One last hike on the TRT

 When we arrived on Thursday, I signed up for the guided hike this morning. (They happen M, W, Th mornings.) I didn't cancel even though I figured it would be the same trail I was on yesterday afternoon. As expected, Jeff (the guide) had lots of stories to tell about bears and forest fires. He showed us a burned over area from maybe twenty years ago that came very close to the hotel very quickly. They had two hours to evacuate. Some of the guests didn't want to go. The story is that the police asked for the name of their dentists, and they changed their minds.

Air quality was ify. I found a website that said it was 175 before I left the room. That dropped a bit before we left the meeting area, but was still enough that one guy with asthma turned back before we had gone far. Mostly we had a good walk, but you should be able to see the lake in this picture and mountains on the other side.

Jeff was surprised when I told him about the helicopters yesterday. "So they were working on Sunday?" But then he realized, they have to finish before the snow comes. They had made a lot of progress . A whole string of these poles went up that weren't there yesterday.

About the time I got back to the room, the wind must have shifted. Visibility went way down. Our reservation was through tomorrow, but we had found that we had a 10.5 hr drive to get to our Tuesday destination of Sanctuary Inn, a missionary retreat center in Oregon. Given the conditions here around Tahoe, we decided to leave a day early. So we had lunch and finished packing up. We saw no more (perhaps less) on the Kingsbury Grade going east than we did when we came in on Thursday. Later on the highway near Carson City visibility dropped even further. The air quality app I found said "254" which is hazardous, but I can't imagine it wasn't higher than that when we could hardly see the vehicles in front of us.

A little less than three hours north, we are staying in Susanville, CA, a town in the wilderness whose economy is no less than three prisons. No hiking. Skies were clear when we arrived, but then clouded up. Rain not smoke. Way better.