Temperatures: No FALL Just Yet

Hello, September!  Good bye, Hot! Right? Wrong!

Nope, the ten-day weather sez we still have a week with several 90-plus days ahead. 

Three weeks ago I celebrated when it looked like we'd seen the last of the 90s. 

Well, they've decided to hang around for much longer than usual.  It's almost unheard of to have the thermometer go that high in September.

Seems like we're encountering lots of "unheard of's" these days.  No appreciable rain in the forecast FOR THE NEXT MONTH.

Pastures are drying up and getting crispier by the hour as critters share the space where grass is still somewhat green.  Grasshoppers are ecstatic and multiplying.

Last night we heard a new measure method of just how dry it is when our farrier John Fuller returned my call to reset Lily and Lefty's shoes. John will come Monday.

"Tell Marianne," he told Bill on the phone, "to run the hose and work up a good mud hole where the horses will walk to moisten up their hooves."  

John has been encountering hooves so dry that he's wearing out his nippers.  

When Bill told me what John had said, it made some sense.  

Lily lost a hind shoe the day before yesterday when I was walking her down the lane to pasture. I didn't realize she'd lost the shoe until my trip back to the barn when I found it.

That night when I brought Lily up from the hay field, I noticed that the hoof without the shoe had broken off considerably.  And, that was after the shoe fell off.  

So, the ground is hard, and that is hard on a horse that has bad hooves in the best of conditions. I'm hoping she still has some hoof left for nailing on a shoe by the time John comes on Monday.

Twas on this day 50 years ago that a major forest fire scorched nearly 56,000 acres in the Selkirk Mountains from the back side of Schweitzer almost Bonners Ferry, 25 miles away.

This morning Bill, other organizers and friends will join the families of the two men who died in the fire for a marker ceremony at a spot on the road to Fault Lake, not too far from where the two were operating a bulldozer and could not escape. 

Tomorrow, from 10 a.m.-1 p.m., a public ceremony, marking the 50th anniversary of the Sundance Burn, will take place at the big parking lot near the second bridge in Upper Pack River. 

Bring food, beverages and lawn chairs!

It should be a somber weekend, filled with story-telling from many who participated in some way or another in the Sundance Fire and its aftermath.  

With all the other forest fires burning in the area that year, the tireless work to put them out lasted for weeks and weeks afterward.  Regeneration took decades. 

The good news is that North Idaho, so far this year, has not experienced too many fires, unlike our neighbors in Washington, Montana and Southern Canada. 

We HAVE seen and breathed the smoke, though, for several weeks.  Let's hope with all this dry, hot weather that our area continues to escape the devastation seen in so many other areas.   

Anyway, it IS September, tomatoes are turning red, plums continue to ripen and late summer flowers are putting on quite a show pretty much everywhere. 

Happy Friday.