@thistlebloom that's too close. And that is a bad feeling, both for those directly affected and for those in the possible pathway. I pray for rain for you.
We got rain last night, AND a dusting of snow on the peaks in Glacier. Soooooo much better here today, washed out all our smoke and put a bit of a damper on the fires. Hwy 2 on the south side of Glacier Natl park was closed due to fire activity for a few days, and has reopened. With that highway closed, if you were driving anything longer than 21' and couldn't drive the Going to the Sun road in the park, the detour was 6 hours long. No joke!
I'm sure we'll get smoke again, there are at least 11 major fires burning in NW Montana, some several hundred acres, some are tens of thousands. BUT its a beautiful day today!
It was wretched yesterday afternoon. Never saw the sun ... Throat sore, eyes red, nose runs continuously .. A blue sky at dawn! . but, I can smell smoke everywhere, on everything.
Thermometer dropped to 48° this morning. Anything to cool the fever ..!
I used to work for a bluegrass farmer on the Rathdrum Prairie, here. Almost a required practice to get good seed harvests was to burn fields every fall. Wheat stubble was also often burned.
The public complaints and monitoring began to increase as the population increased. A Rathdrum woman with asthma died and it was determined that field smoke contributed to her death.
To take the pressure off the farmers, the ID legislature, in its wisdom, decided that monitoring the smoke would be curtailed. The federal EPA promptly shut it all down.
Anyway, the amount of smoke reminds me of those bad-old-days, 30 or 40 years ago. On a brighter note, only one Chinese city had worse air than Spokane, yesterday ...