living under the smoke

This Friday night sure feels different than the last Friday night. Last week, the mountain above La Canada was burning, there were visible flames and the smell of smoke in our house, and friends in La Canada were leaving their homes to sleep where they could breathe. Today, the air quality has improved to moderate, the fire and smoke have moved east of here, and friends are home safe.

Last Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, the smell of smoke was unbelievably strong. The huge pyrocumulus cloud over the mountain was towering above us, with its base of gray-brown-orange and its top of fluffy bright white. It was mesmerizing. It was eerie and ominous. It was strangely beautiful.

The smell of smoke was so overpowering that I woke up Sunday morning nauseous and headache-y. The temperature outside was over 100 degrees, so we had the central air running all day. That filtered the air so that we could tolerate it. We could not stand to be outside. The AQMD listed the air quality as "hazardous."

A photo I snapped from Nick's room of a medium-sized pyrocumulus cloud on Monday

Tuesday was a little different. The smell of smoke was not as strong as it had been. I could not see a pyrocumulus cloud, just grey cloud cover. Except it was not cloud cover, it was the smoke formation. It was on top of us, so that I couldn't see it looking up into it. It stayed that way all of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Finally on Friday (this morning), we woke up to blue sky over our house! And we could see the smoke cloud again, over to the east a bit.

A photo I took on Friday - again I missed it when it was big

On Wednesday morning I heard on NPR that the fire crews had done some work at the top of Lake Ave. Our old neighborhood! Nick and I took a drive up there to see what was going on, since we couldn't see the mountains from South Pasadena through the smoke cover. The fire crews had bulldozed a fire line straight up the mountain from the top of Lake Ave. It was 20-30 feet wide, and very striking. (Of course the photo is very hazy from the smoke!)


The fire was still on the north side of the ridge, and evacuations had not been ordered for the area, so our old neighborhood looked fine. We drove a bit farther east to do some errands, observing the smoke plume along the way.

The smoke cloud from East Pasadena (Sierra Madre Blvd.) - you can get a sense of how it extended due south, right over South Pasadena

The smoke cloud from Arcadia (even farther east)

I stole the following images off of the internet (taken with good cameras!):

This was the view from the South Pasadena water tower last weekend

A picture taken from south of downtown Los Angeles. Normally, the San Gabriel Mountains would be the backdrop of this photo!