Will summer in the Far West be smoky forever??

[profdant139]

Before the bark beetle hit the West so powerfully, we would go on one or two boondocking trips per summer, mostly in the highest parts of the Sierra, mostly to escape the heat. This was in the 2005 to 2010 timeframe.

But the during the last several years, we have either had to cancel because of the smoke, or else we have had to pack up and leave early because of the smoke. It's not that we are super-sensitive to air pollution -- we both grew up in LA, for heaven's sake.

Each year, we keep hoping that this year's smoke festival is an aberration. Or at the very least, that the fires will run out of fuel. But we are not seeing any meaningful reduction in the problem.

The same thing -- chased out by the smoke -- has happened to us in Idaho, and in Wyoming, and Montana, and central Washington, and Oregon.

Is there any hope? Or should we just give up on summertime air quality??

Note that I am emphatically not linking this situation to global warming. The huge swathes of trees killed by invasive bark beetles are what they are. Reasonable minds can differ as to why the beetles arrived, why they have survived the winters, why the trees are so vulnerable to beetles during drought, etc. None of that matters much -- the fires are real.

My focus is much narrower -- is this going to end, or is smoke the new normal?

[2oldman]

That's gorgeous.

[mrw8i]

pnichols wrote:

mrw8i wrote:
Didn't last long. High temperatures at high altitude in the Sierras melted it away during the summer.

... And hopefully that melted High Sierra snowpack will produce enough hydraulic water pressure to recharge the deep water channels feeding our Santa Cruz mountains.

I'm getting tired of our home's spring and well supplies dwindling down to practically nothing every fall. 😉

The central coast mountain range is the hardest hit area in this drought. You don't import water like the rest of the state.

[anutami]

Bummed last week the Ferguson Fire smoke choked us out @ Leavitt Lake...took the whole week off work only to get 2 days up there camping 😞 we headed further south into Red's Meadow and it wasn't much better, then went into little lakes area near Tom's Place and it was clear finally!! Not many places you can go that havn't been affected by fire damage

[Tvov]

I keep reading about wildfires having to "burn off old fuel", all the underbrush and debris on the forest floor. I have been reading about that for decades, at least 30 years.

How long will it take? Back in about the early '80s, firefighting efforts were reduced to allow more "natural" wildfires to burn off fuel. This was back about the time of the massive fires in Yellowstone (might have been Yosemite? It was a big national park). The firefighters intentionally let sections burn. Has it worked?

[tragusa3]

Are we seeing the same weather patterns and fire conditions on other continents? Or is it a unique problem to our country?

[pnichols]

mrw8i wrote:
Didn't last long. High temperatures at high altitude in the Sierras melted it away during the summer.

... And hopefully that melted High Sierra snowpack will produce enough hydraulic water pressure to recharge the deep water channels feeding our Santa Cruz mountains.

I'm getting tired of our home's spring and well supplies dwindling down to practically nothing every fall. 😉

[mrw8i]

After years of drought, California 2017 snow pack was one of the largest ever recorded. Didn't last long. High temperatures at high altitude in the Sierras melted it away during the summer. Welcome to what might be the new norm.

[ORbiker]

snowpeke wrote:
I have plans for Oregon in a couple of weeks and I am not canceling.

Where to?

The big fire up in North central Oregon is controlled. The Medford, Roseburg area is smoked in pretty good. Eugene area (where I live) is getting a little smoke from the Southern Oregon fires today for the first time this year.

The fires are a month early this year. KEN

[Naio]

@snowpeke:

Looks pretty good so far:

https://www.airnow.gov/index.cfm?action=airnow.local_state&stateid=49

[snowpeke]

I have plans for Oregon in a couple of weeks and I am not canceling.

[Naio]

"Native Americans were a much more important ignition source than lightning throughout the eastern USA, except for the extreme Southeast."

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0959683608095581

Indians created the prairies, too:

"most ecologists now believe that the eastern prairies "would have mostly disappeared if it had not been for the nearly annual burning of these grasslands by the North American Indians," during the last 5,000 years. A case in point is the nineteenth-century invasion of many grasslands by forests after fire had been suppressed in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and elsewhere"

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~alcoze/for398/class/pristinemyth.html

They also had cities, farmed and bred crops...

[time2roll]

Yes it will be smoky for a long time. Possibly the next hundred years. The combination of less rainfall and more forest management has created a new normal. Not to mention more intentionally destructive or careless people starting additional fires.
JMHO

[pnichols]

Hmmmm.

But Dan, did the Native Americans periodically set fire to their woods so it would be easier to hunt, or so their forests would not burn down so much?

I'll go along with you and bet that it was so that it would be easier for them to hunt. Destructive fire from lightning strikes in heavily overgrown woods was probably not a big destroyer (percentage-wise) of their woods.

Based on how things in this Earth usually go with ever-increasing human population, I'm merely pontificating on human activities being responsible for more than 50% of our forest fires. I'd like to see some solid statistics on human-versus-natural causes of our U.S. forest fires, as I could be completely wrong.

[profdant139]

Actually, Phil, that is a funny story -- it turns out that the Indians DID manage the forests. They would periodically set fire to it, in order to thin the understory, so it was easier to hunt.

So when the English came over in the early 1600s, it looked like a park -- they were amazed! They did not know why the forests looked that way, but they were delighted.

Then the Indians were essentially exterminated -- disease and war and so forth. No one was setting the fires anymore. The woods were choked with underbrush. The settlers and their descendants were puzzled.

I'm not saying "light it all on fire," but it turns out that managed forests are less likely to experience the occasional catastrophic mega-fire.