With thick, rough fingers, Dr. Keith Argow, sitting in his third-floor Vienna office points at survey magazine photos of severe snow damage to old lookout posts on Cleman Mountain in Washington state this past winter.
"God, that was a storm," Argow said with enthusiasm, his eyes drifting down the page. "This one here broke a leg. Can you imagine the wind breaking the legs of one of these things?"
This year, Argow, a Vienna resident and his legion of about 900 volunteer nature enthusiasts stretching from coast to coast, will look to repair the damage to the forest fire lookout posts on Cleman Mountain on their mission to preserve the remaining 800 or so lookout posts throughout the country.
"We don't save them all, but we got a dog-gone good group of people who are going to try," Argow said, slapping the magazine shut.
THE ORGANIZATION of volunteers, of which Argow is chairman, is known as the Forest Fire Lookout Association, a group run by 35 volunteer directors spread throughout most of the U.S. states, as well as parts of Canada and Australia. Armed with a budget of a little more than $18,000 funded entirely from private sources last year, the group is devoted to the preservation of the world's forest fire lookout towers as historic and useful structures for the safety of the world's woodlands, Argow added.
Local chapters, based in 26 states — some with more than one — work to foster awareness of the towers, catalog their existence and raise funds independently for their maintenance and preservation. Altogether the groups handle about $100,000 annually, according to Argow.
While Virginia is home to approximately 45 still-standing lookout posts, the vast majority in southern Virginia, the association makes its home in Vienna due to the location of its chairman, Argow, a retired district ranger for the U.S. Forest Service and a former professor of forestry at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
Argow, who in 1981 founded the American Resources Group, a non-profit devoted to securing public services for forest conservation is also the director of the National Woodlands Owners Association. Both of which are headquartered in Argow's downtown Vienna office.
IT WAS GROWING up in Oregon and hiking regularly in the Gifford-Pinchot National Forest that got Argow first interested in forest preservation and, in effect, the maintenance and restoration of the historic lookout towers. He remembers sleeping in the lookout towers around Mount St. Helen as a child.
"Kind of like how the lighthouses are to the coast, these are the lighthouses of the forest," Argow said. "So it's a part of our American culture."
Built from the 1930s until the 1950s, the lookout towers once dominated the world of forest fire prevention. Numbering as many as 8,000 at the peak of their era, they were built mostly by U.S. and state park organizations and manned by employees of the parks and volunteers who monitored the nation's forests from the summits of mountains.
"It was the primary tool to get the vertical height to spot the smoke back in those days," said Ron Jenkins, director of general services for the Virginia Department of Forestry, who was once in charge of monitoring the state's lookout towers. "They were one of the only solid ways, for a long time, that we detected forest fires."
They became so prevalent that they were erected in every single state in the U.S. with the sole exception of Kansas, Argow said.
After air monitoring eventually forced the towers for a large part to become obsolete, parks organizations began to dismantle or ignore the structures and they fell into disrepair, Argow added.
"A lot of them had gone by the wayside," said Gary Weber, a district fire management officer for the U.S. Forest Service based out of Priest Lake, Idaho and volunteer editor of the Forest Fire Lookout Association's quarterly magazine. "I think too often we kind of look past some of the pieces of our more recent history, and that was what was happening here to an extent."
ENTER THE FFLA, which has since worked towards raising the awareness of the historic structures, not just for their antique value but for their usefulness in creating another line of defense towards preventing forest fires, Argow said.
The association works with its extended network of volunteers to staff approximately 200 of the remaining 800 lookout sites, based mostly along critical needs due to adverse conditions and availability, he added.
There has also been planning on the part of the Virginia Department of Forestry to see if the towers might be outfitted with radio transmitters for emergency communications in the event of a fire or other natural disaster in the state, Jenkins said.
The sites have also become a relatively popular tourist attraction, with hikers and nature enthusiasts renting out the towers for nights, according to Argow.
It is in that desire to sleep in the old towers overlooking some of the largest expanses of forest in the country that have been the major driving force for a lot of those who exert their effort everyday towards their preservation, Weber said.
"There's something about being out there, above everything else, taking in the forest," he said. "It's the peace and quiet. It's just getting back to nature."