My husband and I love to sleep with the windows open in the summer time. We enjoy the night sounds, and the cool breeze coming in.

Not last night. Last night, we had to close the windows due to really irritating smoke, either from somebody’s barbecue, or a forest fire.

This morning, I went out and found this map of smoke plumes from forest fires from the US Forest Service. https://fire.airnow.gov/?lat=39.710920000000044&lng=-105.08206999999999&zoom=12 It wasn’t a barbecue.

I had to zoom out to get an idea of what’s going on with the smoke situation, but it looks like we are being smoked by a fire on the Utah-Colorado border.

It took me a little while to figure out their key: Circles are permanent air quality monitors, triangles are temporary air quality monitors. Green means good air quality, yellow not so good, and orange really horrible. The little flames, of course are the fires.

It is interesting to note that the air quality along the Front Range has got a lot of yellow circles, and one red triangle. Our air quality, 200 hundred miles away and across a mountain range 10,000 feet high, is worse than it is in Grand Junction, 30 miles away.

When I look at the Fire and Smoke Map (above) as well as the InciWeb site https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/, I can see that the Pine Gulch Fire is about 21,000 acres, and at 7% contained, is still growing. We could be in for a smokey couple of days.

The other fires north of the Pine Gulch Fire have been contained. They won’t be declared “out”, however, until the first snow falls, and puts out the last smoldering roots underground.