This year has been bad for fires. I've never seen it this bad. We had record rain and snow this winter and spring. Apparently, there was a ton of growth from all that precipitation and then it all dried out. The forest fires and smoke have been unbelievable. We are basically surrounded by huge forest fires in every direction from British Columbia, Montana, Oregon, and Western Washington. Whatever way the wind blows, we get smoke. Then, we've been getting weird inversions that just trap the smoke.
The first 2 weeks of August were horrible. We had 12 days straight of smoke. We didn't see any sunshine or much blue sky. It went away for a couple of weeks and we thought we were in the clear when September started. NOPE!
We've had 8 days of the worst smoke I've ever seen in my life. It's so bad, people are supposed to wear masks outside. The kids are actually being kept inside for indoor recess. That is unbelievable. Never have kids been kept inside before for bad air quality!!! The only time they are kept in is if it's really rainy or really cold.
We don't have any trees around here so no forest fires right in our backyard. However, everything is still dry and areas not irrigated are prone to fire. We had a weird thunderstorm roll through early Friday morning. It didn't drop much rain, but it did include lightning. Around 2 am, lightning struck the mountain just south of our house. The kids and I had no idea and just slept through it. Jeremy watched it from work 15 miles away. The homes right near by were evacuated. We are an irrigated hay field and several streets away so we were fine. Jeremy took these pictures when he came home at 4 am. I woke up at 4 when he got home and thought the house was on fire or the wildfire smoke had gotten really bad. Nope! It was just the fact the mountain was on fire. The smell was just seeping in through all the doors and windows. It was horrible. We woke the kids up so they could see the fires raging across the mountain. We knew they would want to see it. They went right back to sleep. I never went back to sleep.
By 7 am when the kids got up for school, the fire had burned its way across the whole mountain. It was completely black. We'd always joked that everything in our neighborhood was brown. The houses, fences, and mountain was brown. Well, now we have a new color! The mountain looks like it's continually in the shade now.
Nathan said several of his classmates had to evacuate so they were very tired at school all day Friday.
Here are the pictures Jeremy took from our house when he got home at 4.
Friday morning, the smoke finally cleared out! They say we will have good air quality for the weekend. However, next week, another inversion is going to start and the smoke from all the fires will settle in again. The kids and I biked down to look at the black mountain on Friday night.
You can see in this picture how Badger Mountain off to the left is still it's normal brown color. Candy Mountain is black!
We're having a nice Saturday here. Smoke is gone, it's sunny with blue skies, and it's supposed to be 92 degrees! Off to play at the pool! This is the last weekend the pool is open and it looks like we'll have warm weather and low amounts of smoke. Thank goodness!
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