Not n Montana anymore

The post that I posted the other day with all of the yarn was kind of jumping ahead of the stuff that happened on the way to the truck stop where I was able to wind all of the yarn. We left Bozeman after shopping at the LYS and then having a yummy dinner at Carino's Italian Grill...we were there during happy hour and they have loverly Bellini's.
I know that the news has been covering all of the fires that are going on in the west, some lightning started and some man started. We were heading west on I-90, and the air started to have a tinge of smoke smell on it. It was in the early evening, not time for the sun to go down, but this is the way that the light was:

You could look directly at the sun and not be blinded because the smoke was so thick. It didn't help that we were going through a river canyon and it was funneling all of the smoke. As we drove farther, the smoke got thicker:
It really looks like it is sunset, but it was actually about 4 p.m. mountain time. It was kind of an eerie kind of light, and you could really smell the smoke. It smelled like you were camping and had a really big campfire going with some really green wood that was smoking a lot.






If you look at the center right of this picture, you can see the plume of smoke coming off of the hillside. There was a pretty good fire burning or it had been burning right next to the road for a couple of miles. As we were driving, there were signs telling you to watch out for the smoke and that visibility would be poor and that you should drive with your headlights on. All of a sudden, we started hearing the chop of a helicopter. We looked out the windshield of the truck and saw this helicopter with a load of water in its bucket. It went
directly over our truck and went to the hillside that was to our right. I was able to snap this picture of what he was treating just before he
He opened the bottom of the bucket and the water fell on one of the hot spots that were scattered throughout the hillside. I didn't try to take a picture of that, because I actually wanted to see it and I knew that if I was trying to photograph it, I wouldn't have really gotten to see it. It was so cool to watch. He lined up right over one of the flaming spots and let loose from several hundred feet in the air and it sprayed out and hit the ground where it was needed, or at least some of it did.

Some of the unsung hero's in fighting the fires that we hear about on the news are the wild land fire crews. Every time there is a report of a fire, a crew member checks it out either from the air or on foot or in a truck. If it is a fire that needs to be fought, a crew is assembled and a camp is set up. We saw where some of the crew for the fire on the hillside was deploying from (sorry for the bad pic). This was a couple of miles down the road from the fire, and the crews were doing what they could to help the ranchers and land owners wet down their houses and barns in case the wind shifted and brought the fire back their way. Each of the large structures in this group had an irrigation sprinkler running on it to keep the wooden parts of the building wet enough that they wouldn't catch on fire. All of the men in yellow shirts are part of the wild land fire crew that was working this fire. There were 30-40 of them all up and down this frontage road.

One of the things that was amazing to me was that within a couple of miles of passing the flaming hillside, the air cleared up and you could actually see the sun in all of it's glory.


I posted that I was getting ready to rip and restart Soleil from the Summer 2007 Knitty. I ripped out the cotton ease yarn incarnation, and then I cast on with the Butterfly mercerized cotton. I really like the Butterfly yarn. It's smooth and shows good stitch definition and knits up nicely. At least that was my first impression of it. I got the first repeat done on the lace bottom and realized that I had forgotten a YO a couple of rows back and had to rip it out again. I cast on the 160 stitches again and got three rows into it and it was looking so good. The pattern was showing up and it was smooth and then I realized that somehow on the second or third row I had twisted the stupid thing and so to the frog pond it went for the third time in one day and I decided that I would put it in time out for the rest of today and I started a DW dishcloth in Summer Splash. That's going along swimmingly and I can hardly wait for the pattern to come out for the next Six Sox installment.

It is unseasonably hot here in the north west. Boise, ID was at 98 today when we stopped for lunch and grocery shopping. Boise isn't supposed to be at 98 degrees...we are in the northern climes of our country...it's supposed to be cooler here than the rest of the country. Even Bozeman, which is usually 15 degrees cooler than the rest of the state was in the low nineties the other day when we were there. That is just so wrong. I want to come to the northwest and be cooler. I don't want to swelter up here. We do enough of that in Texas or Alabama or Tennessee.

I guess that I don't have anything else that is exciting or fun or anything to blog about, so I'll catch up with you later in the week.