Osborne firefinder ...

I've long had an interest in the old fire lookout towers in the Glacier Park area, and a year or so ago I exchanged some e-mails and calls with a Pittsburgh photographer named Tom Persinger, who was planning an expedition to Montana to photograph the lookouts. Tom followed through with his plan, visiting the North Fork country last summer and photographing three very remote lookouts. The results were both evocative and spectacular, and I wanted to post a link to his online gallery ... you can view a selection of his photos here.

Tom gave me permission to repost a sample of his work here, and this is one of my favorites. The shot looks through the windows of the ancient Thoma lookout building, in the Flathead National Forest just a little south of the Canadian line. Last summer was the first that Thoma was staffed in a generation. The round device in the center of the photo is an "Osborne Firefinder," a device used to pinpoint the locations of fires spotted by the lookout.