Air Quality

I always check the weather before I ride. I like to know if I have a chance of getting rained on. Even when it is clear I like to know which way and how strong the wind will be blowing so I can adjust my route accordingly. This pass week I had to add another weather check in to my pre ride routine. That is to check the airnow.gov site for air quality. That is because the smoke from the Canadian fires got funneled down to NJ and most of the mid east states by a low sitting up in New England.  Most of the time when smoke from wild fire drifts over us it is usually higher in the atmosphere and doesn't affect air quality that much. This time it made it unhealthy. It gave the sky that post apocalypse feel. 

Not only did you smell the smoke but the sky was gray and you couldn't even see the clouds above. The sun barely shown through the smoke. I took a picture of the sun with my camera and didn't get the usual glare because of all the smoke in the atmosphere. In fact the picture looked like a picture that I take when I have use my solar filter which blocks 99.9% of the suns light. You can easily see the sunspots. This just shows you how much crap was in the air blocking the light. 

I had initially planned to do a ride on Wednesday but after Jim alerted me to the smoke forecast I checked the air quality and canceled the ride. I did actually have to spend a couple of hours outside on Wednesday. My wife volunteers at a rescue farm and feeds the animals once a week. She needed my help Wednesday afternoon for someone who had canceled. The smoke was really heavy in the afternoon we went so I wore a mask while we fed the animals. The farm has a cow 

a few horses

some pigs, a bunch of goats.

and some cats in the barn.

Feeding the animals is a lot of fun especially the goats. These pictures are from Monday morning when we went to fill in for another person who couldn't do their schedule feeding. On Wednesday we didn't spend as much time with them as Monday as we wanted to minimize our time outside. I felt bad for the animals who had to deal with the smokey air for a couple of days.

Luckily by Saturday the smoke had cleared and I was able to get out and lead a ride. We haven't had a lot of rain this year so the risk of fire is high. We had a fire near where I live earlier in the week which took a couple of days to burn out. There are also a couple of fires burning down in the pinelands so until we get some major drenching rain we will have to keep an eye on the air quality before deciding if it is safe to ride.