Mt. Adams

Saturday evening on our way down from Sunrise at Mt. Rainier, I snapped this shot of Mt. Adams far to the south. You can see it about 3/4 way across the horizon. You've seen other pictures of this mountain here--including the one through the airplane window on my Odd Shot last week and some from my front yard before the hops went in.

This morning I walked to church and took this view of Mt. Adams from downtown. If you eliminate the banks, the cars, the utility poles and wires and let the trees go back to a century ago, you can see how the community got its name.

A number of wildfires have sprung up across the state over the last few days. It's nothing to rival California--yet--but fire season is definitely under way. The evening news reporter told of multiple phone calls asking if Mt. Adams was erupting. I hadn't been outside for a while, so I went out to have a look. I went down the road a bit to get this picture without hop poles. From a different angle--perhaps even from the direction of the first photo here, you can see that it might look that way.

You don't see it here but the sun was a red circle in the middle of the cloud of smoke from a 500 acre fire in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. There are fires west of Tri-Cities as well, in Spokane County, in the far northeast part of the state (Inland Empire Girl wrote about them here), and in the Wenatchee area.