The wildfires started just about a month a ago and since then our air quality has been at best moderate, has gotten to very unhealthy on several occasions, and today is a cherrily morbid unhealthy. Sigh (cough, choke, hack, hack…). Although we’ll be doing something about this real soon, I stubbornly (The LovedOne would say stupidly) wanted to get in one more hike before we did. So why not go along the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) to Hobart Bluff (3.4 miles round-trip; 300 feet of elevation gain) to see the unseeable views? Don Quixote would have approved. So while The LovedOne went to her air conditioned volunteer stint at the library, I motored up to Hobart’s smoke-shrouded trailhead on the PCT. It’s peak thru-hiker time right now and I chatted with a few who had been hiking through smoke for the last two weeks! One guy had seen Mount Shasta when he was 100 miles south of it and then, because of the smoke, had never seen it again. One couple never got to see Shasta at all because of the smoke. So snow in the Sierra Nevada was the big deal last year, while this year’s tribulation is smoke in Northern California and Southern Oregon. The trail giveth and the trail taketh away. Which is a bit sad because, when it’s not treating us like beef jerky, Southern Oregon is a very beautiful place.