![]() If you're thirsty, you fetch water from the missile-container-turned-cistern buried outside. There's a certain pragmatism that grows out of living alone on a mountain for every summer, away from people, power and roads. "So yeah, the future is here apparently and I'm watching it." ![]() These are literally phrases I have never copied down in 17 years until 48 hours ago," he says. Perched inside his glass box, above the surrounding pines, the radio squawks and Connors jots notes on a legal pad. It's part of a short-term experiment land managers are trying in New Mexico's Gila National Forest to spot and monitor fires. That drone, a solar-powered Silent Falcon, was launched earlier in the morning. Why pay a person to sit on top of a mountain when you can plop down a 360-degree camera? Why try to discern a fire's heat and intensity from the color of its smoke when you can get an infrared image? Why pay Connors to plot a fire's location with a faded map, a line of string and a pair of binoculars, when you can get a precise location from drone Unmanned 201? At times, they critiqued it.īut in recent years, the number of active lookouts has dwindled from thousands to hundreds as technology has encroached. At times, fire lookouts were part of that change. They're the eyes in the forest, even as the forests they watch have changed, shaped by developers, shifting land management policies and climate change. ![]() ![]() Forest Service has been posting men and women atop mountains and trees, and in other hard-to-reach places, to wait and watch for smoke. ![]()
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