommend it for National Register eligibilitySource: archive.org
  4. 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 (click the spot there to list them, with dates and downloads).

Story

Researched 10 Oct 2026, fact-checked.

Red Top is in Sandoval County, on the Cuba Ranger District of the Santa Fe National Forest.1,2 The lookout there began as a 14-foot-square, wood-frame house of the L-4 type, built in 1933 according to a 1989 Forest Service survey.2

The survey says a trailer apparently replaced the house sometime in the 1960s, and it does not know when the trailer was placed.2 In 1989 the survey called that trailer the only trailer lookout in use on the Santa Fe National Forest, and it did not recommend the trailer for National Register eligibility.2

The Forest Fire Lookout Association's New Mexico list marks the site as gone.1 It codes the site as a ground site and does not mention the trailer that the 1989 survey describes there.1,2

No source I found describes what, if anything, remains at the site today, or whether visitors can reach it.

  1. Forest Fire Lookouts - New Mexico (by Ron Kemnow), Forest Fire Lookout Association, https://firelookout.org/lookouts/us/nm/ (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
  2. Lookouts in the Southwestern Region, USDA Forest Service Southwestern Region, Cultural Resources Management Report No. 8 (1989), https://archive.org/download/CAT10400086/CAT10400086.pdf (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. 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
  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.