Fire tower at summit of Bearfort Mountain on the New Jersey Highlands Trail in West Milford.

The federal and most state governments stopped staffing many of the 8,200 fire lookouts located in the United States in favor of aerial and satellite observation. New Jersey continues to staff their fire lookouts with full-time state employees.

New Jersey has twenty one fire lookout towers in every major forest in the state. The fire towers are used throughout the summer forest fire season. Because of the recent drought in New Jersey, fire lookouts have been staffed througout the winter also. Every year nearly 10,000 acres burn in about 2,000 forest fires in New Jersey.

2002 is the 100th anniversary of forest fire lookouts in the United States. The career was "invented" in Bertha Hill, Idaho when a timber camp cook was commissioned to sit in a tree on a hilltop to watch for wildfires. Author Jack Kerouac and Poet Allen Ginsberg sought the seclusion of fire lookout jobs in the northwest United States to pursue their writing careers. Over the last few years, most firetowers were abandoned, vandalized or ironically, burnt down. A few towers in scenic locations are rented to tourists. The hasty demise of most of the fire towers was slowed by the realization that people in fire towers are cheaper and more reliable than the high tech solution of airplanes and satellite imagery.

- "As Forest Homes Rise, Keen Eyes Seek Smoke", Blaine Harden, The New York Times, May 26, 2002