Journals ...

Back in the late 80s, I spent a couple of long seasons working as a historian for the Park Service up in Glacier.  One of my main projects was to finish an inventory of government-owned historic buildings in the park, so I spent lots of time visiting backcountry patrol cabins and reading about the park's history.  It was a great job.

There are still nine historic fire lookouts on Glacier's building inventory, so the job gave me the chance to do some in-depth research on lookout history ... and I was pretty quickly hooked on the subject.  Glacier's lookouts are relatively well-documented, and the park archives has an extensive collection of the handwritten logbooks that were kept by the lookouts in decades past.  I spent lots of after-hours time reading those journals, vicariously experiencing lookout life of the past.

The contents of the old logbooks varies a lot, of course -- some are just perfunctory readings of weather and fire observations, but others are true personal journals, and a lot of those are pretty fascinating.  Here are a couple sample pages from the latter category ... these were written by a guy named Howie Clark, who staffed Glacier's Porcupine Ridge Lookout in the Sumer of 1963:

In the entries, "Willy" refers to Willy Colony, who was the Goat Haunt subdristict ranger back then.  Willy and his wife Joe were Porcupine Ridge's primary contacts with the outside world.  Roger was likely the seasonal fire guard who also lived at the ranger station.