A few mornings ago, while doing yoga in the pre-dawn light on my deck, I was surprised to see a smokey cast to the light.

This is familiar enough during the fire season, but BC has so far had a very wet time and I was puzzled as to where the fire could be.  I checked on the US forestry Service’s heat detection satellite website, but could find nothing at all in our province.

The next day, the smoke was thicker.  The sun rose as a red ball.

And the mountains at the head of the lake were barely visible.

This went on for two days.  There was a hot and gusty wind.  The smoke was covering all of the southern half of the province, but no one seemed to know where it was coming from.  News items first said Western US especially California.  Then I heard Utah and Colorado.  But the winds here were west and southwest.  How could they be blowing smoke from Colorado?  Yesterday, a plane came in and the pilot said the high jetstreams were carrying smoke across the Pacific from the paddy fields in China (where they burn off the old straw before planting).  Then I got an email saying it was coming from Siberia.

The wind banged around all night and this morning was warm and extremely buggy.  However, I was much relieved to see the sky was clear in the east.

The west was still a bit murky; the top of Mt Monarch was cut off.

But now, close to midday, even that has cleared, and it was as if the smoke had never been.