We might be in the era of satellite imagery, drone videos and cell phones, but keeping an eye out for wildfires still requires people sitting in small buildings atop mountains all day, looking for smoke.

“They’re still important, certainly,” said Steven Sherman, state forest fire supervisor of the New Hampshire Forest Protection Bureau. “Their primary mission still remains looking for smoke and wildfires, and catching them when they’re small before they grow out of control.”

The program, which has been around for 120 years, is so important that New Hampshire is replacing the fire lookout tower on Cardigan Mountain, with contractors starting work this week. They will be replacing the tower on Belknap Mountain later this summer.

The Cardigan work, which will include some deliveries by helicopter, will require closing some trails on the mountain, which is popular with hikers, between now and the end of August. At times the summit will be closed off from the public.

“They’re going to fly in scaffolding and build it up around the existing tower. Then they’ll remove the cabin, wooden structure, and replace it. The steel structure is going to remain,” said Sherman, who estimated that it would take multiple flights.

The helicopters will hover rather than try to land (“even though it’s a bald peak, it’s pretty uneven”) and will lower material to crews on the summit, probably using cargo nets. Hence the need to keep people away at those times.

New Hampshire has had fire lookouts atop mountains since the first decade of the 20th century – the state’s official history says a lookout in Croydon may have been the first official tower in the East, starting in 1903 – with steel towers dating to the 1930s. More than 30 towers were being staffed by World War II, but the number slipped by the early 1980s. The state now has 15 towers, a number that has been consistent for decades, and the town of Moultonboro operates one of its own.

The towers, about 100 feet tall on average, stand atop hills and mountains throughout the state. They exist from Milford, where you can gaze into Massachusetts, to Oak Hill in Loudon, to the Magalloway tower in Pittsburg where you might be able to see both Maine and Quebec, although not when wildfire smoke from Canada is blowing through.

They are staffed on weekends from spring through fall – two towers in the North Country are looking for spotters – and whenever the state is judged to be in a high fire danger day. That hasn’t happened much this summer, despite the fires to our north; rainy weather means New Hampshire has been in the low fire danger category since May.

Lookout towers are supplemented in high fire danger days by flights from the Civil Air Patrol over certain areas, such as the back of ridges that can’t be easily seen, and sometimes by satellites.

“We have access to national satellite imagery that alerts us to heat signatures in the afternoon.  The fires, for that to pick up, have to be significant – not going to pick up a quarter-acre fire on the woods.”

The big advantage of towers is that they’re constant, staffed by 8-hour shifts, increasing the chance of seeing a blaze before it gets out of control.

Spotters, who make $15.01  an hour this year, are trained on site by rangers who show them radio protocol, local landmarks, and who to contact when suspicious smoke is seen.

“Another advantage of having people in the towers: they start to learn the difference of what might be somebody burning in their backyard … and something bigger,” Sherman said. Depending on the location and circumstance, a spotter will likely call the appropriate fire department: “‘I have a smoke, looks like it could be somebody burning illegally,’ so the fire department may only send the fire warden rather than sending every engine.”

The other important role played by spotters in the tower is educational.

“It’s important for people to see somebody up there, to meet somebody. That’s a great opportunity for us to educate them about wildfire prevention, also about the importance of our forests,” Sherman said. Spotters can also become something of a local tour guide, answering questions about hiking trails, campgrounds and other attractions in  the area.

Updates about the Cardigan project, including notices of non-summitting days and trail closures, will be posted on the websites of both the Division of Forests and Lands and the N.H. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, as well as on their respective Twitter accounts, @nhdfl and @nhdncr.

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