Boise’s smoky summers once were an oddity. Now people plan around them

Boise had endured many late-summer smoke events by the time the Sept. 7, 2006, college football game between Boise State and Oregon State began, with millions of viewers tuned into ESPN.

“It’s a hot and smoky night in Boise,” Chris Fowler said as the game began.

The national audience saw the Boise Foothills covered in a shroud of smoke. The Broncos soundly defeated Oregon State, 42-14, behind a star-making performance from running back Ian Johnson.

The Broncos made a major statement that they were going to be a football power. The smoke made a major statement by covering the city during what has become known across the West as smoke season.

Fifteen years later, Treasure Valley residents have dealt with a summer that has been even hotter and smokier than usual — one of several tangible ways climate change has affected Idaho.

Ever since 1988, the year of the season-long Yellowstone wildfires, large megafires have burned across the region. By 2006, residents and visitors began to take for granted that we would be breathing smoke during the late summer.

Clear days were rare events that TV meteorologists touted with joy. I have one friend from back East who has changed his annual trip to his cabin in Oregon from August to July 4, just to avoid the smoke season.

Sun Valley has moved many events to earlier in the summer. Vacationers must watch for the closure of entire national forests, and river outfitters face uncertainty over the lengths of their seasons. Hunters have had to move their camps out of burned-over areas.

For the folks who moved here after 2006, this transformation is not a change, it’s just life in Boise. For those who have moved from California, it’s just more of the same.

Our burning of fossil fuels and generation of greenhouse gases over the last century has filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide that has warmed the Earth. Climate change has already changed our lives by making fire seasons longer, seasonal river runoff earlier and smaller snowpacks in the mountains that store the water.

Consider one example: fish in a Snake River reservoir.

The 30 years of large fires throughout the Snake River Basin have increased the amount of sediment that is carried down the river and deposited in the reservoir above the Lower Granite Dam near Lewiston. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last dredged the area at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers in 2015 so that barges that haul wheat downriver can navigate the channel.

But because of the increased sediment, the Corps has raised the water level of the reservoir 3 feet so the barges can operate fully loaded. Even with the higher levels, some barges can’t be fully loaded, said Linwood Laughy, an activist who has challenged the Corps dredging.

The higher water level makes its harder for threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead to migrate between the Pacific and their spawning grounds. The higher levels also make the river warmer because of the high air temperatures caused by climate change.

We also re-engineered the original forests into the ones we have today. For most of the 20th century, we suppressed fire aggressively in the decades before climate change took hold. The forests, especially the lower-elevation Ponderosa pine forests of our region, filled with fuel.

By 2006, we were coming to a consensus that a mix of intentionally burning and mechanically thinning our forests could create obstacles to fire growth and offset our misguided suppression policies of the past. But as huge conflagrations destroy communities like Paradise and Greenville in California, our faith in our ability to overcome the effects of the changing climate has waned.

We had a few of those welcome clear sky days in August, but we can expect more smoke and poor air quality to return for a while. Hopefully, we get a clear night for the Broncos’ home opener Sept. 10 against UTEP.

Don’t hold your breath.