April 8 Sulphur and Smoke

29 degrees at around 6:30am. High around 55, but feels colder.  Clouds rolled in around noon, and the winds have picked up considerably. These spring winds are expected, but they also bring with them danger of fire, as they dry everything out quite rapidly, and also often carry "dry lightening" to spark a fire.  This is of concern as I will note below.

As I mentioned yesterday, these mountains were formed from a massive volcano, aeons ago.

There is still volcanic activity here, resulting in numerous hot springs, as well as sulphur vents.

Here is one such vent. I wish I could put a  scratch and sniff sticker on this blog, because the

sulphur fumes here are quite strong.  Note how the sulphuric acid bleaches out the rocks and clay to white.

This photo was taken standing on my front yard. That is the roof of my neighbor's cottage, and that is smoke from a fire burning on the hillside beyond us.  Folks, this is CLOSE, and we are having at least 35mph wind gusts, blowing right in this direction.  The Fire Department is up there, I can hear chain saws, so I know they are doing what they can do, and hopefully will be able to keep it contained.  But with the winds forecast to be even worse through tonight and into tomorrow, it is easy for things to get out of hand.
If you look between the second and third foreground tree, about halfway up the photo, you can barely see a bit of roof peeking through the trees. This is a friend's house, and it is really uncomfortably close to this burn.

Fire is something we live with in this forest.  We had to really get used to this idea, moving as we did from wet, green New England.  Fire was a foreign concept there.  Most everybody has a "go bag" ready for fire season, with important documents, computer back up drive, and clean underwear, not necessarily in that order!  I think maybe I should make sure I have a few things gathered, just in case.