Last week I had to travel to Kamloops, British Columbia on business. I was somewhat excited, since it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the mountains. The media had warned that a few weeks ago there had been some forest fires, so I was prepared for a bit of haze caused by smoke.
I landed there on Monday afternoon, to a beautiful clear day. There was a touch of haze in the air, obscuring the more distant mountains, but the closer ones were quite visible. I took this picture at the airport. I wanted to show my kids how small the Dash-7 100 I had been on was:
Kamloops airport is very small. It has two gates, Gate 1 and Gate 2. This means there are only two places for planes to park, and they are both side by side. Nonetheless, Kamloops is (thankfully!) big enough to land smaller jets.
I woke up on Thursday morning to the smell of a camp fire. This confused me, but I didn’t make much of it till after I had showered and headed downstairs for breakfast. The hallway was hazy with smoke from the forest fires. After breakfast I checked out and started my morning walk to work. It was so smoky I couldn’t see more than 500 feet or so.
To give an idea, here’s the 737-300 I eventually flew out of Kamloops on. It is parked at the Gate next to the one in the previous photo. It is about 20 feet to the left of where the first one was.
This was the only plane to land or take off from Kamloops on Thursday, because the visibility was so bad that the prop-planes couldn’t land. Even Calgary, a 45 minute flight to the east, was blanketed in smoke, though nowhere near as bad as Kamloops was.