My Summer Road-Trip through the Smoke

My previous experiences with fire are limited, however last summer I came into contact with it more than I ever had before.  My girlfriend and I were on a road trip this past summer up through Washington state and into Montana.  We first noticed it right before we got to Spokane.  The air was beginning to get hazy with smoke, and we started to notice that it was smelling more and more like a campfire.  When we got to Spokane the haze was all around us.  I remember being in a Fred Meyer parking lot and not being able to see past the parking lot due to the haze.  At that point the smell was also very apparent.  It smelled as if we were standing right next to a bonfire.  This got me to thinking about many of the different issues surrounding fire.  The first thing that came to mind was climate change and how this was going to affect the fire seasons going forward.  In my atmospheric science class we learned that our planet is warming at an alarming rate, and in my natural resources class this term we were talking about how fire suppression has been a very common management technique over the past fifty years.  Fire suppression has led to there being plenty of available fuel for fire to consume and the warming of our climate is going to create a situation where fires are going to become more common and severe.  These issues will have an enormous impact on humans and our livelihoods going forward.  What I am most excited to learn about in this class is how the leading experts think fire regimes around the world are going to change.  It was clear to me from my road trip last summer that this was a critical issue due to the evidence of ongoing fires throughout my time in Washington and Montana.  Climate change is only going to make fire events more intense and severe moving forward, so management practices that we will learn about in this class are going to be hugely important going forward.