Philip Connors

Philip Connors talks about leaving his job as an editor at the Wall Street Journal to take a job as one of the last fire lookouts in America, spending nearly half the year in a 7' x 7' tower, 10,000 feet above sea level in remote New Mexico. Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout is about his job to keep watch over one of the most fire-prone forests in the country and sound the alarm at the first sign of smoke. It’s also a reflection on work, the power of nature, our place in the wild, and the charms of solitude.

Every day between April and August, Philip Connors climbs a 55-foot tower and settles into a 7-by-7 foot enclosed platform for the next eight hours. The tower is in the Gila National Forest of New Mexico, and his duty while there, is to look out for fires. But while Gila receives more than thirty thousand lightening strikes per year, Connors’s job is actually closer to Walden Pond than reality TV. Alone with nature, and his thoughts, he enjoys solitude, freedom and independence — independence which surely helped him complete a new book called “Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout.”