![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Driving Home through 150 Miles of Smoke
Jul. 29th, 2024 08:41 pmSunday was the last day of our two-day weekend trip to the Trinity Alps in northern California. I'm backlogged on writing about the hiking we did over the weekend, but here I want to catch up on something else: the smoke from the massive Park Fire burning near Chico, California.
We started our day in Yreka, California. It's a town of about 3,000 people just 25 miles south of the Oregon border.
The town's so small we spotted a deer strolling through the hotel parking lot when we were packing our car at 8:30am. But notice also in this picture how clear the sky is. Yreka is about 140 miles away from the Park Fire. Oh, and there are a lot of mountains in between them, too. Like 14,180' Mt. Shasta.
Southwest of Yreka the sky wasn't so clear. We headed down toward the Trinity Alps with a day of hiking planned, but as we got to Fort Jones, just 20 miles away, we could see a wall of smoke ahead of us. That wouldn't have been smoke from the Park Fire... it was smoke from various fires burning in southern Oregon. We decided to pull the plug on the Trinity Alps and try a pair of shorter hikes further south.
Our next stop was in Weed. Yes, there's a town called Weed, California, pop. 3,000. Yes, it's the one famous for the road signs "WEED: NEXT 3 EXITS".
We did a hike about 15 miles northeast out of Weed. Down here the sky was clearer than in Fort Jones though not as clear as up in Yreka. There was haze low to the ground.
After that hike and driving back through Weed we continued south on I-5 toward home. Smoke in the air increased as we reached Lake Shasta. It got thicker as we dropped down out of the mountains into Redding, California, where we stopped for a late lunch. There we could not only smell all the smoke in the air but practically taste it.
Thick smoke continued with us quite a ways south of Redding. The last photo above is from near Corning, California. It's just before 4pm in the afternoon. You can see how thick the smoke is all around us and how it limits visibility. At this point we'd been driving through smoke for 80 miles— and would continue to see (and smell, and taste) it around us for another 70 miles or so.
Compare this to the smoke cloud we driving through here on Friday night. It was a single, if large, cloud on the horizon. On Sunday afternoon, less than 48 hours later, it stretched over 150 miles across.
We started our day in Yreka, California. It's a town of about 3,000 people just 25 miles south of the Oregon border.
The town's so small we spotted a deer strolling through the hotel parking lot when we were packing our car at 8:30am. But notice also in this picture how clear the sky is. Yreka is about 140 miles away from the Park Fire. Oh, and there are a lot of mountains in between them, too. Like 14,180' Mt. Shasta.
Southwest of Yreka the sky wasn't so clear. We headed down toward the Trinity Alps with a day of hiking planned, but as we got to Fort Jones, just 20 miles away, we could see a wall of smoke ahead of us. That wouldn't have been smoke from the Park Fire... it was smoke from various fires burning in southern Oregon. We decided to pull the plug on the Trinity Alps and try a pair of shorter hikes further south.
Our next stop was in Weed. Yes, there's a town called Weed, California, pop. 3,000. Yes, it's the one famous for the road signs "WEED: NEXT 3 EXITS".
We did a hike about 15 miles northeast out of Weed. Down here the sky was clearer than in Fort Jones though not as clear as up in Yreka. There was haze low to the ground.
After that hike and driving back through Weed we continued south on I-5 toward home. Smoke in the air increased as we reached Lake Shasta. It got thicker as we dropped down out of the mountains into Redding, California, where we stopped for a late lunch. There we could not only smell all the smoke in the air but practically taste it.
Thick smoke continued with us quite a ways south of Redding. The last photo above is from near Corning, California. It's just before 4pm in the afternoon. You can see how thick the smoke is all around us and how it limits visibility. At this point we'd been driving through smoke for 80 miles— and would continue to see (and smell, and taste) it around us for another 70 miles or so.
Compare this to the smoke cloud we driving through here on Friday night. It was a single, if large, cloud on the horizon. On Sunday afternoon, less than 48 hours later, it stretched over 150 miles across.
