Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, by Philip Connors (Harper Collins, 2011), is the latest in a series of classic memoirs (see "Related readings" below ) of well-known authors including Edward Abbey, Norman Maclean, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac, all of whom spent summers watching for forest fires. Their books represent some of the best nature writing in the past century. I have devoured them for several decades because I spent two glorious summers (1963 and '64) as a lookout in the wilds of northwest Montana.

In spring 2002, Connors quit his job as a copy editor at The Wall Street Journal in New York and moved to the Southwest. He has spent the past eight years, April through August, working as a fire lookout at the Apache Peak Lookout in the Gila National Forest, one of the nation's first designated wilderness areas. Most days he can "see a hundred miles in all directions."

He spends days watching for smoke with his dog, Alice, in a 7-by-7 lookout tower, 55 feet tall, 10,010 feet above sea level. Nights they get to sleep in the luxury of a cabin at ground level. (I didn't have this luxury; my husband and I stayed in the lookout day and night.)

Over the past century, the work of a lookout has changed little, except that 90 percent of lookout towers have been decommissioned and only a few hundred are still in use. Connors describes the unchanging qualifications to be a lookout:

• able to see fires, hear the radio, and respond when called;
  
• capable of extreme patience;
  
• one usable arm to cut wood;
  
• two usable legs for hiking to a remote post;
  
• the ability to keep oneself amused;
  
• tolerance for living in proximity to rodents; and
  
• a touch of pyromania, though only of the nonparticipatory variety.

Tools of the trade include "fancy binoculars" and an Osborne Firefinder, which enables the lookout to locate the fire, take an azimuth reading, and then have the site confirmed by other lookouts who can also see the smoke. A lookout has five duties: "report the weather each morning, answer the radio, relay messages when asked, call in smokes when they show, and keep an eye on fire behavior with the safety of crews in mind."

In Connors' eight years on the lookout, the Gila forest has averaged more than 200 wildfires each season. Several of these lightning-caused fires are allowed to burn for weeks or even months, sometimes over tens of thousands of acres. For many decades, experts have disagreed about which fires should be put out and which allowed to burn. In the Gila, firefighters still extinguish more than 90 percent of fires.

Connors divides his chapters by the months of the fire season—April to August—and describes both his and Alice's daily activities and some of the larger issues of the environment there. (This book describes a single fire season, 2009, and was published before the severe drought and widespread conflagration in the Southwest in the unusually hot summer of 2011.) April brings brutal wind and occasional snow, summer arrives in late May, the fire season begins in earnest in June, July brings tremendous storms, August is a month of "blessed indolence" and much-needed rain.

Only three Gila lookouts, including Connors', still require hiking in. The others have "roads carved right to their tower." In April he makes the five-and-a-half-mile hike, part way in hip-deep snow, with 50 pounds of supplies in his backpack. More supplies will be brought in later by mule. On the way in "there are always surprises: a tree shattered by lightning, a glimpse of a black bear ... mountain lion scat ..."

Human contact is rare, but he cherishes his visits from "thru-hikers" who are walking 3,000 miles along the Continental Divide trail from the Mexican border to Glacier National Park. Connors admires their "courage and stamina and sheer gumption."

During fire season, he gets every other weekend off and has a replacement for that period.

"My pilgrimage to town ... allows me a restorative dose of civilized pleasures," he writes. "I rendezvous with my wife, Martha, take a hot shower, drink a cold beer."

The only part of the book I didn't like was his attempt to rescue what appeared to be an orphaned fawn. After making rescue arrangements with a wildlife contact, he was told by his supervisor to return the fawn to where he had found it and let nature take its course. Remorsefully, he did so. I was given similar advice 10 years ago by a wildlife expert and chose instead to work with neighbors to raise the fawn one memorable summer.

At the end of a day on the lookout, especially when Martha has hiked in for a visit, Connors says:

I feel a tremendous peace come over me. My dog naps in the meadow. My wife cooks dinner in the cabin. I've been on the clock all day, a professional watcher of mountains. These are the moments I hope to hold close when I'm old...

Like Connors, I would leap at the chance to spend another summer on a remote lookout, savoring solitude and splendid vistas.

Related readings

• Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). Egan describes a 1910 fire that consumed three million acres in Idaho, Montana, and Washington and helped create the United States Forest Service.
  
• Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire (University of Chicago Press, 1992). From the perspectives of the three survivors, Maclean chronicles the harrowing experience of 15 smokejumpers who fought a remote forest fire in the northwest Montana wilderness in 1949.
  
• John Suiter, Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades (Counterpoint Press, 2002). These three poets' lookout experiences helped form the "literary, spiritual, and environmental values" of their generation.