This year the wildfires in Canada were particularly destructive. So much of the western and central parts of Canada and the US saw its effects. For travelers it was a major factor in deciding when and where you could go, always thinking about exit strategies. From my days traveling in Africa, I was acutely aware that although very destructive, its nature's way of bringing regrowth and replenishing of the land and you can see this from the many birch trees that spring up long before the evergreens have a chance to regrow. For me, driving north, it meant crisscrossing between the 97 and the 5 in BC, trying to determine if the smoke was too thick and unhealthy to breath and what would I need to do if trapped because the fires would move that fast. These pictures show the density of the smoke early morning at Lac Des Roches. I was amazed at how the smoke filtered the sun in a way that made it seem otherworldly. The iphone could not capture the scene adequately. In the pict it looks like the moon, but in real life sky was beyond eerie. The feeling that morning will never leave me, I have the photos but they are a very weak representation of what it looked and felt like