KEEPING WATCH

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[Chris] Usually we just…

[Mark] I could just run with things just so.

[Chris] If you could just tell us what your relationship is to War Eagle.

[Mark] Okay.

[Chris] And why you’re up here.

[Mark] Well, this place. Are we rolling?

[Jack] Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. Introduce yourself and then let us know how you came to be here.

[Mark] I can do that. Yeah. So. Well, my name’s Mark Schneider.

00:00:42:08 - 00:01:10:04

[Mark] I’m a professor of history, and humanities at the University of Alaska Kodiak College now. But I have some 26 seasons with the Forest Service under my belt and including 16 as a lookout. Ten right here on War Eagle. And this place means quite a lot to me. And I haven’t been back since 2004 17 years. And now I’m here.

00:01:10:06 - 00:01:39:09 [Mark] But as for how I got here and start, well, I started with the Forest Service in 1979, and I was 21 years old, worked on trails and years in timber stand exam. And then I got tired of, well, looking at the results of our labors places being logged after we had to hike or backpack or get helicoptered in or of course, and see the areas sold off for timber.

00:01:39:12 - 00:01:58:24 [Mark] So I became a wilderness ranger, worked in the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness right there on the Selway River. Incomparable stretch of river, at any rate. But they gave I’ve always had Great Pyrenees dogs and for being there for dang near forty years, and they gave me a bit of a hard time about having my dog with me there in the wilderness.

00:01:59:00 - 00:02:27:14 [Mark] And so I said, Well, to hell with this. I can do a lookout, you can have your dog. And then, well, I’ve always been either a student or a teacher. And so the life of the lookout, having summers off works out really well. And I was teaching in high school here in Idaho at Council, and I took my first look out on Pollock Mountain right over there in 1988.

00:02:27:17 - 00:02:51:02 [Mark] And I moved around a little bit from Pollock. And one thing I like about this place is from here [Mark pauses here to take a long drag of his cigar] you can see all the other lookouts that I’ve been on, except for Williams Peak it’s the lower elevation right there and Miners Peak out there. Pilot Peak over there. Heaven’s Gate is way over there in Pollock. If you know where to look, you can spot it So and then.

00:02:51:02 - 00:03:19:21 [Mark] Well, to make a long story short, I always knew that I’d end up at War Eagle somehow. Don’t ask me how, but it was. It’s the lead, the Hub lookout. And I was on Miner’s Peak for a couple of years. And before I took over War Eagle, there was a woman named Judy Kudervall here, who’s from Salmon. And she’d been there, I think, 28 years or something like that.

00:03:19:24 - 00:03:44:07

[Mark] A long, long time. And folks like, well, she’s never going to leave. And then she did. And it opened up and I said, awesome, I’ve come to War Eagle and also because I’m a traditional bow hunter of, you know, I can hunt from here too. And it had I love this lookout because it has the fence, you know, the deck for my dogs.

00:03:44:09 - 00:04:14:26

[Mark] And it was just the perfect solution. So I spent ten, 16 years total a ten of them here. And I was telling Roger, who’s now manning the place, staffing the look out that generally, you know, you come up in June and you might leave in September or when the snow comes October. But I’ve been on the lookout as late as November 10th on Heaven’s Gate.

00:04:14:28 - 00:04:28:15

[Mark] But even I mean, talk about a late season. I actually spotted a fire on October 31st, and that was right here. Yeah.

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:34:07

[Jack] Did you guys just because we’re a little pressed for time. Did you touch on the movement away from.

[Chris] Oh, no, No, we didn’t.

[Mark] Moving away from what?

[Jack] The movement away from the human fire lookout. And now what do you think is lost in the transition?

[Mark] Okay, I’ve studied the history, and a lot of these were built by the CCC during the thirties.

00:00:34:10 - 00:00:59:10

[Mark] Uh, you see some, what, 5000 lookouts nationwide. And when I wrote the manual, I think they were down to 200 that were manned. And everybody says, oh, they’re going by the wayside. And with satellites, you know, you can plot lightning strikes and aerial, uh, ships can come. And I’d like to think that we live here all the time.

00:00:59:11 - 00:01:30:12

[Mark] You know, they were looking at the place. I hope lookouts don’t go away. The human lookout. I hope not, and maybe GPS and all that.

[Jack] But why not? I mean, what. What can the human lookout do that, uh, a camera cannot do?

[Mark] Okay, so we’re replaceable. Uh, maybe it’s just the romance that I don’t want to give up.

00:01:30:15 - 00:02:20:15

[Mark] Um, I don’t know. It’s technology. And when I teach environmental history and you talk about wilderness, is it wilderness anymore? And like when Renee would go up to Sheepeater. She’d go up by horse and mules because you can’t land a helicopter there in wilderness. But what if we’re up in the Brooks Range in Alaska and you break your leg and you get out your GPS and find your coordinates and you use your satellite phone to call someone, maybe it’s a helicopter rescue and they come land where they’re not supposed to.

00:02:20:17 - 00:03:00:26

[Mark] You know, is that wilderness? Is it the end of wilderness? As Morgan Sherwood would say, when I teach Alaska history: is there wilderness anymore? And so maybe I to answer your question, I eschew technology, because as Aldo Leopold also said, writing in the 1940s, he said, what passes for woodsmanship then is simply the mastery of gadgetry. This is before GPS.

00:03:00:28 - 00:03:26:01

[Mark] You know, I had a compass and a contour map. I had smokejumpers down here and they and then I had to they couldn’t spell see the smoke. They’re going through timber. And I got at the maps here and you know, I take and there’s the smoke, there’s these guys are but wait and alidade is set to true north and they’re using magnetic north.

00:03:26:02 - 00:03:53:13

[Mark] You have to get the declination which was 18 degrees or maybe it’s 21 around here and you have to know that and then lead them into the fire and they couldn’t see it and you did that. But that’s using technology, of course. But nowadays I’ve and I’ve been away from it for a while, so I don’t even know what tricks they have up their sleeves.

00:03:53:13 - 00:04:00:20

[Mark] But maybe just for personal or sentimental reasons, I would hope that lookouts don’t go away.