Where Did the Mountains Go?

We’ve been tolerating smoke from surrounding forest fires for weeks now, but never so much as the past couple of days. It cloaks the surrounding mountains and the smell permeates everything. Lungs labor to breathe, eyes itch and water, throats go dry and scratchy. Even the animals are coughing and sneezing. There is a constant, eerie haze that blocks out most of the sun, and even though the temperatures are finally tolerable, most folks stay inside because any activity causes respiratory stress. I wake up in the morning to the smell of it and go to bed at night feeling like I'm surrounded by one giant campfire.


These two photos were taken from the exact same spot along the river just outside of town. The first was taken earlier this summer, and the second taken just today. No color enhancements have been made - the air really is brown right now...

Just about this time of year we start getting light dustings of snow high in the surrounding mountains, cooler daytime temperatures and noticeably colder weather at night. This seemingly drastic change helps to calm the forest fires and brings much needed relief to the fire fighters. This year however - particularly this week, the temps are in the high 70s to mid 80s, and only down to the mid 40s to low 50s at night. They say we're not going to see any improvement in the air quality until (quite possibly) mid October! So we have three to four more weeks of this mess. The best we can do to tolerate it is to keep from doing any escessive outdoor activities. Keeping the smoke out of the house is near impossible, it creeps in from everywhere.


The only (somewhat) positive note in all of this is that at least these fires, for the most part, are not close by. While there is one fire about 50 miles south of us, most of them are in neighboring states, Idaho and Washington to be exact. On the down side, most of the air currents from both of these states move east off the ocean - right into western Montana.

The entire area is relatively quiet. Drove onto Blue Mountain this afternoon, and where there is usually a large crowd of hikers, dog walkers, folf players and the like – I had the entire mountain pretty much to myself. In a way it was nice, but the fact that all of the smoke makes it difficult to breathe, I chose not to stay and headed home after a couple of photos of the surrounding mountains – or lack thereof.

There seems to be a trend in the past decade or so, that we have these nasty forest fires every three years. 1997, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2009 and 2012 were all bad fire years. Sure would be interesting to know what's causing this pattern.