We thought that if we got to Homer, all the way out on the end of the Kenai Peninsula, with several mountain ranges between us and Fairbanks, we'd get a break from the haze. Wrong. It turns out that the 1500 acre Glacier Creek Fire near Homer started on August 15th. Though Homer is situated on Kachemak Bay and looks across to the backside of the same mountains that Seward is at the edge of, we never really saw them. Most of the time, it looked for all the world like there was nothing out there but ocean.
I call this the castleboat. Not the one in front, but the one behind it. It's beached, and though you can't see it very well here, there are odd turrets and outcroppings tacked onto it. A very strange sight.