Canyons and Wildfires

Today was a day of bad air. You have no idea how bad stagnant air can be until you are in an area that has been hit with massive wildfires in addition to high-90's temperatures. The bad air just sits there. Maybe the fact that the Wasatch Mountains are alongside it makes it worse too. At any rate, by the time we got here to our motel in Salt Lake City, I had a headache and my eyes were burning.

Earlier in the day we made a few stops around some really cool scenery in lower Idaho. I think they were all part of the same canyon actually, and from what we saw, the whole canyon probably looked a lot like a long scar in the flat ground if you viewed it from the air. The best part of the stops we made were of Shoshone Falls. We got some great pictures of that.

After we entered Utah, we drove right smack into a huge wildfire. We could see it looming in front of us as we neared it as it was sending a huge plume of smoke so high into the air that the top of it looked like a cumulus cloud. As we got right up to it, they stopped us (the traffic) saying that the fire had jumped the freeway just ahead. We sat there about a half hour, taking pictures of the fire right next to us. We could actually see the flames jumping out of the brush and the firemen chasing it down. It was pretty impressive and awesome to be in the middle of something so strange as that. Luckily, we were the second car from the front when they stopped traffic, so when we got a "green light" we got to hammer it pretty good. I have no idea how far back traffic ended up being backed up, but I'm sure it was a long ways. A few miles farther up the road, we ran smack into the residual effects of all the fires, in the form of a totally yellowish/brownish cloud that obliterated the sun. It was the most eerie thing I've ever driven through. It was at that point that the air got bad, and it never really recovered. It was so hazy all the way down through upper Utah that we could hardly see across the valleys. It's no wonder I got a headache.

We took a quick look at the Great Salt Lake before getting our motel, but it was horrible where we were--Looking all the world like a huge, nasty mud puddle. Tomorrow we'll go slightly back North and catch the little road that takes us over to Antelope Island in the middle of the Salt Lake. Supposedly, it's a lot nicer than just the nasty edge of the outskirts of the lake.

Tomorrow we'll also be heading to Moab to the Arches State Park, then on to Bryce Canyon.