NORTHPORT, Wash. — There is nothing newfangled about Gayle Kaste. For 25 consecutive summers, despite two hip replacement operations and cataract surgery on both eyes, she has been working on a wooden tower here in the heavily forested northeast corner of Washington State.

 

"I call in every little smoke I see," said Mrs. Kaste, 74, known among local firefighters for spotting fires fast and locating them precisely. "Heavens, I don't go anywhere without my field glasses."

 

Mrs. Kaste is a fire lookout, practitioner of a craft that this summer is celebrating its 100th anniversary, having been invented in Bertha Hill, Idaho, when a timber camp cook was ordered to sit in a hilltop tree and look for smoke. Until recently, Mrs. Kaste's lonely calling had been steadily passing into history.

 

Federal and state forestry agencies, seduced by the mobility of fire-spotting aircraft and the cost-effectiveness of satellites and electronic sensors, stopped staffing most of the more than 8,200 lookouts scattered across the United States. Some especially scenic lookouts were rented to tourists, but many others were abandoned, vandalized or burned down.

 

The decades-old demise of the fire lookout, however, has been put on hold. As suburban-style homes are built ever deeper into the forests, fire experts are beginning to realize that people like Mrs. Kaste, in her Flagstaff Lookout, can be the cheapest and most reliable way to prevent exurbanites from burning up the woods, their houses and themselves.

 

Many fire lookout stations go into operation across the country this Memorial Day weekend.

 

"We have been getting back to using some lookouts," said Buck Latapie, assistant director for fire and aviation management at United States Forest Service headquarters in Washington. "In parts of the country where there is an increasing amount of human-caused fires, fire towers are better than regularly scheduled aerial surveillance."

 

The Forest Service has no national numbers on how many federal and state lookouts have been refurbished and restaffed. But it says the trend, with some exceptions, is most pronounced in regions where increasing numbers of people are living in and around large forests, including the Far West, the Northeast and some Rocky Mountain states.

 

Oregon appears to have had the sharpest reversal of fortune. After nearly 40 years of decline, the number of staffed fire lookouts in the state increased about 10 percent in the past decade, to more than 100, said Ray Kresek, author of "Fire Lookouts of the Northwest," a book that chronicles the fate of all 3,133 lookouts in the region.

 

Thanks to increased federal spending on fire prevention in Oregon, the number of fire lookouts on Forest Service land increased nearly 30 percent in the past year, to 66 from 51, a Forest Service spokesman in Portland said.

 

"There are so many people moving from the cities to rural wooded areas in Oregon," Mr. Kresek said. "Both the Forest Service and the state realized that fire detection by aircraft wasn't really cutting it. The reports were not early enough and they resulted in larger fires."

 

The urbanizing forests of Southern California are typical of the long fall and recent rise of the fire lookout. There, as in many of the reborn lookouts across the country, the work is done by volunteers. Many of them spend long days in towers where they can see their own neighborhoods.

 

"I got started in a tower where I could see my cabin," said George Morey, 63, who installs windows and screens in new houses. "I think we have proven that we can do a better job of protecting our home than satellites or airplanes."

 

Mr. Morey volunteered in the San Bernardino National Forest. Located about 60 miles east of Los Angeles, it is one of the country's most heavily populated national forests. Because of the hot summer winds that rake across a ridge of mountains, the forest is also a major fire risk.

 

Starting this weekend and running until the first snows of late fall, that risk will be monitored by 260 volunteers who staff seven lookouts inside the forest. The volunteer program has also spread to two lookouts in the nearby Angeles National Forest.

 

For many years, human eyes were not all that useful in Southern California lookout towers. They could not distinguish forest-fire smoke from the pall of smog that drifted west from Los Angeles. In the past decade, though, stricter rules on automobile emissions have significantly cleared the air.

 

"Now that we can see better from the towers, we can do a much better job of spotting fires," said Angie Moebius, a coordinator for the San Bernardino National Forest Association, a nonprofit group that manages the fire lookouts.

 

The lookout program began in the early 1990's, she said, as a way of restoring abandoned towers and teaching Californians to appreciate the ecology of the forest. As the years went by, however, lookouts often spotted fires before air surveillance planes. "Now we are up in the towers primarily for fire detection," Ms. Moebius said.

 

In parts of the Northeast, staffed towers are making a comeback, as forests and suburbs meet.

 

"We have the most problems with fire in what we call the wild land-urban interface," said Bob Wolff, a fire warden in northern New Jersey for the state Forest Fire Service. "People love having pine limbs brush up against their house, which is a beautiful thing — until that forest catches on fire."

 

New Jersey, where about 2,000 forest fires burn nearly 10,000 acres every year, is one of a few states that never turned away from fire lookouts. It has 21 towers, which afford lookouts a view of every major forest in the entire state. They are staffed throughout the fire season with full-time state employees. Because of drought in New Jersey over the past year, Mr. Wolff said, the fire season extended throughout the winter.

 

Leaving fire spotting primarily to aircraft has always been a bad idea, said Mr. Kresek, who lives in Spokane, Wash. "There is no comparison between a good lookout and an airplane," he said. "A good lookout will see smoke at dawn, long before people who live next to a fire."

 

The comeback of fire towers, especially in Oregon and California, has been gratifying, said Mr. Kresek, a retired firefighter. But he describes himself as "extremely disappointed" in the State of Washington for continuing to take lookouts out of service. "I expect Washington to be putting lookouts back up once they get them all torn down," he said.

 

As this summer begins, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources plans to have only one full-time staffed lookout in the state, he said.

 

Located in the Colville Forest about seven miles south of the Canadian border, it is where Gayle Kaste continues to do what she has been doing for a quarter-century.

 

"I don't read books up here," she said, prowling the catwalk that surrounds the glassed-in cabin of her 40-foot lookout. "I read magazines. That way I can look around every 10 minutes."

 

Jim Updike works as a warden down in the forest that Mrs. Kaste guards from her mountaintop perch. By spotting fires early and directing firefighters to the precise location where they are burning, he said, she certainly earned her keep. She makes about $1,700 a summer.