Missoula 2017
I think this is the way it should work. We encountered the smoke as we drove into town Friday evening from the south. We learned here that it was from some prescribed burns in Idaho. It showed up red here as now the first yellow spot just inside Idaho west and slightly south of Missoula. That lines up with the few thousand acre Kelly Creek area mentioned by the Forest Service. Missoula’s air quality quickly went from “good” to “unhealthy” as shown here, and you can advance to “next day” to see that it was back to essentially “good” within 24 hours of when it got bad. We slept with our windows closed in a warm house for one night. To me, that’s a lot better than the days to weeks we did the same thing in a hotter August 2017 due to wildfires. (But I wonder if doing Missoula a favor was really the reason, “Planned treatment areas on the North Fork and Lochsa Ranger Districts are located within remote, roadless areas or areas with very limited road access.”)
