Looks nice at Kaye’s house. Â Even some sun!!
Starting to look bad in town. Â Kind of glad I’m getting out for a night!
No bueno! Bad smoke, the further north we went. Â Bummer.
Alaska is on fire and we got smoked out of our camping and kayak float trip to the Upper Chatanika river. So we are drinking for lunch in town at Kaye’s instead.
Headed out of town on Monday morning to do an overnight float trip of the Upper Chatanika with some car camping. I could smell the smoke at my house as I loaded up my gear, but was not thinking about smoke or fires being a problem since we were headed north all the fires that I knew about were south and east of Fairbanks.
Got my friends house and her yard had lingering smoke smells too, but I saw clear skies and sun. We headed over to DNR to pick up some play-by-play river maps for the river and noticed that the roads had started to get smokey. Again, I thought we were heading out of the mess so I was happy to be leaving, not even thinking I should have checked for new fires in the north.
We got about than 10 miles up the Steese from Fox when I noticed that the smoke was actually getting worse and given that two of us in the group has lung ailments, I pulled over so we could discuss options. After trying to find a signal to look at maps while the smoke started to irritate our eyes and lungs, we ended up turning around.
We stopped in Fox at the gas station (inside) to see if there was anyplace close enough we could go that was not close to a fire. Anything more than two-hour drive would have been too far to go with our current schedule since we had obligations in our group to be back by noon the next day.
All around us in Alaska seemed to be on fire!
Reluctantly we returned home and spent the afternoon enjoying each others company with some beer and smoked salmon.
This adventure will resume when the smoke clears……