Ruby Mountains?

[Wandering Daisy]

There are several active fires in the Elko district. Web cams near Elko show smoke, but not as much as Reno. Not sure you can totally escape the smoke, even in the Ruby Mountains.

Personally, I would go to the Lost Coast.

[Wandering Daisy]

The weather forecast for today shows "areas of smoke" for Elko. Not predicted for future days, but that could change.

[Teresa Gergen]

.....

[JWreno]

I went to the AirNow and looked at the maps again. The region around Elko looks better than all of the Sierras The areas north of central Oregon and Idaho look awful.

https://airnow.gov

We are going to the Ruby Mountains on Thursday for several days to see them for the first time. It's a very casual, non-itiniary trip. We have enough food to stay out 4 nights.

[JWreno]

Just got back from the Ruby mountains. We spent 90 minutes on the Highway near the hospital in Elko waiting for the firefighters to open the highway. Didn't get to Island Lake until 8:30 Thursday night. We didn't not see any smoke in the Ruby mountain wilderness. Had much unsettled weather for the first two full days of hiking.

Spent 4 nights in the Ruby's doing the Lakes loop. Survived a fierce lighting, hail and rain storm Friday when working towards our 2nd wild pass that day. The first pass west of Island lake was easy to the top. The other side was a moving mass of loose soil and rock. The 3 of us had to stay right next to each other to keep from sending rolling rocks to someone below. My wife and son did not enjoy going down that chute. The vegetation was much more abundant then I see in the Sierras. We had a lot of problems with bushwhacking through willows mixed in with large boulders.

We spent 2.5 days off trail. It was a lot of work. The canyons were beautiful and steep and I enjoyed the trip. We joined the Ruby Crest trail Sunday afternoon west of Favre Lake. My wife and son did a little happy dance when we reached a maintained trail. I used the Gaia GPS app on my iPhone. We had printed maps with the GPS route, compass, and my wife's phone with Gaia GPS for a backup. Had a solar charger to keep the phones charged. The Gaia app was so much more useful than my Garmin GPS. The ease of use and large screen made the topo map so much easier to use. There were several times the GPS tracks kept us from heading up or down less viable routes.

I did the planning at the Gaia GPS website and synced the data to our phones. We also downloaded a large area including all of the Ruby mountains before leaving home. I found I needed to put Gaia GPS to only use location services while using to optimize battery life. I also ran in Airplane mode. I would would go to the home screen each time after looking at Gaia GPS to keep it from the foreground so the GPS wouldn't run all the time. I wasn't concerned about keeping an accurate track of my route. I just wanted to be sure of my location when I was looking at the Gaia GPS app.