It's been kind of an eerie day at Baptiste ... cool and unsettled, with smoke from the big fires blowing in and out of the valley. The lookout tower really shakes in the wind, something that makes Charlie more than a little nervous and is a bit unsettling to me, too.
For a lot of the day, the smoke was so thick that I couldn't even see the adjacent mountains, and it made my head hurt a little bit. But now we're getting a rain squall which is helping things a lot. The whitish-gray world that enveloped me has been replaced by a pallete of dark, muted blues, which are really quite lovely.
Charlie and I took a couple of short walks, but mostly it was a day to get acquainted with this exotic little place that will be my home for the next two weeks ... but I'm feeling comfortable quickly, and this little building and this isolated mountain are clearly a fit for me. Mostly I sat quietly in the lookout cab, listening to the fire traffic on the radio and drinking a warm beverage.
I took this photo partly for my friend Scott, who's intrigued by the fact that in the old days, Forest Service lookouts and ranger stations had their own china pattern. I'm happy that there's some of it up here.