Smoke/air quality?

[David]

Seeing on weather report notes of patchy smoke.  Any sense of whether the air quality is too poor to enjoy hitting the summit?  Planning on going up from south fork on 8/21.

[stbrnnr]

Hi David,

Good question.  I’m no weather man…but i think this weekend is looking like a Go.

Bensweather.com currently says: “a cool northerly flow will also draw additional drift smoke into the area from wildfires in Northern California, clearing this weekend as the flow turns more southwesterly” [emph mine].

Note also the live-cam shot of SGW North on same website, looks clear now at mid-day.   [So too does fire-alert cam of south slopes shot from Snow Peak 2].   No unhealthy air warnings are currently posted for Forest Falls this weekend–whereas there were on several days in recent high-humidity weeks.

Monitor all the available sources through this evening and unless something changes tonight i’d plan to go for it.  Enjoy your hike!

[chris in redlands]

What summit? What smoke?

There are lots of summits and no active local fires.

[David]

Thank you @stbrnnr.  You were correct, any reports of patchy smoke from early in the week weren’t an issue.  Beautiful day, blue skies and light breeze.  There was a bit of brown haze lower down on the horizon, but everything on the mountain was great.

For the record we did the south fork – dry lake – dollar lollipop.  Plenty of water at south fork meadows but I didn’t check any other off-trail spots.

[Author]

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