We saw the smoke come up from Cape Horn in its earl;y stages. We thought to ourselves that this could be a really bad one. We made our bi weekly trip to the local garbage dump in Athol (formerly know as the Athol Mall before they started watching it full time)and then headed down into Bayview for lunch at Ralph’s Coffee Shop. Ralph had the scanner up ,and we could hear it go from bad to worse to extremely bad. I had almost finished my burger (really good there) when the first evac advisory came over the scanner. Ralph shut down right then and there and we hightailed it out of there.
There are a lot of nice places in amongst big trees all over that area. Perimeter Road is a narrow, twisty bottleneck of a road. Got closed down early on by a rockslide.
We can smell the smoke over here today - we’re about 8 miles east of that area. So we’re on full alert with hoses and heavy equipment at the ready.
Thanks for the first-hand report, Noumenon. Hope you stay safe from this and all fires.
Is the Henley Aerodrome still active in Athol...learned to skydive there back in the early ‘70’s.