A Montana Vacation in Smoke

So, a little background on me: I was born in Montana and still have family up there. My husband and I love it up in the Flathead Valley (near Glacier) and try to vacation there often. So, we decided to spend a week visiting friends and family before the semester starts back up.

Looking northwest from Main Street in Kalispell (technically, Sweet Peaks) on Tuesday, August 1st at 9 PM. The super red sunset was from all the smoke in the air.

Unfortunately, Montana has been really hot and dry this summer, and there are wildfire everywhere. Since smoke exposure is bad for your health, we didn't hike or camp like we were planning. We still had an amazing time and saw some sweet sunsets (see pic above), but the smoke is a sad situation and definitely reduced the visibility of all the beautiful scenery (see pic below). Another problem is that it isn't usually hot for so long, so a lot of people don't have air conditioning, and the smoke makes it indoors.

Looking north from Columbia Falls at Whitefish Mountain on (left) Tuesday, August 1 at 11 AM,  (middle) Thursday, August 3 at 6 PM, and (right) Saturday, August 5 at 10:30 AM. The mountains kept appearing and disappearing!

So, I'll give you an idea of the conditions there. Most of the fires are in western  Montana, around Missoula (although by the end of the week, we were getting smoke from Idaho, Washington, and British Columbia as well). We drove up through Seeley Lake on Saturday, July 30, 2017. It smelled like smoke and my eyes were burning. The Rice Ridge Fire (https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/5414/) was burning just west of Seeley Lake. They were on mandatory evacuation watch all last week, the lake was closed for recreational activities, and lot of the hiking trails were completely closed. It is still only 10% contained. Probably didn't help that they had to suspend aerial firefighting last week on Wednesday because someone was flying a drone.

HMS Smoke Plumes and Fires for July 30^th, July 31^st, August 1^st AM, August 1^st PM, August 2^nd, August 3^rd AM, and August 3^rd PM.

Concentrations definitely reached the unhealthy level for many towns in Montana. From the HMS plots, you can see smoke covering most of the state pretty much everyday of our vacation. It smelled like a campfire outside a lot of the time. I took allergy medicine everyday and had pretty itchy eyes. I had filled my inhaler prescription before I left, but luckily, I didn't have to use it (probably because we didn't do any vigorous outdoor activity). Anyway, here were the concentrations in the Flathead Valley, not nearly as high as down in Seeley Lake or other towns south of where we were (Columbia Falls/Whitefish/Kalispell), but still much above normal.

PM_2.5 concentrations recorded for the Flathead Valley monitor for July 30 through August 4, 2017. Data from http://svc.mt.gov/deq/todaysair/.