People & Culture
In an age of advancing technologies, the art and science of watching for wildfires from lookouts is fading away. But fire lookout Bart Vanderlinde watches on.
There is something to see in all directions, if you know what to look for — and Bart Vanderlinde does. Beyond infinite shades of green and ever-changing clouds, Sinkut Mountain, B.C., is a vantage point to find more than beautiful views. Vanderlinde finds fires.
As a kid, Vanderlinde wanted to be a forest ranger, even if he didn’t quite know what that meant. His family had emigrated from Holland to Canada, and Vanderlinde grew up in Fort St. John, B.C., which he points northwards at from where he sits on Sinkut Mountain.
The Sinkut fire lookout is roughly 22 kilometres south of Vanderhoof, B.C., on Saik’uz First Nation territory, at an elevation of almost 1500 metres. The two-storey building, painted a now-peeling dark green, juts out at the peak of the crag. The top floor features a 360-degree view with windows on all sides and a wraparound balcony. From up on the hill, wearing cargo shorts and a navy shirt, Vanderlinde, 71, surveys this now-familiar landscape from behind square-rimmed glasses and a bushy grey moustache.
At 19 years old, Vanderlinde was offered his first summer job in forestry at the Blueberry fire lookout, near Dawson Creek, B.C. After fulfilling his childhood dreams of working as a forest ranger, Vanderlinde’s retirement led him back to where it all started: working as a fire lookout.
“I enjoyed it so much when I was 19 that I said ‘why not?’” Vanderlinde chuckles. “Eight years later, I’m still here. So much for career planning! Fifty-two years later and I’m still doing the same job.” But now Vanderlinde is the last regular fire lookout in British Columbia.
Since Vanderlinde first set his eyes on the horizon, much has changed. The Sinkut lookout was built in 1927, when fire detection and technology were drastically different than they are today. British Columbia used to have some 300 active lookouts in a vast network across the province. Fire watchers sat atop these mountain seats, scanning the landscape for the faintest blur of smoke or glimmer of a flame.
As technology advanced, B.C.’s wildfire service sought to make fire detection more efficient, using infrared technology, predictive software and air patrols. The ongoing development of roads and cell phone connectivity has also enabled more members of the public to report fires from these high places. In 2024, only one summer after the most destructive wildfire season in the province’s history, this former network of lookouts is active in just a few online groups of enthusiasts who keep track of them for hiking and recreation purposes.
Vanderlinde now represents one of the last vestiges not just of fire watching but of a way of life. Aside from numbers and efficiency, the job is also about pride, he explains. If there is a fire in your area as a lookout, “you’d better be the first one to report it, or you sure want to be. You don’t want someone to beat you to the punchline asking, ‘what were you doing? Sleeping?’”
Fire watchers sat atop these mountain seats, scanning the landscape for the faintest blur of smoke or glimmer of a flame.
Vanderlinde carries a machete in one hand and bear spray in the other as he leaves his stoop on the hill to venture to the nearby outhouse. These precautions are both necessary and part of what could seem a quirky lifestyle, as Vanderlinde would be the first to tell you. His education is from the school of hard knocks. Aside from nearby wildlife, he knows the public road could lead anyone to the lookout at all hours of the day or night.
Vanderlinde’s life on the lookout during fire season (usually late June to the end of August) typically runs 14 days at a time, depending on weather, with quick stints home to Prince George where he lives with his wife. During that fire-watching fortnight, Vanderlinde works and lives at the lookout.
In each direction, Vanderlinde can see as far as 80 to 90 kilometres across a majestic expanse of forest, lakes and distant slopes. Between the lookout and the horizon, visibility varies depending on the surrounding terrain, with certain blind spots that fall into valleys and out of sight.
From 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Vanderlinde scans the sky on behalf of the B.C. Wildfire Service, playing a piece in the multifaceted puzzle of fire detection. The weather doesn’t care much for these hours, and the job can extend beyond the clock. Vanderlinde doesn’t mind though. “I just like being outdoors.”
While spotting a fire’s exact location is what the role comes down to, a lot of his time is spent daydreaming. In between the long stretches of silence, the job is about “bearing and distance, bearing and distance,” Vanderlinde says — taking bearings, measuring distance and tracing coordinates onto a map. To break up the quiet, every four hours Vanderlinde calls in for a safety check and sends along weather information like relative humidity, temperature, wind speed and barometric pressure.
The job of a lookout isn’t to stare mindlessly into the distance, Vanderlinde explains, but knowing what to look for. “The trick is that you’re looking for something different. You’re not looking for smoke; you’re looking for something different on the landscape.” Knowing his surroundings intimately is vital. He needs to be familiar with nearby forest service roads where vehicles visibly kick up clouds of dust along the road. Knowing the sometimes subtle difference between dust, vapour and smoke could be the difference between a genuine and a false alarm.
Several years ago, “all of a sudden, my arm got really warm and the hair started sticking up from static. You could smell the ozone,” recalls Vanderlinde. Knowing lightning produces ozone, he stumbled indoors. Indeed, as he fell through the doorway, Vanderlinde saw a flash from the corner of his eye as the lower part of Sinkut Mountain was struck by lightning in the wake of a storm.
Once Vanderlinde finds something noteworthy in the distance, he pulls out the binoculars passed down to him by his grandfather, Nicolaas DeWit. Vanderlinde prefers these to the newer pair he has stowed away in his bag for backup.
When he identifies a fire, the next step is to work out the exact location of the fire and to relay that information to the wildfire service. He determines the location of the fire using the fire finder or using a theodolite app on his iPad (although he prefers the old-fashioned way). To the untrained eye, the fire finder tool looks like an antique: a metal disc welded onto a wooden cabinet with a scope on top. It is undoubtedly the centrepiece of the lookout. At the base of the tool is a 360-degree map with Sinkut lookout marked at the centre.
Vanderlinde rotates the eyepiece above the map, lining up the fire in the crosshairs. He then finds the bearing on the fire finder map and estimates the distance, which he double checks on a second nearby map. Once noting the exact location, he relays the information by radio.
One of Vanderlinde’s main responsibilities is to monitor the skies when storms are forecast, in case of lightning-caused fires. According to the B.C. Wildfire Service, from 2012 to 2022 around 58 per cent of fires were sparked by lightning, while the rest were caused by people. The Sinkut lookout is equipped with lightning rods and surrounded by wire at the base that serves as a grounding mechanism in case of a lightning strike. But now that B.C.’s wildfire service subscribes to and relies on a lightning detection service from Environment Canada, it requires lightning lookouts less and less.
The Sinkut lookout was remodelled in the 1950s, and minor updates continue as needed. Its location and track record of finding fires is why it is the only regularly staffed lookout in British Columbia. Beyond technological advancements, the cost of upkeep to the hundreds of lookouts scattered around the province and the safety of lookout personnel are among the reasons why active fire lookouts are fading into obscurity.
The job of a lookout isn’t to stare mindlessly into the distance.
Outside his 12-hour shifts, Vanderlinde’s time on the lookout is spent much the same as when he’s on duty. On the first floor, there’s a stove, fridge and cupboard of snacks curated by his wife, including Dutch cookies to honour his family’s heritage. Vanderlinde says Sinkut’s electricity is a lookout luxury, along with wi-fi and cell service. In the past, there were few entertainment options beyond reading a good book and radio chatter with other lookouts from time to time.
Back in the day, Vanderlinde says, you’d be dropped off to work at your lookout with only yourself and a lunchbox radio. “It used to be, when all the lookouts were about 30 kilometres apart, an unwritten rule after 8 o’clock at night when things were quiet… the lookout guys would chatter. It would be the old telegraph line type of thing.” If you couldn’t hear the guy two lookouts away, Vanderlinde explains, the guy in the middle would relay the message back and forth. “Now it’s cell phones.”
The year 2023 was the last one Vanderlinde had another regular lookout to communicate with — Dianne Seyferth, 67, who was posted at the Kuyakuz lookout, a fly-in only lookout roughly 80 kilometres south of Sinkut Mountain. “Right from the start you knew she was a lookout person. There is this mentality or something there,” he says of Seyferth. “You can tell people who have done this job before… and you can tell who is good at it too, just by the way that they talk.”
Seyferth passed away in the summer of 2023, and Kuyakuz lookout has been vacant since. It’s uncertain whether a new regular fire watcher will be brought in.
This year marks Vanderlinde’s eighth season working at the Sinkut Lookout into his retirement. “There is nobody else out there doing the job. It gets… not lonely, but lonely in the fact that there is nobody to relate to,” he says, reminiscing about the changes he’s seen over his career. When asked about the rising concerns of fire season and its impact, Vanderlinde notes that the higher intensity of fire and greater area being burned are significant. Life on the lookout has given him lots of time to look for fires, and even more time to contemplate his life now that he is in his 70s.
Evidence of this contemplation is tucked away in the corner of the lookout in a Prince George Fire Centre notebook. Inside is a list of handwritten prompts and memories that Vanderlinde intends to pass on to his grandchildren. From a near-death experience working in aerial firefighting to family adventures in Hawaii, Vanderlinde has many tales to share of a life that hasn’t much bothered with the distinction between work and play in the mountains.
On the second-floor work desk, next to an old-school radio, sits a Bluetooth speaker that Vanderlinde pairs with his phone. Laughing, the man on the hill says he knows the perfect song (by the Beatles and later covered by Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66) that encapsulates life on the lookout:
Day after day
Alone on a hill
The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still.
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