A seasonal fire lookout's notes on the books and board games that get him through a Montana fire season — written alone in a tower, mailed down when the trail crew makes a supply run.https://wesleyshideout.com/en-UShttps://wesleyshideout.com/essays/why-i-stopped-swinging-a-pulaski/https://wesleyshideout.com/essays/why-i-stopped-swinging-a-pulaski/Three seasons on trail crew, a foreman named Deb, a rockslide that closed a section for a summer, and the specific morning I decided I wanted the quiet more than the crew.Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/essays/the-voice-on-the-other-end/https://wesleyshideout.com/essays/the-voice-on-the-other-end/Twice a day I talk to a dispatcher named Ruth for about ninety seconds, and one July morning that call was the only human voice I heard for a week and a half.Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/patchwork/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/patchwork/A two-player quilting game that fits in a jacket pocket and gives me something to actually think about between smoke checks.Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/essays/the-woman-who-waited-out-the-squall/https://wesleyshideout.com/essays/the-woman-who-waited-out-the-squall/A through-hiker named Dana climbed up out of a squall in my fourth season, sat on the platform railing, and we played two games of Hive before she went back down.Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/desert-solitaire/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/desert-solitaire/Abbey's season alone at Arches, before the road got paved, reads like a field report from someone doing roughly my job with a lot more opinions about it.Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/7-wonders-duel/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/7-wonders-duel/A card-drafting civilization builder rebuilt from the ground up for two players, with a structured pyramid of cards and three routes to winning.Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/where-the-crawdads-sing/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/where-the-crawdads-sing/A marsh girl raises herself alone and it turns into a murder mystery, and the isolation is the part that rings true while the plot mostly doesn't.Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/essays/what-i-dont-carry-anymore/https://wesleyshideout.com/essays/what-i-dont-carry-anymore/Five seasons of hiking the same 4 miles up in June has taught me more about what to leave at the trailhead than what to bring.Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/targi/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/targi/A two-player-only worker placement game built around a shared four-by-four grid of tiles, dense enough to eat a whole slow week up here.Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/station-eleven/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/station-eleven/A flu wipes out civilization and Emily St. John Mandel writes about the twenty years after like it's a quiet, patient thing worth surviving for. Read it over three nights up here and kept the radio off longer than usual.Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/the-overstory/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/the-overstory/Nine lives braided around trees, some of them among the best writing about forests I've read up here, some of them dragging once the plot has to catch up to the theme.Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/star-realms/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/star-realms/A deckbuilder small enough to fit in a coat pocket that somehow still wants an opponent across from it more than most two-player games I own.Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/hive/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/hive/No board, no paper, twenty-two hexagonal tiles in a cloth bag, and a two-player game with more bite than most things three times its weight.Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/jaipur/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/jaipur/A two-player trading game that fits in a jacket pocket and somehow still has real tension in it, camel herd and all.Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/onitama/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/onitama/A five-by-five grid, sixteen pawns, and five movement cards that reshuffle the whole logic of the game every single match.Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/lost-cities/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/lost-cities/A card game about five expeditions and the discipline of not chasing a bad one, small enough to ride in a shirt pocket up the trail.Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/essays/what-the-day-actually-looks-like/https://wesleyshideout.com/essays/what-the-day-actually-looks-like/An hour by hour account of a smoke-watching shift, which is mostly waiting and looking, and how little of that people believe when I tell them.Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/educated/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/educated/Tara Westover grows up in rural Idaho with no birth certificate and no school, working her father's junkyard, and eventually earns a PhD from Cambridge. The mountain in this one isn't scenery, it's the whole argument.Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/essays/the-logbook-before-mine/https://wesleyshideout.com/essays/the-logbook-before-mine/The tower was built in the thirties, and a stack of old logbooks in a footlocker under the bunk goes back further than I can account for, including one lookout who apparently named the weather.Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/the-fox-in-the-forest/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/the-fox-in-the-forest/A trick-taking game for exactly two, with a small deck, fairy-tale art, and a scoring system that keeps you from ever fully pulling away.Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/essays/the-first-two-weeks-back-in-town/https://wesleyshideout.com/essays/the-first-two-weeks-back-in-town/Every October I come down off the mountain into Missoula and every October the same specific thing catches me off guard, five years running now.Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/a-gentleman-in-moscow/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/a-gentleman-in-moscow/A Bolshevik tribunal sentences Count Rostov to house arrest in a Moscow hotel for the rest of his life, and Amor Towles spends thirty years there with him. Charming company, though I wanted a little more weather in it.Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/the-martian/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/the-martian/Mark Watney gets left for dead on Mars and solves his way out of it one calculated problem at a time, which is close enough to how I spend a bad week up here that I read it in two sittings.Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/into-the-wild/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/into-the-wild/Krakauer's reconstruction of Chris McCandless's last months holds up better than the myth around it, mostly because Krakauer keeps arguing with his own sympathy.Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTBooksWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/essays/the-day-the-mule-comes/https://wesleyshideout.com/essays/the-day-the-mule-comes/One packstring, once a season, up the same 4-mile trail, and how much a person can look forward to fresh onions when they've been gone eight weeks.Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonalWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/wild/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/wild/Cheryl Strayed hikes eleven hundred miles of the Pacific Crest Trail with a pack too heavy and boots too small, mostly to outrun her own life. I've got professional opinions about the pack weight.Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTBooksWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/essays/the-storm-that-kept-me-on-the-stool/https://wesleyshideout.com/essays/the-storm-that-kept-me-on-the-stool/A dry lightning storm in my third season, six hours on the insulated stool with the legs pulled in, and the strike I watched hit the ridge across the drainage.Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTPersonalWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/essays/the-week-i-counted-the-logs/https://wesleyshideout.com/essays/the-week-i-counted-the-logs/Nine days of low cloud and zero visibility in my first season, and the increasingly ridiculous ways I found to fill hours that had nothing to watch.Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTPersonalWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/santorini/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/santorini/A clean abstract about building and climbing towers that plays well two-player, though the plastic pieces are a genuinely bad idea to carry four miles.Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTBoard GamesWesley Harthttps://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/the-road/https://wesleyshideout.com/reviews/the-road/A father and son push a shopping cart south through a burned country with nothing left in it, and Cormac McCarthy strips his sentences down to match. Not a book for a bad week alone in a tower, but I read it anyway.Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTBooksWesley Hart