Smokey Says…
It has been a long time since I posted here. While a lot has changed, people in general haven’t. More on the former later.
Traveling through Montana we were shocked to see a guy sitting in his camp enjoy a nice camp fire. Is that allowed!
While the camera focused on the truck’s dash, we focused on increasing our distance from him and his many buddies as well as finding a camp with multiple exits.
Then we got an emergency alert from home.
Yes, that is a fire just over a hill from our house. Then there was air support for the fire. Then a lot more air support and a pre-evacuation notice. Followed by an evacuation notice for our house, and a road closure.
Things calmed down around 5 pm with mop up efforts resuming in the morning. Pretty scary.
We moved our camp to Wyoming as it’s closer to home and ran across a pretty camp site next to a small creek.
We pulled in to discover the previous campers were as conscientious as that first guy. They left their fire smoldering. All that is needed is a bit of wind to revive the fire and carry a single spark to level the entire forest.
We parked and filled our bucket from the stream to put out their fire.
When Smokey say, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” He means every “you” not just the “you” in the next camp over.
While home is fine for now, watch out for your neighbor, he might not realize “you” means him.
As for the less exciting things happening around us, we have changed our website provider, been to southeastern Utah, the Flat Tops, Grand Mesa, Denver, and Arkansas as well as Wyoming-where we are now. We also have a second rig which will allow for easier traveling in wet and cold conditions. There will be more posts on all that in the coming weeks.
We are hosting our own website now and still working on cleaning up old posts from the transition.