Take Wing Event: Cerro Pelado Fire Lookout

Take wing with PEEC at one of our special Take Wing events.  These special events are offered as thank you gifts for donations to PEEC's capital campaign of $150 or more per person registering. To register, make a donation either online or by check to PEEC's capital campaign.  Once your donation is received, you will be emailed a link to the registration page for all the Take Wing events.  The hardest part?  Choosing just one event!  Please call us at 662-0460 if you experience any trouble registering.

Janie O'Rourke and Barb Zinn will lead a trip to the Cerro Pelado Lookout, a Forest Service fire lookout located in the Jemez Mountains.  The lookout is approximately 12 miles southwest of Los Alamos off of New Mexico State Road 4.  The Cerro Pelado Lookout was once part of a system of ranger stations and fire lookouts built to help protect trees in the national forest from destructive fires.  Soon after the creation of the Jemez Forest Reserve by Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, work commenced on building permanent fire lookouts on strategic peaks in the Jemez Mountains.  By 1914, Cerro Pelado was the primary lookout for the Cochiti District, one of the early ranger districts in the Jemez Forest.  Cerro Pelado continues to function a working lookout to this day.

Janie O'Rourke has been hiking the Jemez Mountains documenting the forest service telephone line, ranger stations and lookouts in the Jemez Mountains for over ten years.  Barb Zinn, a Park Ranger for most of her career, is currently working as the lookout on Barillas Peak in the Santa Fe National Forest.  Barb and is researching the historic fire lookouts for the entire Santa Fe National Forest. She has been a lookout for 27 years, including in Glacier NP, Dinosaur NM, S. Kaibab NF, Mesa Verde NP.

During the early days of the Forest Service, the fire guard, or lookout, typically slept in a tent on the peak and had little more equipment than a map board for locating fires and a phone to report them.  When smoke was detected, the fire guard was expected to ride out on his horse with a pick and shovel and put out the fire himself.  Later, elevated structures or towers replaced the earlier cabins and map boards on the primary peaks.  These new fire lookouts were equipped with fire finding alidades - the Osborne Fire Finder - and wrap around windows opening out to a 360-degree view.  While the fire lookout infrastructure expanded rapidly throughout the 1930s and 1940s, after World War II modern technology made fire detection less reliant on the old lookout system.  By the 1980s many of the lookout structures were decommissioned and even removed.  

However, the lookout on Cerro Pelado continues to be staffed by men and women whose job it is to report forest fires.  Our visit to Cerro Pelado Lookout we will include going into the lookout, seeing the panoramic fire-lookout views, and learning the technique of triangulation using the old Osborne Fire Finder.  

We will leave PEEC (in Los Alamos) at 9:00 AM.  We will drive directly to the Cerro Pelado Lookout.  Car travel time is approximately 1-1/2 hours one way.  Although the Forest Road sections are steep, they can be driven by most passenger cars - however a higher clearance than a Prius is probably best.

From 10:30 to noon we will tour the lookout.  Weather permitting, after our visit to Cerro Pelado Lookout we will hike to Los Griegos Peak - a secondary lookout associated with the Cerro Pelado LO and located about one mile north of Cerro Pelado.  Our hike begins west of the saddle between the two peaks.  The distance from the trailhead to the saddle is approximately 1 mile and then a steep 1/2 mile to the top of Los Griegos.  The hike to the top has a total elevation gain of 1000 feet. The hike is moderate to difficult because of the elevation gain. The elevation at the top of both Cerro Pelado and Los Griegos is about 10,115 feet.

We will get back to our cars at about 3:00 PM. We should return to PEEC by 5:30.