Montana didn't use to be this hot

I woke this morning to the smell of a campfire.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t camping.

Smoke from wildfires in Canada drifted into Montana last night. Those beautiful, clear summer skies are gone, and with them the long-range vistas this state is known for. So long, mountain ranges. So long, endless landscapes. Get ready for a summer of smoke, and limited visibility. There appears to be no end in sight and it’s not yet the Fourth of July.

It wasn’t so many years ago that smoky summers were a rarity. Then Yellowstone National Park burned during the summer of 1988. I was living in Livingston at the time and remember waking one morning to a house filled with smoke. I panicked until I realized the smoke hadn’t come from inside the house.

The spectacular columns of smoke we’d oohed and aahed over for the last few days had stopped rising and spread out over the land. While the fires remained miles away, their impact had become personal.

Since then I’ve grown accustomed to summers of smoke. They seem to be more common than not.

This time, especially, it was no surprise. Temperatures soared last week into triple digits in parts of Montana and rainfall vanished. A few small fires broke out across the state, but bigger blazes to the north and west brought the smoke.

Unless you take everything you hear on conservative talk radio as gospel, it’s hard not to believe the climate is changing.

Montana didn’t used to be this hot.

I base that fact on anecdotal evidence.

Years ago a Montana native told me that the weather out here only got hot for about a month -- from mid July to mid August. And for years that seemed to be the case. June was wet and cool. A Fourth of July snowstorm wasn’t unusual, and fall usually arrived in August.

You had to be ready for the warm weather when it arrived or you might miss it. Now I sit and sweat and wait for it to pass -- month after month after month.

Last week I was fishing a little pond near the Canadian border where big, white, puffy clouds raced each other across a cobalt-blue sky. Nearly a hundred miles to the south the Little Rocky Mountains rose sharply from the prairie.

Today the sky is opaque. The mountains have vanished, and I can’t stop wondering what’s burning.

I just hope it’s not me.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]