Kelly Butte Lookout is located on the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest roughly  25 miles northeast of Mount Rainier. The trail begins on an old logging road, then switchbacks steeply amid rock towers and outcroppings, before leveling out and climbing gently through green meadows to the top of the ridgeline and the lookout. In the summer months, the hillsides and meadows are full of wildflowers including Indian Paintbrush, Columbine, Lupine, Phlox, and more. On a clear day, the panoramic views from the lookout include Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, and Mount Stuart, among other peaks in the Cascade Range.

The first lookout on this site was a cupola cabin built in 1926. It was replaced in 1950 with an L-4 cabin and staffed into the 1980’s. During World War II while the majority of adult men were away fighting, the Forest Service recruited teenage boys from local high schools to staff fire lookouts in the summer. One such teenager was John Sandor, who was only 16 when he spent the summer of 1943 as the lookout on Kelly Butte. As one of eight children, Sandor had watched his mother cook dinner many times and thought he would have no trouble preparing food for himself. His first night in the lookout, however, he remembers his attempt at cooking spaghetti turned into a “gluey glob of sticky pasta noodles in the shape of a cooking-pot.”

After Kelly Butte Lookout was abandoned by the Forest Service in the 1980’s, it began to fall into disrepair and was further damaged by vandalism. In 2007, a group of volunteers led by Bob Adler began a restoration project of the lookout that lasted for 5 years, culminating in a re-opening dedication and volunteer appreciation ceremony in 2011. Today the Kelly Butte Lookout is staffed by volunteers on most weekends from July-September, and the door to the lookout is often unlocked for visitors, even when it’s not being staffed.