When we left Eugene, the road ahead looked like this.
Not too much later (remember, we only drove for about two and half hours the first night), we could see smoke over the mountains in the distance.
Okay, so that one is not very much in the distance. We’d heard there might be road closures due to forest fires, but we didn’t expect to see this, right from the road.
The traffic merged to one lane and there were fire trucks and firefighters and it was all very exciting and SO TOTALLY WEIRD. All of my other pictures are big blurry messes, but there were individual trees burning like torches. It’s one thing to know it happens and another to drive alongside.
Today (Day 2, or full Day 1) was uneventful. Plenty of smoke haze on the horizon across the rest of Oregon and into Idaho, but no visible fires. We may be taking a slightly more southerly route across Montana to stay on the interstate and get away from the smoke faster. We’d like to drive away from the scratchy throats, please.