No Photoshop tricks here, just one awfully hot day. This was the temperature at 2:30 PM today. And it was windy, to boot. Perfect weather for a totally uncontrollable wildfire. I’ll bet everyone in our little valley is peering out the window every few minutes, looking for smoke. I sure am!
9 comments:
Wet everything down! Stay inside! Yikes!
I'm thinking of you over there - hope you DON'T see smoke. I'm with Hil.
Susan, smoke is most of our atmosphere here. I can't see the mountains that define the valley. Visibility is reduced because of the fires way over there on the coast where thousands of houses are at risk. If we get a fire here, we're at a very low priority for protection due to our boonie-ness (bush-ness). It would actually be good if most of our area burned, since that is the way nature set it up. We have distorted the way things work here, and it isn't working. Blame a man, the first Forest Service Chief, Gifford Pinchot, for the disastrous situation we're in nationwide. He was an idiot who said all wildfires should be suppressed. This created a huge understory of trees and brush that carried a normal little fire clear into the crowns of the big old trees, and destroyed entire forests. He is the source of a terrible policy that continues and will destroy most of the forests in the United States.
We're holding our breath, Tom. Pleases let us know if anything happens. That's just the kind of situation that leads some idiot to do something idiotic. Wish you had our weather--partly cloudy, coastal fog, low temp.
Thanks for the extra info. I had never heard of Gifford Pinchot. Sorry to hear he set such a policy in place. How on Earth did he justify that.
We get bushfires here too that destroy whole towns. Our bush isn't as dense as your boonies, but it sure doesn't take much to burn down a house or two or a thousand.
Take care - am holding my breath for you too.
Susan—he justified it because wildfires kill baby birds and raccoons and cute things! Also at that time the logging industry actually existed in National Forests, and they thought they were protecting that investment. Now very little logging is allowed (at least in our area) and it's grown out of control. It's scary, even up our way at the high ranch.
At the high ranch the weeds of the forest are the lodgepole or tamarack pines. They are similar to the digger or bull pine down in the foothills in that some of them retain their very first branches forever. They jut out from the trunks just barely above ground level and grow big then die. The trees have built-in ladder fuel!
Hilary, how stupid have people become. If everything (even if it's cute) in nature lived, we would be overrrun with critters anyway. If the logging pattern has changed then there's no 'investment' to protect and isn't it time to revisit the burn off policy?
Tom, that sounds really scary about the lodgepole/tamarack pines. Sounds like nature's way of making sur forest fires happen to me.
I hope the weather eases off for you soon, though I can see it will be just a temporary reprieve...hope you are doing alright today.
This is an interesting bunch of comments. It is sort of people-centric, if you get my drift. Believe me, I hate to see some of the mess that is going on, a mixture of what is Natural, and also what is also natural, namely people doing stuff, stupid or otherwise. If you factor in both Nature and People I guess this is what you should expect. Or is this comment stupid?
(Sorry, just a sort of can-of-worms or chicken-or-the-egg type of question.)
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