Fire lookout · San Miguel County, New Mexico
Rosilla Peak
Also known as Rosilla
San Miguel County site listed under the Santa Fe NF; a 1989 survey photo dated 1937 shows an L-4 or L-5 log lookout house, probably built in the early to mid 1930s; FFLA lists the site as gone.
- Gone
- Access unknown
- Verified
Gone: The lookout no longer stands. Only the site is left. FFLA lists the site as gone, with no date; no account of its removal found
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
- Type
- Ground-level cabL-4 or L-5 log lookout house (photographed 1937; survey caption says it probably was built in the early to mid 1930s)The designs: L-4, L-5
- Built of
- Not recorded
- Built
- Unknown
- Height
- Unknown
- Elevation
- Unknown
- Agency
- Santa Fe National Forest
- Land
- Federal land
- Location
- San Miguel County, New Mexico
- Coordinates
- 35.73233, −105.62601
- Registers
- Not on a lookout register
- This entry
- VerifiedResearched, then checked independently. Updated 10 Oct 2026.
- Firefinder id
us-nm-rosilla-peak
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 3.4 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
- 1937 EventPhotograph date from the 1989 survey caption; a photo date, not a build date. The same caption gives a probable build range of the early to mid 1930s.Source: archive.org
- 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 (opens another site) (click the spot there to list them, with dates and downloads).
Story
Researched 10 Oct 2026, fact-checked.
Rosilla Peak is in San Miguel County, and the Forest Fire Lookout Association's New Mexico list shows its site as a ground site that is now gone.1 The list gives the site's coordinates as 35.73233, -105.62601.1 The Forest Lookouts website files the lookout under the Santa Fe National Forest.2
A 1989 Forest Service survey of the region's lookouts includes a photograph of a Rosilla lookout house. Its caption describes a house of the L-4 or L-5 log type, photographed in 1937, and says the house probably was constructed in the early- to mid-1930s.3 That places a lookout house at Rosilla by 1937, the year of the photograph.
No source I read describes what remains at the site today, or whether the public can reach it.
- Forest Fire Lookouts - New Mexico (by Ron Kemnow), Forest Fire Lookout Association, https://firelookout.org/lookouts/us/nm/ (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
- Rosilla - Forest Lookouts, Ron Kemnow, https://westlookouts.weebly.com/rosilla.html (accessed 2026-10-10). ↩
- 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
- Forest Fire Lookout Association (FFLA) - US lookout lists (opens another site) 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
- FOREST LOOKOUTS -- western US (Ron Kemnow's weebly sites) (opens another site) 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
- 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
- Lookouts in the Southwestern Region, Cultural Resources Management Report No. 8 (USDA Forest Service, Southwestern Region (Internet Archive copy)) (opens another site)
- FFLA New Mexico lookout list (firelookout.org) (opens another site)
- Rosilla on Forest Lookouts, western US (Ron Kemnow) (opens another site)
Firefinder takes facts (places, dates, numbers) from these sources and writes its own words. See all sources and licences.