We are sure having those. Temperatures in the 80s this week with no letup in sight. Might be comfortable somewhere, but here it is just damned hot. A couple of months ago I mentioned the expert at the Bureau of Land Management who said we would have a light fire season because it would be cool and wet. Guess what. Cool and wet turned into hot and dry and we now have 70 wildfires burning across the state that have already consumed 629,739 acres. So much for the light fire season. One fire already has burned 125,000 acres. The picture is toward the mountain I have photographed before, only you can't see it today because of the haze from the smoke drifting over us from the fires farther north.
In other news, i saw a bear on the way home last night, on the bicycle path near Eagle River. A little farther along I saw a late-night hiker walking toward the bear. Nothing in the news this morning so everyone must have passed all right. It was a small black bear, so probably pretty easy to chase away if they did happen to meet.
Then there is the garden. The owl must have fallen asleep on duty and the squirrels stripped the plant. Kind of disheartening but now we have entered phase two as seen in that picture. Heavy bird screen around the plant, supported by stakes and held down with spikes and rocks. So far so good. This is quite the plant. It already has produced at least a dozen berries and there are at least half a dozen more on it now ripening. If you look you can see some red around the base. I went looking today for a live trap but no luck. I will find one and that is phase three. After that it starts to get serious. Then there is the second bloom on the Himalayan poppy. Another one is ready to go. And there are new flowers, yellow ones on this broad-leafed plant i have no idea what it is.
So with haze and bears (three so far this year) and strawberries and new flowers, not a bad day to be alive.
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