After working almost 20 summers for the US Forest Service, mostly as a wildland firefighter, the author became an Aerial Observer on the Willamette National Forest in Oregon. Each story in this book of short stories is an account of an incident that happened during the years he was an Observer.

This book uses almost 100 photographs to illustrate some of the author's memories from a job in which he looked for wildfire smoke during the late 1980s.

There are photographs of lookouts, small fires, and aircraft. There are photographs of large fires with awesome flame lengths. There are beautiful pictures of mountains, lakes and forest. Fire lookout structures are captured from many angles.

One could enjoy this book by only looking at pictures. The scenery they flew over is spectacular, from majestic peaks like 10,495 foot Mt. Jefferson in the north to the Calapooya Mountains over 100 miles to the south. In between are the Three Sisters and many smaller but appealing peaks.