Fire and route change

We awoke to a beautiful 44 F morning. We ate at the restaurant near the campground which also serves lots of PCT hikers.

Our trip to Burns went well. We saw a Badger. We stopped at Christmas Valley for a picnic.

As we got closer to Burns, OR, we noticed a lot of smoke in the air. We stopped at a rest area right outside of Burns to check the facts since we'd had almost no connectivity most of the past 2 days.

There was a huge fire right outside Burns where we were supposed to stay tonight. The highway between Burns and Boise was also closed for 60 miles due to a different fire.

We made the decision to fuel up and take the only remaining open route to Boise tonight instead of waiting. Burns was in early evacuation stages. At first we thought we might be able to get out of the smoke and camp, but the further we drove, the more smoke there was. In fact we drove very near at least 5 different fires.

One town where we got extra fuel is under an evacuation order right now and we were just there 2 hours ago. We were able to get a hotel room in Nampa just outside of Boise. The hotel where we'll stay tomorrow and Tuesday was completely full tonight.

There are tons of firefighters and firetruck on the roads. The air quality here is very poor. It doesn't look like our next campsites are currently impacted by smoke or fire. We'll reassess each day to make sure.Read more