The most important job on the fireline.
On the fireline, the Lookout hikes to a good vantage point and watches the fire, keeping an eye out for things a crew ‘down in the hole’ can’t see: weather changes, an unexpected increase in the fire’s behavior, or a spot fire that compromises the escape route. It’s often boring, lonely, and tedious, but when things start to fall apart, the Lookout has the most important job on the crew.
Today, whole counties are chopped up with dozer line, and your normally-quiet neighborhood may be “Division Papa” on today’s Operations Map. My hope with this site is to help fill some kind of lookout role for the general public; keeping an eye on what’s happening, and communicating to the crew (that’s you) what’s coming next. Why aren’t there more tankers flying? Why didn’t the lines hold up to the winds? How did end up in such a bad relationship with fire? Why do we keep going back to our broken ways of managing it?
There is plenty to dig into and while the official government information officers work really hard to get info out, they are bound up trying to deliver a sanitized, hopeful version of an incredibly messy, political, and complicated topic.
My name is Zeke Lunder. I’ve been working in wildfire for almost 30 years, and I started this website during the Dixie Fire when I realized Twitter, Facebook, and other fire information pages weren’t really working to tell the kinds of stories I want to tell. We are drowning in misinformation, and even the good information which gets out often lacks any historical context or geographic specificity. It often seems that the public information officers on major wildfires don’t give the public enough credit for being able to understand nuanced messages or the operational details of how the fire is being fought (really the most interesting thing to a lot of us).
Our aim with this site is to help people get a better grip on how fires work, how they move across the landscape, how we fight them, and how to tell when they are doing good work for us.
I grew up in the sticks of Northeastern California, and started working seasonally on local timber-marking crews in 1995. I got hooked on fire after a couple winters burning house-sized piles of logging slash and working on the district fire crew. I was taking geography classes at Chico State and kind of just fell into fire mapping and wildfire intelligence right at a time when we started bring computers and plotters out to fire camps to make maps onsite.
I’ve been making maps and working wildfires ever since – on over two hundred large fires spread between Southern California and Northern Minnesota. I don’t like driving that much anymore, and I’ve got a family, now, so I stopped working in fire camps and I’ve been focusing my fire-geek energies on reporting on fires on the West Coast.
Over the years, I have become involved with a lot of prescribed fire training and burning. I gained qualification as a California State Fire Marshal-Certified Prescribed Burn Boss (CA-RX) in 2023, and lead landowner burns and write burn plans for municipalities and private landowners. Burning with Native American tribes on the Klamath River has helped me realize our woods are trashed and burning up largely because we did our best to wipe out the native people who really understood how to use fire to maintain the forested landscapes. 100 years waging war on fire and criminalizing its use left us with broken forests and communities on the brink. We won many battles, but with climate change as an ally, fire will always win the war. It’s over. We need to negotiate a new relationship with fire – as long as we keep trying to keep it off our landscapes, it will continue its siege until every last mountain town and green tree is burned to ash.
Over the past 3 years, YouTube has become our primary communications tool, but we still try to use this site as our archive and map library. When things are slow in wildfire land, I do consulting work and metal sculpture, and we work on longer-form stories and video projects. I’ve worked with some real badass, brave, funny, and smart people and we are slowly getting through our list of interview with them. So stay tuned!
If you appreciate the information I share and want to help support our work, and the development of this new website, click below!
Note: @Wildland_ZKO is The Lookout’s official Twitter handle.
A copy of my CV is here.
Zeke Lunder
Chico, California.