Out on the sagebrush plains of Eastern Oregon, a decommissioned fire lookout tower built in 1932 has been restored to its original purpose - with a modern twist.
After nearly 30 years of sitting idle, the Dry Mountain fire lookout is now equipped with fire-spotting cameras that link into a statewide network managed by the Oregon Hazards Lab at the University of Oregon. These cameras are a vital resource for fire managers and emergency responders around the state, allowing early detection of fires before they become large blazes.
The install happened months later than originally scheduled, as Oregon faced one of its most severe fire seasons on record. In July, when the Oregon Hazards Lab team had planned to set up equipment, the lookout was shrouded in smoke from the nearby Second Flat Fire and the air quality was unhealthy for weeks. More acres have burned across the state in 2026 than in any modern recorded year.
"There was a lookout on Dry Mountain for good reason," said Nick Maggio, the lab's associate director of research and development. "It provides a stunning view of a landscape that has seen roughly half a dozen named fires in the past five years. Restoring eyes to this location gives fire services on both sides of the mountain a better chance to detect new starts early and monitor fires as they grow. That shared view is urgently needed in a place with this much fire activity."
Oregon Hazards Lab, or OHAZ, manages a network of more than 70 cameras around Oregon, mostly mounted on mountaintop telecommunications towers or existing fire lookouts. But the Dry Mountain site, about 100 miles southeast of Bend, is unique in having such old infrastructure that's still usable for cameras.
"We deal with sites regularly that had things from this time period that have blown over or been replaced," said Oregon Hazards Lab engineer Kevin Rowland, who led the installation in October. "And at most of the other sites where we're using existing infrastructure, it's 10 to 15 years old, not 100."
A record-setting fire season
2.5+ million
Acres burned across Oregon
$1.4 billion
Estimated cost of fire suppression efforts in the state
5
Number of mega-fires
To install cameras at Dry Mountain, the team first had to get permits from the U.S. Forest Service, which manages the land on which the lookout stands. And because it's a historic site, they also partnered with Museum of Natural and Cultural History archaeologist Sonya Sobel and historic preservation specialist Brooke Willoughby to survey the area.
When Sobel and Willoughby ventured out to the lookout in November 2025, Sobel found evidence of past visits, potentially by loggers, hunters or those working at the lookout. There were rusty old cans dating back to the mid-20th century, for example, but no significant cultural artifacts that would be disturbed by work on the site.
Willoughby inspected the tower itself, as well as other buildings on the site.
For its age, the structure is in surprisingly good shape, Willoughby noted. She credited that to the fact it's built of metal rather than wood. Even so, climbing the 70-foot tower on a breezy fall day was a bit daunting.
While some fire lookouts are topped with a small one-room cabin that includes living quarters, this tower only has an observation room. A secondary building on the ground provided living space for lookout staffers from around 1930 to the late 1990s.
The museum's site survey concluded that installing cameras would result in minor modifications to a historic structure,but for a purpose that was in line with its original intent.
"Having this historic tower that we can continue its use in its original function and design intent with some modern equipment is really fun for us," said Rowland.
OHAZ staff factored the site's historic nature into their installation. To preserve the tower's original look as much as possible, they painted all camera equipment to match the the existing tower.
Rowland and his team also installed solar-powered batteries on the ground that keep the cameras running and allow them to send data back through other nodes along the Highway 20 corridor, towards Bend.
Oregon has a long history of staffed fire lookouts, many of which have fallen into disrepair. But for the OHAZ team, these cameras don't replace the role of human observers. Instead, they supplement staffed lookouts, often returning eyes to important locations where staffing is not an option. The cameras sync with apps like Watch Duty, which provides public alerts about wildfires. And they're a resource for fire managers and dispatch centers across the state. They connect to a bigger wildfire camera platform called ALERTWest, which spans the western United States. Through the ALERTWest interface, fire professionals can remotely control the cameras and software can quickly detect early-stage fires and flag them for human verification.
There was no chance of the condemned Dry Mountain tower being turned back into a staffed lookout or a rental, Rowland said - bringing it up to code would have been prohibitively expensive. Instead, the OHAZ cameras can give it a second life as a fire detection tool.
View from the top of the Dry Mountain Lookout
The new site "will tie our sites in the highway corridor back to Bend and give us more robustness with being able to loop our networks into other networks," Rowland added.
That redundancy is important when working with data in remote areas. If a key node goes down, there can be another path to transmit the data back to home base in Eugene.
The cameras aren't just for fire, Rowland said. "We're on mountaintops that create their own weather, and we have viewsheds over incredibly valuable flight paths." That can be helpful for Life Flight, first responders and emergency personnel coordinating rescues in remote areas.
And beyond fire season, "you can see when wildflowers are in bloom, or check snowpack," Rowland said. "We look for fires, but we're also adding layers of environmental monitoring to support resilience research."
