Sierra East Side Smoke

[Preston]

Harley Goldman and I spent the last several days on the East Side (Mono Basin and Yosemite) and the haze was pretty bad. While on our way home yesterday (Sun 7/28) the smoke was affecting the entire East Side from north of Olancha according to Harley who went south) and all the way to Sonora Pass. When I crested Conway Summit the mountains to the east were shrouded, and once in Bridgeport, the Sawtooth Range was invisible.

This smoke is the result of the Aspen Fire in Sierra NF. Strong inversions…mainly at night and into the morning hours is keeping smoke near the surface. More info on current and upcoming East Side weather here.

So, if you're planning a trip to the East Side, you'll want to monitor the conditions, and if possible delay your trip for a few days until the fire winds down.

Aspen Fire Info from InciWeb

--P

[ROL]

Aspen Fire: Summit Post

[Drew Wiley]

Gosh. That's some pretty steep terrain between Mammoth Pool and the Beasore Fire Rd. I grew up with a view of that canyon wall - it's the second highest on the
continent (twice as deep as the Grand Canyon). The San Joaquin Basin acts like a huge bellows and will siphon all that smoke right thru Mammoth Pass and clear into Nevada. Glad my backpack is still a month away.

[tgtaylor]

And wildfires burning in Oregon have gummed-up the skies on the West side of the Sierra so that at least the whole northern half of California is now smokey.

Thomas

[Brad Rippe]

Thanks for the info Preston, next week I was going to meet a few friends in Dusy Basin, who are doing the John Muir trail, but they came out early due to the smoke, must be pretty bad there. I live in the SF Bay Area, and we've had smoke color the sun red. It can make for some interesting photography!
-Brad

[ROL]

FYI: Absent first hand reports, I've found InciWeb to be the most reliable predictor of the life of any fire and its affects on any potential sojourns. Updates on containment and suppression activity are frequent while the fire is aggressive. Not so much, once laying down and virtually contained, but the effects are also considerably lessened by that point anyway. Brad's friend's exodus and first hands from Bishop are stopping me in my tracks, literally, right now.

[Drew Wiley]

I was unexpectedly sneezing a little yesterday. I'm very sensitive to smoke, but what's reaching us in the Bay Area is from a fire up the coast, not the one on the
San Joaquin. What it so worrisome about that fire is that it's just below the second largest uncut ponderosa pine forest in the world, up on the plateaus behind
Kaiser Peak and on the opposite bench of the canyon toward Margaret Lakes. There was a helluva fight back in the 60's to keep logging out of there; but in the end it was largely the extreme expense of putting bridges and roads in at public expense that stopped it. Kaiser Wilderness was officially adopted at that time. I've spent numerous nights on the summit of that peak overlooking the canyon where the fire now is. You can see Balloon Dome down in the canyon, looking like a little pimple in the vastness of it, even though it's even bigger than Half Dome in Yosemite! And like I already mentioned, any smoke in that canyon inevitably spreads a long ways. I ran into smoke from the last big one in the same area clear over on the western side of Utah.

[ROL]

The Wunderground smoke map had light plume concentrations (not sure how they are calculating that) all the way out to the Utah border this morning. Last night there were high, light bands of wispy smoke defining the northern sky from northern LA County. I suppose the current weak upper level troughing could have brought it this far south, but I couldn't say from which fire they originated from. What's amazing is how far reaching the smoke is throughout the central and southern Sierra, except for western SEKI – for once!

The fight I remember, and was directly involved in, was against B.F. Sisk's (local congressman) multi decade hard on for construction of the Fresno to Mammoth, All Weather Trans-Sierra Highway. For those unfamiliar (not Drew) and as a point of historical geography, the Sierra Nevada crest is unbreached by paved road from Yosemite through Sequoia–Kings Canyon, the longest stretch of unvarnished mountains and veritable wilderness in the lower 48. The San Joaquin River, cuts a relatively low elevation path through the crest from near Devil's Postpile (eastside) through the western Sierra, south of Yosemite's Merced watershed, and the seasonal Tioga Pass crossing. It is a natural path for general westerly winds, funneling air through the Sierra to Mammoth, explaining in great part why Mammoth Mountain receives so much snowfall in the winter. Of course, these are same dynamics responsible now driving high concentrations of smoke from the Aspen Fire into the Owens valley and parts far beyond. This same, particular trick of geography was what made the prospect of an all weather trans Sierra abomination so appealing in the (19)60's and 70's. As powerful a legislator as Sisk had become, the highway was never funded past the exploratory stage.

[Drew Wiley]

Ah... the villains of the past. Before that there was a whole string of dams proposed above Mammoth Pool, which only the Great Depression stopped. Even Yos Valley itself was slated for a dam at one time. Then our last big ego Governator wanted one of the world's biggest dams to flood one of the last sections of lower canyon wilderness flooded, at the same time drowning four operative hydroelectric plants ... and just maybe the recent recession stopped that madness. Good ole Calif politics - get one bumper year when one of those reservoirs will actually fill and they'll use it as an excuse to let development run amuk with overallocated water, and you end up in a worse position than you started out. Probably the average hiker doesn't notice the subtle changes up in the high county as particular species of trees die off at particular elevations or soils due to diminished snowpack. Everything still seems beautiful. But the folks who watch the state's "water bank" are pretty paranoid. And so are people who understand fire. And I can think of all kinds of minor glaciers which have outright disappeared in recent years. Fortunately, I planned for a bad year and didn't schedule an Aug backpack. Hope it rains before Sept and clears things up. I've lived thru my share of massive forest fires and have been chased out of the high country by smoke enough times - twice in recent years. But do hope I stay in shape long enough to visit that
remote glacier on the west side of Iron Mtn, right where the most weather of all channels thu that gap. Not many people get up there.

[Drew Wiley]

... and the other abortive trans-Sierra shortcut was the persistent eccentric who did mangage to get a paved road up the hill south of Whitney as far as the Cottonwood Lks trail and (southern) Kennedy Mdw area. ... Now it's the Coast Range in imminent danger from the madness of untested fracking procedures,
right in the heart of classic textbook earthquake country. Sheer voodoo for a couple decades of economic sugar high.