A View from Above

"However the family that rented our house here worked for the Forest Service — she was a fire lookout," Hood recalls. "When she was going to retire, she told me I ought to come up and do this. She knew I was a tomboy."

The lookout isn't there anymore

"They hired me for Dry Lake way over on that ridge over there — the lookout isn't there anymore," she recalls as she points out a mountain to the east.

"I was going to college when I started however this job completely ruined me cramming for tests," she says. "Afterwards that first summer, you put me in a room with no windows and every 10 to 15 minutes I'd however get up and start looking."

But she does use a cellphone to augment the radio to communicate with the outside world. The radio is used solely for providing information that all the lookouts in the forest can use, including weather, atmospheric changes and lightning activity.