Hugh;
Good morning to you sir, I hope the sky is a bit brighter in your part of the world and that this first day in August will be a good one in all ways for you.

This is a wee bit of a cut and paste from the main forum when I responded about the smoke.

Where I'm typing, I am located directly west of the Thomas Creek fire - it was maybe a bit less than a kilometer from our place on the first and second day.

https://www.castanet.net/news/Penti...0-hectares-up-to-10-000-in-just-24-hours

Then about a week after that this lit up just south of us and has surpassed the first one in size.

https://www.castanet.net/news/Penti...re-grows-to-13-000-hectares-BCWS-mapping

It's tough walking some mornings as it does make it difficult to breath.

When we drove into Penticton on the grocery run yesterday we couldn't see across Skaha Lake which is about 2km wide at most as a guess.

We're at the narrowest place in the entire Okanagan Valley here and since I posted an hour ago I can now see the dim outline of the mountain across the valley from us which is roughly a kilometer and a half.

I keep on saying this is as bad as I've seen it in 36 years - and then it gets worse - so perhaps I need to stop saying that? Not sure this can be all on me though, you know?

They're already restricting us from going up into the back country in the fire areas and frankly we've made the decision not to go until we get some rain. I just don't feel that lucky anymore and don't want it to be my pickup's brakes causing another fire this year.

As mentioned too, the whole hunting season will be up in the air until the situation settles down a bit. The guys aren't even taking shod horses into the back country because of the sparks. Nobody other than fire crews are doing bush work down here that I'm aware of either.

Stay safe all, it's already been an interesting summer and it's only now August which was traditionally the bad month.

Dwayne

The most important stuff in life isn't "stuff"