Farragut Fire

I know, I know. For the past few days, my posts have been about nothing but the fires and smoke in the Pacific Northwest. This is no different, but rest assured, I have other subjects I plan to cover. It's just that the perpetual brownness and difficulty of breathing mean the fires occupy my mind the most right now.

Yesterday, I drove over to Farragut State Park near Bayview, Idaho on Lake Pend Oreille. A couple years ago, I tried to organize a Steemit meetup there. It's well south of the Garfield Bay campground I visited earlier in the summer, but it is the same general geography. However, the smoke made everything seem surreal.

The photo above is from the end of the sandy peninsula at the south edge of Beaver Bay Beach swimming area. Nobody else was there. The water was almost perfectly still. There was no perceptible breeze, and everything was silent. I heard one surprisingly loud splash of a fish leaping from the water, but all I saw was the ring of ripples it made, disturbing the almost mirror-like reflections.

Looking eastward, the brown smoke seems to swallow the wooded slope across the bay. The furthest I can see is perhaps half a mile again today.

I then headed for the picnic pavilion where I had previously met up with the families of @generikat, @crowbarmama, and @scribblingramma. Here, there were deer staring at my intrusion. I walked to the water's edge and took a few shots across the lake where the hillside loomed faintly through the haze. I could hear a boat on the water, but its appearance out of the obscuring brown smoke almost startled me. Since my phone's photography is less than spectacular, I chose this shot to share once it approached closer to the beach where I was standing.

I saw none of the fire itself, although somewhere thataway, it is still raging. Despite the poor visibility, I hoped to see something more like this:

But no, all I got was a nasty cough from the polluted air I was breathing. The hike up from the beach back to the parking area at the pavilion was far harder than it should have been, and I was gasping for air like an asthmatic from very little actual exertion.

Rumor has it this fire was started by boaters who built a campfire on a remote beach, and it got out of hand. Another in the area was likely due to the windstorm that knocked out power last week when many trees were blown down into power lines. A third small fire was put out a few days ago before it could grow beyond a few acres, but I do not know what started it. The firefightere have been working around the clock to ensure as little damage as possible, but the season suddenly went from calm to crazy, and they are stretched thin trying to handle everything.

Perhaps I will post something completely different tomorrow. Meanwhile, stay safe.