A Fire Lookout On What's Lost In A Transition To Technology

Can you see it? The fire in the photo above?

A single tree burning doesn't put up much smoke.

There's a flash of lightning, sizzling across the sky. Then, a pause, as bark smolders and flames creep, building heat until poof: a signal in the sky.

Philip Connors, gazing outward from a tower, sees it as a new dent on the crest of a distant ridge. He's spent thousands of hours contemplating the contours of southwest New Mexico. The fuzzy smudge is out of place.

Connors is a fire lookout and as such, he's paid to notice small, faraway things.

For more than a hundred years, the U.S. 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. 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. At times, fire lookouts were part of that change. At times, they critiqued it.

But in recent years, the