Aloha ʻoe e Montana. How I’m gonna miss you. Yet we still had hours of driving through the mountains, and that helped. We were heading to Wallace, Idaho, and before we got there we pulled over to view this historic sign. Of course. But what a sad one! Imagine the smoke going all the way to London!  And all those lives lost. This was a huge tragedy, which you can read more about here.

The scale was immense. Telegraph operators sent out desperate messages describing the approach of a solid line of flame 30 miles wide, and that was no exaggeration. Today, you can drive Interstate 90 east from Wallace, Idaho to just short of St. Regis, Mont. — about 45 miles — and be within the old burn zone every mile of the way. And this was by no means the only burn zone in the Northern Rockies – just the biggest.

We were driving makai (west), but could still get a little bit of the scale of the horrible firestorm. Do check out the link I posted; it’s a worthwhile read.

Next to the 1910 Fire Marker was this one:

We could see that lake ‘way down there, and I pulled over so that Nolemana could take a photo of it.

If you look carefully at the very beginning of this video, you can get a quick glance of the lake. We took a nice long video of our drive; this is a really good memory for me. I almost feel as though I’m there again.

It wasn’t raining too hard, and I thought, maybe the sky is crying because we’ve left Montana.

We are now almost to Wallace, a town where we wanted to make a brief stop; I’d read about it, and we were both ready for a break.

So next time, get moa advencha! A hui hou…till next time.