The big Horse Creek fire this week in the Jackson, Wyoming area is, thankfully, under control.
The Snake River, where it winds its way through Jackson Hole, east of the breath-taking Grand Tetons is running low, perhaps not at record lows, but pretty damn low, say the river runners and ranchers who know the rocks and cut-banks inch by inch.
Wyoming, in the summer of 2006, was declared to be dead center to the zone of increased wild fires due to climate change.
Some think climate change will come on slow enough to be adjusted to. The evidence of fire increase, however, “may be the grizzly bear banging on the door.”
Which brings us to today’s N Y Times article about the Southeastern United States. They don’t have grizzlies there, but the maw of drought is wide open and frightening.
Northern Alabama has become acre after acre of shriveled cornstalks, cracked red dirt for miles and days of unrelenting white heat. The region’s most severe drought in over a century has farmers here averting their gaze from a future that looks as bleak as their fields.
The drought is worst here, but it is wilting much of the Southeast, causing watering restrictions and curtailed crops in Georgia, premature cattle sales in Mississippi and Tennessee, and rivers so low that power companies in the region are scrambling and barges are unable to navigate. Fourth of July fireworks are out of the question in many tinderbox areas. Hay to feed livestock is in increasingly short supply, watermelons are coming in small and some places have not had good rain since the start of the year.