Office of Steam Forum for Model & Toy Steam Gas & Hot Air Engines

I've been having to wear a mask a lot here of late .... indoors at home even, the fires are truly that bad. Rarely see the mountains that are less than five miles away. Visibility often well under one mile and we can see smoke drifting up the street or between the house and the back fence. This has been going on for over three weeks now ... but better smoke than flame, to be sure.

There is a wall of granite almost three miles high that will keep the flames from getting here, but it is unimaginable what is occurring on the other side of that wall. And that is only one of at least a hundred all up and down the interior of the West Coast.

Some of my favorite places to go for serenity and photography are now gone, including what I called the Green Cathedral, which were beautifully forested gold claims up on the Cal/Ore border that got sweep by a raging wind driven firestorm last week. I'd actually intended to be up there about then, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first summer that I spent there (but that's another story), but because of all the fires everywhere else, I chose to stay home, and it was a good decision. The claims are up at the end of a really tough dead end road in what is essentially a box canyon with no other exit, and that fire burned over 120,000 acres in less than thirty hours .... I doubt that I'd have had a chance to get out of there!

I feel terrible for the tens of thousands (must be over one hundred thousand by now) of people who've been forced to flee (I know some) and  even worse for those who have lost everything already, and I know some of them too. Also feel heartsick for all the animals that are dying in terror and confusion and pain. Bear & Deer, Coyote & Foxes, Rabbits & Squirrels, Snakes & Lizards and thousands more kinds of critters , dying by the millions. Birds are reportedly dropping from the sky from smoke inhalation, as their rapid respiration rate makes them ultra vulnerable.

It is just bad, bad, bad all over, and people are the worst of it, intentionally making it all worse.

Sorry .... bum rant off