Mount Colfax, a one thousand two hundred sixty-six-foot mountain in New York’s Capital District north of Cambridge, is best known for the former fire lookout tower that still stands on its summit. The Conservation Department built the eighty-foot Aermotor LS40 steel tower in 1950, and it began operating in 1951. During its first year, observers reported twenty-three fires and logged seven hundred fifty visitors. Fire lookout service on the mountain ended after the 1970 season as aerial detection became more common, but the tower survives as a reminder of the region’s mid-twentieth-century system for monitoring forest fires.