High Sierra Topix

I spent the last few days in Ansel Adams Wilderness and TM --- one day had significant haze/smoke, but the rest of the time it was very clear. Vista points were a little muddled due to the fires, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. A lot depends on which way the wind is blowing. It certainly is a great improvement on what you'll experience in the Sacramento Valley!

Smoky in the Lone Pine area. This is the first weekend I could barely see the mountains. Cough was pretty bad this weekend. My throat was sore last night (better today), and I start coughing if I take a deep breath, laugh or say more than one sentence. Been sucking on Riccola drops, which seems to help.

Does anyone have an update for thousand island lake area? I plan on going to that area this weekend.

I am just back from a bit south of there, coming out of a trip down Fish Creek at Reds Meadow. It was getting pretty clear by yesterday (7/14), but distant views to the west were rather yucky. It's good enough to go IMO if photography is not the main objective.

Mike

Pear Lake area was pretty hazy going in on Saturday. The Rain Sunday afternoon (5 hours worth) seemed to have cleared it up some.

Going up Pine creek pass was fairly smoky on the 11th, coming back on the 15th was mostly clear. High-country/french canyon was not seriously effected during the time I was there.

Big Pine Creek over the weekend. No smoke or haze.

Hi Maverick,
As the preceding posts suggest, it's kind of luck of the draw for the smoke. My wife & I hit smoke of varying degrees of bad from the time we started in over Piute Pass (July 6th) till it started to rain late in the afternoon on the 12th (I plan to post photos at some point, I'm just slow!). Bad was when visibility dropped to a couple miles: sinuses clogged up, dull headache came on and exertion was very difficult. What amazed me was how rapidly conditions changed. It was hard to believe how the awful conditions on the 6th mitigated on the 7th and remained tolerable for a couple days before reverting to awful again, literally overnight (how huge air/particulate masses move that rapidly is impressive!). Anyway, once it started to rain (which it did a lot of, at least where we werre in McGee basin and Ionian basin), it cleared the air spectacularly. To our chagrin, one of the clearest days I've seen in years (in the Sierra) came on the day we hiked out (the 17th). It was so nice, we decided to stick around and do a day hike up Big Pine creek on the 18th. Since then, from what the webcams show, it has gradually gotten hazier, but nothing like the crap we hit on a couple days. With the weather forecast showing more thundershowers, it's likely to clear things up again (if there are no lightning-induced fires). And, at some lower elevations, the skeeters hit 3 on your scale, but the higher we went, the fewer bugs we hit..... I think you should have a fabulous time heading for Blue canyon!
CG

Hi CG

Thanks for the update. Looking forward to your pic's.
If everything stays clear and no fires start up in the Blue Canyon area I'll head up
next week.

On my trip last weekend to silver lake/gem lake/clark lakes there wasn't any noticeable smoke.