About Wesley's Hideout

Fifth season as a fire lookout for the Forest Service, stationed in a single-room tower cabin roughly 14 feet by 14 feet, reachable by a 4-mile trail. Radio check-ins twice a day, otherwise mostly alone from June through October except for the rare hiker or a supply drop. Before this, worked trail crew for three seasons. Reads and plays games because the job is long stretches of watching for smoke with nothing else to do, and because anything that needs four other people or a screen doesn't work up there, no cell signal, solar panel barely covers a headlamp and a radio.

I spend five months a year alone in a fire lookout tower in the Bitterroot National Forest, so I read and play a lot of solo and two-player games in the gaps between smoke checks. Winters I'm back down in Missoula doing whatever pays. Everything here got read or played up in the tower unless I say otherwise.

What this is

Weight matters more than almost anything else up here. Whatever's on the shelf in the tower made it up a 4-mile trail on my back, so the rating isn't really "is this good," it's closer to "did this earn the space it took in my pack." Cheap paperbacks and small-box games win a lot by default.

I don't take review copies. Nobody's shipping anything to a fire lookout anyway, and even if they could, half the point of this is that everything here already survived a season's worth of actual use, not a first impression.

Some entries aren't reviews at all, just notes about the job, the trail, the radio checks, what the smoke looked like on a slow week. Those go up too, same feed, no separate section for them.

No ads, no newsletter, nothing tracking what you click. There's no signal up here for that kind of thing to matter anyway.

Get in touch

Email wesley@wesleyshideout.com. I'm off the trail and back on a real connection most winters; during the season it might be a while before I see it.