The last time I went hiking I stupidly ventured forth in an extreme heat warning. I also traveled to the trailhead and back via motorcycle (a sweltering ride). No regrets! The heat was more serious than I’d bargained for, but these things happen.
This time I picked a very short trail and basked in my truck’s AC to the trailhead and back. It was hot but not “extreme”. I’d planned a low key “redemption hike”. A low hassle, low risk, self-esteem building lazy afternoon in the forest.
It was definitely easier than “extreme heat madness” but bad air hassled me.
It makes me sound like a whiner but air pollution, especially from distant but huge forest fires, kicks my ass. I learned that through experience. I did a few seasons fighting forest fires. It was ok. A lot of people like it. It wasn’t my cup of tea but I didn’t mind it either. Any job that involves fires and chainsaws has a certain fun factor. However, as young and bulletproof as I was, I noticed that smoke from burning pine or manzanita 30′ away is fine but a valley full of it from miles away is not. Over the years, I’ve learned to avoid bad air like I avoid debt.
Minimal debt and breathing clean air is a pretty good way to live.
I deliberately live a million miles from urban pollution. I ought to be breathing God’s cleanest air. OK fine, I breathe a lot of two stroke saw exhaust… but that doesn’t seem to mess with me. And all winter long my air is crisp like I’m in Antarctica.
But, in summer, Canada can’t keep it in its pants!
I understand some smoke. We must forgive the occasional local forest fire. Volcanoes are a thing too. Even if you thin and manage fuels carefully, some biomass winds up burning. It’s the luck of the draw and I get it. But Canada is such a mess that it goes off the rails. They fling province scaled, crossed borders and flooded timezones sized, smoke plumes. It’s one thing to piss off my neighbor. It’s another to send ghastly plumes halfway to Greenland. And they do it repeatedly.
It’s uncivilized, unneighborly, and frankly out of character with the rational, intelligent, Canada I once knew. Times have changed. Neither USA nor Canada seems to be run by rational adults but even current USA doesn’t fling cholera and asbestos at our northern neighbors. They should muster enough competence to stop nuking entire time zones on our side of the line. Whatever it’s faults or glories, Canada spends the summer burning its own resources and sending pollution south.
They’re a hard boiled egg fart in an elevator. That’s no way to behave.
For any nation; if you fuck up the air internationally three out of five years, you need an attitude adjustment. Go into the hockey penalty box and stay there until you’ve learned to manage a forest. I’m rooting for Canada! They have awesome fishing and I love poutine, can’t they keep their shit together for the short summer burn season?
I knew all this before I stepped out of my truck. I’d been watching the pollution index. Assuming US’s air quality monitoring stations are accurate (who knows if they are?) there was a window of more or less tolerable air. I’d hike in the clear and maybe just hang out in the shade of the trees for a while. I’d be back behind AC air filters before the wind shifted.
I didn’t time it well. I was slogging down the trail, pleased that I’d remembered my bug spray and manfully “breaking in” a new set of boots… when the wind shifted. I felt a headache form in real time. I’d planned to kick back and read a book under a tree, instead I scampered my sweaty ass back to the truck.
It wasn’t a big deal. I slammed some Tylenol, bitched about Trudeau (who is no longer in power but it’s always a good thing to bitch about him), and let my truck’s AC clean the air. I’m glad I wasn’t far out when the wind shifted.
Thus, my happy saunter in God’s forest didn’t go as planned. Maybe next time I’ll get it right.
Summer is fleeting. It will be (literally!) 100 degrees f colder in six months. The good news is that weather patterns have shifted again in my favor. I think I’ll try again soon.
A.C.
P.S. It could be a lot worse. I’m not out east where they’re getting absolutely curb stomped. I don’t usually have empathy for Chicago or Cleveland, but they didn’t fuck up their own air and they don’t deserve the crud they’re forced to breathe. Also, unlike Europeans, I’ve got AC. I don’t like being indoors on sunny days but chilled and partially filtered air is pretty damn sweet! (I have some air filters too.)
Does this apply to the wildfires in our state of Minnesota? The problem with wildfires in wilderness areas is the fact that it’s wilderness. No Roads, no access, no way to contain these fires. Don’t know what you expect Canada to do, heck a fire started in Minnesota and crossed the border into Canada. Does that mean Canada can sue Minnesota for poor fire management?
I agree that once a fire is out of control, especially in wilderness conditions, it is ridiculously expensive and often impossible to stop. However, humanity has the knowledge to wisely attack big dangerous uncontrollable situations before the ignition happens at all. Once it’s a big uncontrolled fire it’s almost more like weather than anything mankind can readily handle, but budgeting and public support goes through the roof on a huge fire.
The thing to keep an eye on is the fuel loading before things get out of hand. If fuel loads get too high, choosing to leave it accumulating is functionally identical to choosing to allow a huge expensive smoke plume to manifest in the future. Sadly, this is almost always a politically easy situation. Folks tend to freak out about removing fuel from a place that hasn’t yet lit up but are more than happy to hurl money and labor at the same area after it’s already burning.
What fuels a fire is well… fuel. We know how that works. Live trees can be moderately dense or packed tight like a Chinese subway. Thinning can greatly reduce density months or years before the whole stand of trees catches on fire. Dead trees can be consumed with rot or mechanical means or controlled modest fires over time, or they can accumulate into massive bone dry jackstraws which will be an absolute bear to stop once they’re lit. It’s a choice between accepting strategic small impacts in advance and at opportune moments (in Boundary Waters it’s easier to get around in winter ice than summer lakes) or just rolling the dice until the perfect summer fire conditions kick off a circus. Getting into a place like Boundary Waters with people and saws and equipment and having many smaller controlled burns is not easily explained but it’s probably better for society than waiting too long and sentencing Chicago to weeks of dangerous air when the inevitable happens.
Yes those are great points but 40% of Canada is forested, more acres than the US but the population of Canada is only 42 million people. With forests being 900 million acres it is unrealistic to expect total forestry management.
I sympathize with you – having to limit what you can do, for any reason, sucks (that’s the technical term for it). Getting old isn’t for sissies – but still beats the alternative.
And I can’t disagree with anything you say in your reply, above. My only rebuttal, coming from up here north of the 49th, is one of scale. Don’t take my word for it; please do two things:
1) using any online map program (I checked on Google Earth, but any will do) and look at the colours of the vegetation across the US and Canada from 6 – 7,000 miles up. There’s that thick band of green that goes across Canada, pretty near from coast to coast. That’s the boreal forest, which under best commercial forestry management practices can be harvested on a 80 year cycle. The long growing cycle to get mature trees, combined with literally millions of acres of forest, make thinning and taking out dead trees possible but unlikely – forget who would pay for that, just ask who’s willing to do the work (at any price)?
2) then boot up firesmoke.ca , and follow the link to the smoke forecast (the map on the left side of the screen). Then do a quick estimate of the number of fires shown in Canada, compared to the number in the US. Yes, Canada produces lots more smoke. But the US has just as many wildfires, they just don’t have the huge forest to grow up in.
I probably get more smoke days than the eastern US, it’s part of living here. Again, I agree with you – today’s problems with wildfires are because of years of bad decisions and practices (Smokey the Bear – spit!). Changing our culture to accept pre-emptive fire control will take time & commitment – something that hasn’t happened all that often, on both sides of our border.
Steve O
In the early oughts I was a timberyard monkey in Melbourne (not Florida). Receiving, stowing, advising, selling, loading, etc. There were some serious bushfires because the greenidiots had forked up the previously functioning procedures that had managed eucalypt forests since Noah docked. The temperature was mid to high 30’s C, and the air was chokingly thick of smoke, soot and sometimes charred leaves, tens of km from the fires. A customer would come in and ask “do you have any Victorian Ash?” (a generic name for gum tree wood). TimbermonkeyMe’s answer: “yeah, yer breathin’ it”.
Carney is worse for Canada than Trudeau was before him. Just as Burnham will be worse for the UK than Starmer was before him.