About this book:

High in the North Cascades, ten miles of rugged wilderness separate two fire lookouts—and the men who occupy them. It's 1993, and Jim has spent twelve seasons in the glass-walled solitude of Desolation Peak, content with silence, routine, and the crackle of the radio. Then Vance arrives on Copper Mountain: twenty-six, bright-eyed, and broadcasting his every thought across the district net. He laughs at his own mistakes, waves across the canyon like a fool, and refuses to let the mountain's isolation harden him.

What begins as grudging mentorship over the radio—weather reports, goat warnings, midnight troubleshooting of a squeaky shutter—slowly becomes the only conversation that matters. Jim finds himself staying up past schedule, waiting for that warm voice to cut through the static. Vance reads the barometer wrong but reads Jim perfectly, chipping away at decades of armor with nothing but terrible jokes and genuine curiosity.

As the season turns dry and lightning stitches the horizon, the professional distance between towers becomes impossible to maintain. *The Lookout's Season* is a slow-burn romance forged in altitude and quiet, where every shared frequency, supply drop, and smoke column draws two men closer across a canyon that might as well be an ocean—until the fire comes, and the only thing that matters is hearing each other's voice through the dark.