The Lookout

In her story, Ronalee traces factual happenings in one fire season around an abandoned lookout tower. She writes from 40 years of seasonal work with the U. S. Forest Service. Ronalee “made her bones” as a lookout on Hager Mountain, in northern Lake County. By 2011, she had staffed six mountain tops on three national forests in eastern Oregon: Hager Mountain Johnson Rock, Summit Point, Mule Peak, Table Rock Dixie Butte Simultaneously beginning her “super lookout” reputation and raising two of five children atop a volcanic cone, she became “the Hager Mountain day care mother” for Silver Lake’s neighborhood children. Several graduates remain part of her “family” as adults. This book is a narrative nonfiction from fire seasons on those mountains she deeply loved. Herein, she writes intimately of what she saw. One may intuit from Ronalee’s story, her addiction to lightning and thunder and wildfire, wildlife and wilderness and freedom. Imaginations may fall under spells she casts and experience a day at her “Hager Mountain Day Care In The Sky”.