Forest service kid ...

 I grew up in a Forest Service family.  My Dad started his career doing cartography at the regional office in Ogden, Utah, and then he put himself through college so he could start working his way up the career ladder.  In the Forest Service, that meant a succession of transfers, so a lot of my childhood was spent in a series of small western towns that happened to have Forest Service offices.  There were a couple of years on the Challis, up in Idaho; then a couple years in Utah, on the Dixie; and then three years on the old Bridger National Forest in Kemmerer, Wyoming.  I mostly loved the itinerant nature of the life.

It was a good fit for my family, because my parents loved the outdoors, and they loved exploring anonymous backroads and forgotten ghost towns.  I lived for that, too, even as a kid ... and I still feel that way today.  My Mom would pack a picnic lunch and we'd pile into the family's old International Travelall, and we'd head off for the day to follow some random forest road that none of us had ever seen before.

My first real fire lookout memory came from one of those trips ... a long, dirt-road drive out of Challis, Idaho when I was 8 years old.  The Travelall made short work of the hair-raising, scree-covered Jeep road to Twin Peaks Lookout, and we were invited inside for a tour.  It was pretty exciting for me to be in there, though I imagine the young man staffing the place was a little nervous about having somebody from the Supervisor's Office show up unannounced.

From Twin Peaks, we kept going on a narrow, ridgetop road, flanked on both sides by what was then the Idaho Primitive Area.  We stopped to see the old lookout building at Fly Creek Point, where my Dad took the first picture of me at a fire lookout.  I'm the guy on the left:

We drove all the way to the end of the road, where there was a trailhead sign pointing the way to Sleeping Deer Lookout.  We didn't do the hike, though I remember really, really wanting to ... I guess that day must have officially started my lookout infatuation.

I've never been back to Twin Peaks; my last trip up that way was in a Corolla, and it just couldn't handle the road.  That one is still staffed today, and it's the highest-altitude operating lookout in the Pacific Northwest.  Fly Creek Point was burned down by a typically-disrespectful hunter in 1993.  Sleeping Deer Lookout is still out there, though I still haven't gotten to hike that trail.