Oregon Update: The Smoke Continues

In my last post I wrote about how smokey it was from the fires burning in the park, and how much of a relief it was to take a trip to the coast to escape from it. Little did I know, that was just the beginning of our smoke problems. Since then, we have had many days that the smoke settled into the park and did not dissipate for a long time. Air quality has been so bad sometimes that we have spent the whole day doing office work instead of going out into the field, and even inside we could still smell the smoke. The amount of smoke in the air changes day to day, and even hour to hour, but for the past several weeks it has basically been fluctuating between various levels of terrible. Words can only go so far in describing the situation, so here are some pictures to help.

This was our view while driving to our work site the first day that the smoke was really bad. 

This is what greeted me when walking out my front door another one of the worst days.

Same day on my walk to work. There's a ridge about 1/4 mile away that is completely obscured by the smoke.

Looks like storm clouds, but in reality...you guessed it, smoke.

Sometimes the smoke makes the sun look a crazy red color and gives the light an eerie quality.

One day last week when we worked on the lake it was beautiful and clear...then we saw this rising from the other side of the caldera.

...and it just kept growing throughout the day.

We got out just in time that day. As we were hiking out we saw the cloud of smoke crawling towards us across the lake.

The next day on the way to the lake again, this is what that same view looked like. You'd never know there was a lake there. 

We could see the lake once we got down to it, but not very much of it. 

I was driving past one of the fires last weekend and it was growing quite rapidly. 

At the height of it, most of us were miserable most of the time. I started to feel trapped under the blanket of oppressive air that was difficult to breath and occasionally gave me headaches. The worst were the nights when I could smell the smoke while laying in bed trying to sleep with all the doors and windows closed. I wanted to get away from it, but basically the whole western half of Oregon is on fire right now, as well as many of the surrounding states, so there wasn't really anywhere we could go. We looked at satellite images of Oregon a couple weeks ago and it was insane; almost the whole state was covered in smoke! I felt even more trapped by the fact that I don't have a car, so I couldn't go anywhere unless other people were already going. All I wanted to do was get in a car and drive until the smoke lifted, but I couldn't. Thankfully over Labor Day weekend some of my coworkers decided to go to Portland so I was able to tag along. Portland had some fires nearby but the air quality was amazing compared to Crater Lake, so it was such a relief to get away for a few days. 

Luckily this weekend we finally got a reprieve. It's been beautiful and I've been much happier. I went for a 12-mile hike with my roommates and the smoke mostly stayed away the whole time, and when some did roll in it was so slight that I barely noticed. It was the best view of the lake I'd seen in probably 2 months. We also got to see a fire helicopter drop off supplies at the peak we hiked to, which was awesome!

Beautiful view from Watchman Lookout during our hike.

Helicopter circling, preparing to drop off supplies. You can see the smoke rising in the background from one of the fires. 

The helicopter descending almost directly overhead.

And now for a couple bonus pictures: the eclipse! I never wrote about that, but I ended up staying at the park instead of going several hours north to the path of totality with some of my coworkers. It just seemed like a lot of effort and I didn't want to deal with the traffic as everyone in Oregon drove that way. I also wanted to see it at the lake since that's where I live and work. So I went to work that day but we stopped and watched while the eclipse while it was happening. It was about 95% here, and although it didn't get quite as dark as I expected, it did get rather cold, which for some reason I hadn't anticipated, and the lighting got super weird. It was a neat experience (and we all looked super cool in our eclipse glasses)!