The smoke from the King Fire finally cleared up last week, and we can finally breathe easy. I’m from the Midwest, so I grew up around tornadoes and floods, not fire. I’ve never checked the weather forecast and seen “smokey” as an actual weather condition. It’s almost unbelievable that the King Fire burned tens of thousands of acres, and nearly 8,000 firefighters were fighting the fire. The cold front and recent rains from last weekend definetely helped in the containment of that fire. There are even snow capped mountains now, which is a lovely site.

The Carson City team finished up the last of our fire monitoring transects recently, and now we’re wrapping up the Fire Monitoring ESR reports.  The actual fire monitoring process was informative, as we learned a lot of new techniques used to measure soil stablility, perennial vegetation, and other things.  Writing up the reports helped me see the big picture, and I was able to actually visualize how the sites we monitored were recovering. We monitored about 10 fires over the summer. I will never forget lugging some of that gear around over hilly, rocky terrain, sometimes having to hike over a mile to reach the plots. We saw a lot of beautiful sites in the process, so it was worth it. That’s all from Carson City, right now. Peace!