Why and How We Add Wildfire Smoke Conditions to Our Camping, Hiking, and Climbing Trips
(This post may contain affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links and make a purchase, I’ll receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps support the channel and allows us to continue to make videos like this. Thank you for the support!)
What can you control? What is open to your influence? What is beyond your control?
Many a version of both bumper-sticker wisdom and actual wisdom calls out the need to differentiate between these categories of things and also act upon such a process of identification. “Banging your head against the wall” trying to make something happen that we have little-to-no control over is misapplied time and effort. Things we can influence often need to be considered by the notion of time-for-return: is it quick or time consuming to influence a thing or a person, and what else could I be doing with that time? And stuff we can control often becomes a matter of simple prioritization: how important is the particular change to us? Because if we want to make the change, we can.
Let’s put these abstract thoughts into a climbing context:
We can control, for the most part, our level of expertise and ability to implement a technique: say, our belay technique. We can influence our climbing partners to follow certain safety procedures and keep their skills up to date. We can’t control the weather, we can only react to it.
So, through this lens, this is why I tend to think of smoke like weather. Unless we are talking about the wildfire I avoid starting, myself, by being fire-danger aware, I can’t really control when and where a wildfire shows up. In recent years, we’ve seen whole sections of big-deal thru hikes like the Pacific Crest Trail and the Continental Divide Trail (both in the United States) shut down do to impassible smoke and fire.
This potential constraint to my adventuring plans has always been there, but is now becoming more and more prominent. So, how do we react?
This video is an attempt to frame the issue and provide resources to help us with taking smoke and fire into account when we want to make our plans. On our YouTube channel, we have links to the studies sited and resources mentioned in the video, so it only seems appropriate to recrate them here. I hope the video and these links prove to be a help.
Review of the Marshall Fire in Colorado
Worsening fires in South America
Canada fires polluting the continent