WHITEFISH - JoAnn McKee sat outside Mrs. Spoonover's ice cream store, rubbing her eyes and wishing her plane was leaving today and not on Sunday as planned.
She sat perched on a wooden bench, a carved moose at either side like bookends, eating a vanilla cone.
Things started tasting like a campfire last week, she said, when she and her boyfriend were evacuated from a campground on Lake McDonald. Wildfires were burning at both ends of the valley, and last Thursday Glacier National Park officials cleared the tourists out.
McKee moved to a KOA campground in West Glacier, she said, but on Monday that area was evacuated too. Now, she's sitting on Central Avenue in Whitefish, staying in a room atop the Big Mountain.
The room's expensive, she said, but at least it has air conditioning to filter the heat and haze.
"We keep moving farther and farther from the fires," she said. "But we can't get away from the smoke."
From Many Glacier to Eureka, Canada to Polson, getting away from the smoke has become a top priority for travelers like McKee.
"At certain times, with the weather that we're having now, it's smoky everywhere in the park," said Punky Moore, a fire information officer working on the Trapper Creek Complex of wildfires.
Those fires, she said, have filled the west side of the park with smoke, and westerly winds are carrying the plume over the Continental Divide to the east.
"People are calling constantly," Moore said. " 'Should I still come? How's the smoke?' I tell them, 'Well, it's smoky. That's all there is to it. Some days are better than others, but it's always smoky."
Even on the east side.
"Yeah, there's smoke here, too," said Joe Lester, meteorologist for the fire crew battling the Trapper Creek Complex. He is located just beyond the eastern park border between St. Mary and Many Glacier.
"It's smoky all through here, all along the front range," he said. "And from what we can tell, what we've seen is what we're going to get."
That is, smoke and heat and dry and afternoon wind to fan the flames. Sunday, he said, could come with some thunderstorm cells, but he's uncertain how much wind and rain will accompany that front.
But the smoke is spotty, Lester said, thick in the mornings some days, in the evenings other days, all day Friday.
Just a few miles north of Lester's camp, the folks in the tourism business are telling a more cheerful story.
"It's clear here," said Dan Horlock, who works the desk at the Many Glacier Lodge. "It's always clear here."
But when you press him, and remind him that the images on the Many Glacier Web cam show a smoky haze, he admits that "it does get kind of smoky in the afternoon."
The smoke, he said, combined with the news of Glacier Park's wildfires, has delivered a powerful one-two punch to business, even on Glacier's east side.
People came east in droves when the west side of the park closed, he said, "but now we're seeing cancellations. We're down in numbers, for sure. We should be at 100 percent, but we're running at about 80 percent."
The car campground is not full, he said, which is unheard of this time of year, and there are empty beds at Swiftcurrent Inn as well.
"Two days ago, you couldn't see the pass because of all the smoke," said Joe Hyeon at Swiftcurrent. "The closer mountains are visible, but it's hazy."
Which, while not good, is still better than along the eastern Going-to-the-Sun Road at Rising Sun.
"We can't see anything here," said Adam Peterson, who works at Rising Sun. "The peaks right in front of us, we can barely see them. They're just a faint outline. It's totally socked in."
Like Many Glacier and St. Mary, he said, Rising Sun is taking lots of cancellations.
"It's not good," Peterson said. "It's pretty dead."
As is traffic on the eastern Sun Road, which remains open to Logan Pass.
"I wouldn't say it's deserted," Peterson said. "But it's awfully slow. Traffic is just a trickle. It's the smoke that's pushing people out."
Some of those people were pushed to Whitefish, where smoke was thick Friday morning and ashes were again falling lightly.
"I cannot begin to tell you how tired I am of smoke," said McKee, the tourist. "It's everywhere. It's like taking a bath in stink."
The stink runs all the way to Eureka, where city clerk Mary Duran said "it's very, very socked in. If you drive up here, you'll think you're going through heavy fog."
Her town is getting smoke from the park when the wind blows west, from Idaho when the wind blows east, from Canada when the wind blows south.
"It's smoky down here, too," said Polson resident Aggi Loeser. "It's pretty bad, actually, in the mornings. Today, I couldn't see the Flathead Lake from my house."
And Friday afternoon, she couldn't see the Mission Mountains from her downtown office. Lake County health department officials labeled the Polson air as "very unhealthy."
"It makes it kind of hard to take a good deep breath," she said.
As far south as Ronan, taking a good deep breath is no easy task.
"I do the ambulance billing," said Danyel McCrea at the Ronan city clerk's office. "And there's been quite a large number of ambulance trips for respiratory complaints. Over at the pharmacy, it's been just crazy with people trying to fill prescriptions for inhalers and that sort of thing."
But, she said, "the farther south you go, the better it gets."
At least to a point.
St. Ignatius is better than Ronan, and Arlee is good by any standard.
But by the time you hit Missoula, you're back into it, with light smoke and ash filling the valley from fires in the Bitterroot and Idaho.
Running north for fresh air is no good, either.
"We are getting lots of smoke from fires to our south and fires from our north," said Janna Smith, spokeswoman for Canada's Waterton-Lakes National Park.
"Just take shallow breaths and walk slowly," said Glen Gray, environmental health director for Flathead County. He was only joking. Mostly.
"People need to be careful out there," he said. "Especially people with a sensitivity to respiratory irritation. The smoke is really very, very thick."
It was especially thick, he said, on Thursday and Friday, when still air and an extended inversion trapped the particulate close to the ground.
"It hasn't been lifting the way we'd like it to," Gray said. "It's been pretty much 'unhealthy' all day."
His hope, he said, was that evening winds predicted for Friday and Saturday would scour the haze out of the valleys. Of course, those same winds will fan the flames and increase fire activity, creating even more smoke.
"Well," Gray said, "you can't have everything."
In the meantime, he said, "we'll just hold our breath, so to speak."
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com.
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