No, seriously. What do you know about dry weather? Besides the fact that it's the opposite of wet weather?
This area is usually characterized by wet weather with rain and snow, but for some reason, this year is totally different from others. To start with, the amount of precipitation has dropped since the beginning of the year. A lot depends on snow here—the water levels in all the park's reservoirs—but there was very little snow this season. Usually, it can last all summer in some places, but not this time. What followed was a terrifyingly dry summer, which was severely limited in rainfall and became quite hot. This led to the park issuing a new law banning smoking. You could only smoke inside a closed car, because anywhere else, the wind could blow ash onto a tree, bush, or grass, and thanks to the dry weather, it would ignite instantly. For violating the law, if caught by a ranger, a smoker can be awarded what is called a "ticket" in this country, which means a "fine" in other words.
It so happened that, apparently, someone ignored this law in the eastern part of the park, and a fire started there. On the first day, the fire was less than a square kilometer, but after 2 days, the fire had already spread to about 16 square kilometers, and a day later, it was 20. The fire's reach grows every day at a terrifying speed, considering that the territory consists mainly of forests and there is terribly dry weather outside. Naturally, all this is already leading to the evacuation of people from those places, as well as the closure of roads leading there.
That famous Going to The Sun Road also closed, which, in fact, leads to Logan Pass, where all the most famous local hikes are located. This caused a sharp drop in sales in our area, as people most often show up here for the reason mentioned above. Went for a hike—came to us for lunch. Slept in a sleeping bag somewhere in the forest—came to us for breakfast. And here you go, nothing, so to speak.
Oh, by the way, this is me pointing to where we live, and the red is the first big fire that blocked Going to the Sun Road and Logan Pass:
Some of my acquaintances, with whom I had the honor of working last year, are quite close to the fire site and say that they might be evacuated too.
The fires continued endlessly. They would end, then start again. Some areas would just die down, while others would ignite. These fires were the hell of this summer for our park. In the end, it happened that one of our branches was evacuated after all. They were just a mile from the fire, and they had to close the hotel. A wedding was being prepared there, so a huge amount of food was transported to our restaurant, and the people were split up: into our dormitory and another branch.
At that moment, I watched the Americans who had been working at this hotel for several years. They had already firmly decided to go home. You could even shed a tear when they said goodbye to each other, talking about how they hadn't been to their home states for 2-3 years and maybe it was time to go home. That this was it—the right time. Hugging and saying goodbye, they got into their cars and drove off in different directions. It was truly sad.
This evacuation also hit our restaurant. The company wanted to keep a few quality cooks, waitresses, and sales clerks, so they, roughly speaking, cut our J-1 students. But they couldn't fire them, so they just transferred them to another company because they wouldn't have enough hours.
In less than a week, the hotel reopened as the fire in that area died down, and the cooks returned, but some of our workers were still transferred to another company, where they were given even more hours and paid more, but they didn't have those friends and that fun, as they said.
In such moments, you realize the truth of all those news clips on TV about forest fires. And it really is scary. One small spark can lead to kilometers of ash all around, which were filled with green fir trees and incredibly beautiful wildlife. My location is quite far from the ignition, but we are still worried about this, as we are in the same national park. And we greet every rain with joy and hope that it is just as rainy in the eastern part of the park.
Also, in such moments, you realize how dangerous a person can be. More dangerous than nature itself. I don't know if the fire happened because of a cigarette butt or an unextinguished campfire (which, by the way, were also banned due to the dry weather), but no one rules out this option. And what nature has created over tens of years can be destroyed by the light hand of an inattentive traveler. Isn't that true?
