In the summer of 1956, the Beat writer Jack Kerouac ascended the North Cascade Mountains, climbing up through the glacial crests of Washington State to Desolation Peak, where he would assume a summer post as a fire lookout for the United States Forest Service. Alone in his sparsely furnished cabin in the sky, Kerouac kept watch for smoke, the first sign of forest fires. He was broke (On The Road was still a year away), and room, board, and $230 per month was a draw. But it was really on his friend Gary Snyder’s urging, the writer and Buddhist practitioner dubbed “Japhy” below, that the city slicker signed on. Kerouac was chasing an ascetic, meditative experience that would never really materialize. He would recall his sixty-three days of isolation in the semi-autobiographical Desolation Angels (1965), drawn from the journals he kept at the time, and Dharma Bums (1958):

Lo, in the morning I woke up and it was beautiful blue sunshine sky and I went out in my alpine yard and there it was, everything Japhy said it was, hundreds of miles of pure snow-covered rocks and virgin lakes and high timber, and below, instead of the world, I saw a sea of marshmallow clouds flat as a roof and extending miles and miles in every direction, creaming all the valleys, what they call low-level clouds, on my 6600-foot pinnacle it was all far below me. . . . I made bacon and eggs, dug a garbage pit a hundred yards down the trail, hauled wood and identified landmarks with my panoramic and firefinder and named all the magic rocks and clefts, names Japhy had sung to me so often. . .

The images featured here are versions of what Kerouac calls his “panoramic”: circular maps custom-made for the fire towers that once dotted the American wilderness like land-bound lighthouses. They come from the Maine Forestry Department, which erected dozens of steel towers — supporting lookouts some 12 to 48 feet (3.7 to 14.6 meters) above the craggy summits of the American Northeast — after a spate of devastating fires in 1903 and 1908. Like all of the panoramic maps produced for the Maine Fire District between 1918 and 1923, they were drawn by the civil engineer Archie G. Norcross (1880–1947).

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View from Double Top Forest Fire Station (detail), Maine, 1919 — Source.

Each map takes a particular fire tower for its epicenter, orienting the lookout to his or her elevated universe: a world whose limits, more or less, are as far as the eye can see. Dotted with landmarks, panoramic maps made it possible to pinpoint a wildfire’s plume and coordinate teams of firefighters to extinguish it. They would have been accompanied by an alidade (Kerouac’s “firefinder”), a simple sighting device.

Gaining popularity in the early 1900s, the use of fire towers peaked in the mid-century, when improved communication technology, surveillance strategies, and “controlled burn” management began to take hold. Today, most of the 8000 lookouts have fallen into disrepair, superseded by camera networks, thermal satellite imaging, and aircraft patrols. A scant few remain active. Some are kept open as bare-bones shelters for passing hikers, who report wooden furniture and tin dishes left behind from over a century of use. The Doubletop Mountain lookout, for one, was dismantled sometime before 1972: according to the Forest Fire Lookout Association, it was “notorious for getting struck by lightning”.

Below you will find a selection of Norcross’ maps, courtesy of the Maine State Library via the DigitalMaine Repository. We've featured all the ones they've labeled with an open reuse license (in this case Creative Commons Attribution), but you can see a wider selection at this link.

View from Coburn Mountain Forest Fire Station, Maine, 1918.

View from Beetle Mountain Forest Fire Station, Maine, 1920.

View from Soper Mountain Forest Fire Station, Maine, 1920.

View from Allagash Mountain Forest Fire Station, Maine, 1920.

View from Deboulle Mountain Forest Fire Station, Maine, 1922.