Cooney Lookout
The Cooney Lookout on the Swan Front near the end of Rumble Creek Road is still used for spotting wildfires by the Flathead National Forest and the Swan River State Forest. Volunteers staff the lookout for part of the summer.
In 1932 local Forest Service employees Dave Halme and Tauno Strom built the original lookout. It was a 14’x14’ wood frame cabin on a 20-foot high tower with windows all around. It was replaced by a 30-foot-high tower in 1968.
Pete Klein, a part-time valley resident, worked at Cooney Lookout for several summers between 1961 and 1981. At that time the U.S. Forest Service was closing and dismantling lookout towers. In his job, Pete had access to fire records.
In 2000, Pete was interviewed for the Swan Valley Oral History Project: “I did a little survey on how many fires had been spotted by the plane and how many had been spotted by the lookouts, in particular, how many had been spotted by Cooney. Cooney beat all the lookouts and the plane combined. That convinced them not to get rid of Cooney.”
On August 10, 2003, Swan River State Forest Manager Dan Roberson was concerned about a fire weather forecast calling for lightning strikes during extreme drought conditions. The lookout on duty was away, so Roberson spent that evening observing from the tower.
He saw a flare up from a lightning strike that had occurred on August 5 at the top of Red Butte in the Mission Mountains Wilderness across the valley. He called it in to the fire dispatch office at the Flathead Interagency Dispatch Center. Within moments the fire spread down the mountain toward the Swan Valley, starting the approximately 15,000-acre Crazy Horse Fire.
Despite a quick and massive response by firefighters who worked for several weeks to prevent the loss of lives and property, the Crazy Horse Fire burned into the fall.
The lightning storm that had come through on August 5 started at least five fires in the Swan Valley. All were put out quickly except for the Crazy Horse Fire. It’s still possible to see the fire scars filling in with young trees by looking west across the valley from the lookout tower.
