Sunday, August 19, 2018

8/13 Smoke in the Columbia River Gorge

Weak internet this evening, so I am keeping my fingers crossed this will post.  If it looks incomplete, check back later.

I wanted to post some of the photos I have taken.  Keep in mind that this is fairly mild compared to some other areas in Oregon, but bad enough as it is. When I arrived here, you can see a slight haze in the two photos below that I took then. 


However, on Sunday, things got worse.  This is taken from almost exactly the same spot as the photo on the top. 


The sun looked really weird. 



This is the air quality map from Monday.  My campground is just east of the "d" in Portland. The black line between Washington and Oregon is the Columbia River, which has over the centuries dug itself into a gorge with hills on each side that trap smoke.  (It is also where Lewis and Clark traveled to reach the Pacific Ocean.)



I went into The Dalles, a town about 30 miles away, on Tuesday to get a new tire put on my bike and took these photos of the I-84 freeway.


The next four photos were taken today, the day I finally posted about the smoke, as I drove from LePage campground to Portland and then down to my next stop along the coast.  There was a tiny bit of green grass on this hillside, which means it probably burned earlier this spring before the rains or last fall when there were a lot of fires in the gorge.  This is about 15 miles from my campground.

No green on the next three, so they might have been last week.  There were other fires last week burning behind the hills, so smoke was coming from a lot of places, including British Columbia, the news said.  This is all grasslands and located about 40 miles from the campground.  The big forest fires last year were closer to Portland where there are more trees.  



Whew!  Glad these uploaded OK.  Tomorrow I will post photos of the sturgeons at the Bonneville Dam Fish Hatchery.



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