The long weekend has mostly come and gone. By this time of the year, the nights are usually getting cooler, the air is starting to clear, heat haze is disappearing, the tourists have gone back home and we start thinking about getting ready for fall hiking, cleaning out the garden....
Not this year.
This is what our province looks like today. The intense fires of the Cariboo are still burning, new evacuation orders are bring issued daily, new fires have started in the the Southeast, some forcing more evacuation alerts and orders, the temperatures continue extremely hot and it's still very dry across much of the south of the province.
West of Cranbrook, a large, intense fire near Moyie Lake has forced the evacuation of the area near the lake, visibility has been reduced on Highway 3, no boats are permitted on the lake at all to make way for helicopters and water bombers tanking up, forest access has been completely restricted in the whole Rockies Forest District, no off-road ATV use is permitted anywhere, and no change in the weather is anywhere in sight.
Still, in the Kootenay Lake valley, we remain relatively calm. There are a few small fires, some in steep terrain to the north and west and some to the south, closer to the US border. There are a couple of evacuation alerts. We've had smoke every day for weeks now and the air quality is quite poor. Some of our neighbours are being affected by it. For us, we water the garden early in the morning, do what yard work we can before the sun comes up and then we mostly work in the shade or go inside.
Where we are, daytime temperatures are mostly just below +30C and at night it's not cooling off. Last night, for example, it was still +22C at midnight. It managed to crawl down to +18C by 6 am. We have two fans running on the main floor so it sounds like a twin turboprop airplane taking off.
How much longer?
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