Sunny afternoons ...

 I made it to a couple other drive-to lookouts when I was a kid, but the first real backcountry lookouts I visited were the ones in Glacier National Park ... and they're still some of my favorite lookout sites.  I spent six summers working for the park's concessionaire at Lake McDonald Lodge, and my friends and I hiked the park every chance that we could.  We had great adventures trekking to a half-dozen or so of the park's lookouts.

Lake McDonald employees can look up from the lodge grounds and see the distant outline of the Mount Brown lookout against the horizon -- 5-1/2 trail miles away, and 4,200 feet up.  It's one of the tougher trails in the park, and making it to the lookout was something of a badge of honor for lodge employees.  Our first attempt to make the climb ended in failure, but I've made it up there several times since, and even got to spend the night there once.

There are always a couple resident mountain goats at the lookout, but otherwise it's a quiet place ... the catwalk is a perfect place to doze in the sun on a warm summer afternoon.  I think I took this shot way back in the summer of 1981.