Vail area seeing hazy conditions due to smoke from Idaho wildfires

A high-pressure system spinning over the Northwestern United States began bringing smoke into Western Colorado this week.

Air quality in the White River National Forest area was downgraded from good to moderate this week according to airnow.gov, which tracks air quality throughout the country. The Grand Mesa National Forest surrounding Grand Junction is also seeing moderate air quality. Southern Colorado in the San Juan, Umcompahgre and Rio Grande national forests is still seeing good air quality.

Meteorologist Scott Stearns with the National Weather Service in Grand Junction said the smoke is coming from wildfires in Idaho.

“And maybe a little bit of Northern California and Oregon,” he said. “We’ve got high pressure over the area and it’s slowly moving in air from the north and west.”

The Moose Fire in Idaho grew to become the largest active fire in the United States last week, consuming more than 100,000 acres. Several other large fires are also burning in Idaho including the Ross Fork fire at nearly 30,000 acres and the Kootenai River Complex and Four Corners fires, each burning on more than 13,000 acres.

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The high pressure system, in addition to swirling the smoke around the Northwestern U.S., is also exacerbating the fire conditions, so those fires are putting out more smoke, further contributing to the decrease in air quality.

“We’ve been under high pressure for a few days now, but it’s just a matter of the winds being fairly slow, and it’s just taking a little time for the smoke from the fires to get here,” Sterns said.

Stearns said meteorologists are hesitant to forecast how many days the skies over Western Colorado will remain hazy.

“It’s not only dependent on the weather pattern, but also fire activity, so it’s hard to predict,” he said. “The high is going to dampen a bit probably Thursday or Friday of this week, but even so, with that we’ll still have winds from the northwest aloft, so not much of a change until late this weekend or early next week, but then signs then are high-pressure system will build back into the area, so depending how that sets up it could push smoke further to the north of us, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”