Like it or not, parts of Wyoming and other places in the west are stuck with smoky air for awhile because of the wildfires in California and the Pacific Northwest.
And that can be problematic for everyone but especially for people who already have breathing issues.
That’s why when we saw a television station in Spokane recommend Cody and Rock Springs as locations in Wyoming to escape the bad air, we wondered what was so special about these locations. Could they be home to smoke-free unicorns?
Sadly, there are no unicorns. The respite from the smoke could all be temporary.
Wyoming meteorologist Don Day said those two locations might be have good air quality presently, that could easily change.
“It is a moving target, the whole Cody/Rock Springs thing was at a moment in time, the smoke plumes come and go, so what is good one day may be bad the next,” Day told Cowboy State Daily.
“There are no good or worst spots,” he said. “It all depends on the day.”
Day recommended visiting this website to check on the conditions in case you wanted to travel to get away from it.
If that is your strategy, be prepared to play a game of traveling whack-a-mole. You might be in a good location for six hours, only for weather patterns to shift and smoke to roll-in.
If you can suck it up for a couple more days, he says it will get better.
“I expect the smoke through Thursday, it starts to thin out Friday and into the weekend but may not completely move out,” Day said.
He said much-needed rain is headed for Washington and Oregon in the next few days which will certainly help. But most locations in California are still going to be dry.
“California fires will only get rain in the far north,” he said. “Central and southern California fires will be the bigger smoke producers this weekend and next week.”
