Smoke in the Valley
Aug 17, 2012
Happy Friday! I hope everyone has had a good week. Mine has been pretty good! Last night, I was treated to a really nice work dinner with other employees for working through a big sale, which was awesome. The restaurant was called "Local" and I feel like they could have gotten some of their inspiration from Husk in Charleston... lots of bacon and pork accents, southern-ish stuff, nice but casual, etc. Even though there are some mixed reviews of Husk, Local didn't even come close to being as good, or really living up to their name. At Husk, there is a huge chalkboard with a list of the ingredients they are using for that menu and where they came from. None of that kind of information is given at Local, which I thought was kind of weird. A lot of the restaurants here have at least a couple of trying-to-be-southern things, which is pretty funny. I didn't know the whole country wanted to be southern so badly... there are a lot of restaurants and bands pretending/trying/wanting to be southern (and everyone loving it) and people still making fun of southerners.. It's interesting. I will say that the mint julep at Local was great, and most of my co-workers had no idea what it was.
Anyways, one of the major happenings around town these days is the smoke. Honestly, it sucks. It's also pretty much all anyone is talking about, and no one really knows when it will go away. Rain would help, but rain is really rare here... It might rain next Wednesday. Most of the smoke is actually from the wind patterns. There are a couple of contained fires in the area, but a lot of the smoke is coming from Idaho and even as far as California. I have some comparison shots to show you how bad it really is!
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| Taken while hiking Snow King this morning |
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| Taken while hiking Snow King in May |
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| Taken in the Elk Refuge the other night around 6 PM |
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| Taken in the Elk Refuge about a month ago... I forgot how pretty it was! |
As you can see, there is a huge difference in the visibility and how blue the sky looks! It is obviously not nearly as pretty right now because you can't even see many of the mountains that surround the valley. This does happen to some extent every summer, but this is supposedly pretty bad and early in the season for it to happen. It is crazy that this is a fact of life for the mountain states... Definitely something I didn't know about at all before coming! I really hadn't given much thought to wildfires in general before moving here.
I feel pretty bad for all the tourists! Not only is it hard to adjust to the elevation, but now they have to do so while breathing in smoke. It also is a bummer for those of us that live here, obviously. They don't do any air monitoring in Wyoming (they do in other surrounding states) so we are just being told to take a "common sense approach" to the smoke as far as outdoor activities go. I wish there was some kind of measurement of the air quality, just out of curiosity. Luckily, the smoke hasn't bothered me too much so far. I have been running inside on the treadmill and only doing shorter hikes that aren't too strenuous. I do hope it clears soon! I miss the mountain views and clean air.
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