The 1930s camera that photographed fire lookouts in national parks

In the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) money boosted the National Park Service's fire-suppression policy. Enrollees built roads, fire breaks, fire trails, lookouts, telephone lines and guard cabins. Alongside, another effort aimed to detect and suppress fires faster, before they engulfed large areas. Its tool was a very special camera.

An Osborne photo-recording transit in use. NPS photo.

The Forest Service project

The U.S. Forest Service began planning in 1931. One phase took oriented panoramic photos from lookout stations or proposed sites, focused on national forests in Oregon and Washington, with the NPS, Bureau of Indian Affairs and state foresters joining where more coverage helped. Junior Forester Albert Arnst led it. After equipment tests in 1932, photography began on June 11, 1933, with CCC money. Arnst's crew of CCC enrollees, mostly forestry students at Oregon State University or the University of Washington, included Lester M. Moe. The team also visited Crater Lake and Mount Rainier national parks. The Forest Service money ran out in 1935.

A custom camera

William B. Osborne, Jr., the Forest Service senior regional fire inspector, designed the cameras. A Yale Forest School graduate of 1909, he was responsible for the Northwest's first lookout tower (1911) and first central fire-dispatching system (1913), and is best known for the Osborne firefinder, a map on a rotating steel disc with brass sights that let lookouts pinpoint fires; Leupold-Volpel & Company began making it in 1913. His camera, a photo-recording transit, merged an engineer's surveying transit with a camera. The tripod head had a movable azimuth ring graduated from zero to 360 degrees, and the camera was oriented with the firefinder. The equipment weighed about 75 pounds. Leupold-Volpel made four in 1932, and the NPS bought its own, the sixth made, in 1934, when photography began in California parks including Yosemite, Sequoia and Lassen Volcanic and Pinnacles National Monument.

Panoramic photograph by Lester Moe from Moro Rock, Sequoia National Park, October 12, 1934. NPS History Collection.

Lester M. Moe

Moe was born January 21, 1910, in Portland, Oregon, and graduated from the University of Oregon. He left the Forest Service project after the 1934 field season and joined the NPS as a junior forester in 1935, documenting lookouts and proposed lookouts. In four years he documented 200 sites in at least 26 national parks and monuments. A 1938 Park Service Bulletin said the work meant hauling equipment weighing upwards of 100 pounds, climbing trees, poles and roofs, and facing extreme winds; the NPS history notes that safety gear is conspicuously absent from project descriptions.

His NPS career continued. He worked at Yosemite as a ranger from June 1, 1940, served in the U.S. Navy in World War II, and moved to the engineer department in 1946, retiring in 1966. He died August 27, 1990, in Merced, California, aged 80.

How the photographs worked

A marked-up panorama showing how to read and orient the images. NPS History Collection.

Each print carries the station name, location, photographer, date, a numbered azimuth scale and a level line. Three standard setups at each lookout, each covering a 120-degree sector, gave a full 360-degree view; the sun's position set the timing, roughly noon for 300° to 60°, 3 pm for 60° to 180° and 9 am for 180° to 300°. Moe used panchromatic (normal black-and-white) and infrared film. In infrared, healthy deciduous plants look very light, healthy conifers gray, dead or dying vegetation black, water dark and smooth, and moist soil darker than dry. A lookout took almost a full day to photograph.

Prints, 5 by 13 inches, were contact prints mounted in three-fold cardboard albums for everyone with fire-control duties. The "seen areas" were also mapped at three distances: 15 miles for the best visibility, 8 miles for normal fire season and 5 miles for emergency or bad fire weather. Until 1960 the NPS Washington Office kept a central file of negatives; as requests dwindled it was split up and sent to regional offices, then often to parks. Yosemite and others have put scans online. The NPS History Collection holds a small set of the photographs from Crater Lake, Death Valley, Mount Rainier and Sequoia, but not the camera.

A second look

The panoramas also helped plan roads and trails. Today they show historic roads, trails and structures, vegetation change and altered landforms. In 2007 the NPS and Forest Service retook Moe's views in Yellowstone and Glacier national parks with the same type of transit, to see how the parks changed over 70 years.

Crater Lake from Watchman Peak by Lester Moe, June 28, 1936. NPS History Collection.

Sources

• National Park Service, 50 Nifty Finds #24: Fire Away!; rewritten in hubnx's own words.